Here’s why 6sense bought ZenIQ

6sense, which helps marketers generate and manage B2B leads and accounts, announced yesterday it has completed the purchase of ZenIQ, which also helps marketers manage leads and accounts. The question is: What does 6sense get from the acquisition that it didn’t have already? “We were looking to complete our platform,” 6sense CEO Jason Zintak told me. Several weeks ago, 6sense announced the addition of a new media platform that creates micro-segments and serves ads, based on user behavior and a firm’s characteristics. There is a “tremendous amount of implementation fatigue for the multiple tools” that marketers typically employ, Zintak said. ZenIQ, he added, boosts 6sense’s capabilities by helping to consolidate “the tool confetti.” Zintak pointed to three main capabilities that his company is getting in the ZenIQ purchase. First, he said, there’s a “more robust” contact enrichment than what 6sense currently has. This capability cleans up and synchronizes the data for contacts and the corresponding accounts, as the data often comes from many sources in different forms. 6sense had contact enrichment, Zintak said, but it wasn’t accessible via a user interface so a marketer could control and monitor the process, like ZenIQ’s is. Second, there is now automated matching between a lead and its account. ZenIQ CEO Srihari Kumar told me that “fuzzy logic” AI is required for this kind of matching, since the data can have many overlaps and degrees of vagueness. A lead might come into one office, for instance, for an account that is siloed by territory in another office, or there might be typos. Zintak said this kind of matching was previously done manually on his company’s platform. Finally, ZenIQ is bringing intelligent workflow, which provides guidance on how marketing to these leads and accounts can best be handled across channels and opportunities. Here’s a screen showing ZenIQ’s intelligent workflow integrated inside 6sense:

Buying decisions in B2B are often made by committees, so there are multiple people to persuade in some careful sequence, and sometimes a phone call might work better than an email. Intelligent workflow, Kumar said, looks at the next best action to take, rather than employing a “carpet bombing” approach for the pitch. Kumar noted that ZenIQ moved into the acquisition to become part of a more complete account-based management (ABM) platform, with 6sense adding two capabilities his company didn’t have: intent data (which ZenIQ previously got from third-party sources) and segment-targeted advertising.