Tools like 6sense weren’t built on some visionary GTM prophecy — they were built as a band-aid for a broken B2B system. They emerged because marketing teams couldn’t agree on what a “good lead” was, sales teams didn’t trust anything in the CRM, and everyone hoped that AI-washed intent signals would magically reveal who was ready to buy.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
6sense didn’t solve those problems. It just disguised them behind a very expensive dashboard.
Let’s call it what it is.
Intent Data Is the New Astrology for GTM Teams
The promise was seductive: “We’ll show you who’s researching your category before they ever talk to you.”
The reality?
Half the “intent surges” are false positives — and the other half are meaningless.
A student researching a homework assignment triggers the same high-intent flag as a CIO evaluating a platform.
A competitor poking around your site looks identical to a buyer exploring solutions.
Sales teams get excited.
They call.
Nothing happens.
Pipeline dies quietly.
Intent data isn’t useless — it’s just hopelessly generic.
And generic data leads to generic decisions.
Account-Level Intent Without Contact-Level Precision Is a Mirage
It’s great to know BigCo is “in market.”
It’s not great when you have no clue who inside that 40,000-person company is actually doing the research.
This is 6sense’s fatal flaw:
You can’t personalize outreach when you don’t know who you’re personalizing to.
It’s ABM without a buying committee.
A treasure map without coordinates.
A flashlight with dead batteries.
The Revenue Model Only Works If You Ignore the ROI
6sense is expensive — painfully expensive.
The cost only makes sense if your CRM is pristine (it isn’t), your RevOps team has unlimited bandwidth (they don’t), and your sellers willingly adopt a tool they don’t understand (they won’t).
Companies don’t churn because they “don’t get ABM.”
They churn because the ROI rarely materializes the way the sales deck promises.
Pipeline “influence” is easy to claim.
Revenue reality is harder to hide.
Most Companies Don’t Have the Org Maturity to Run It
6sense insists that all you need is tight sales, marketing, and RevOps alignment.
Cool.
Show me a company where those three groups agree on anything.
Operationalizing 6sense isn’t a switch you flip — it’s a resource-intensive, time-consuming slog that requires specialists most teams don’t have.
You don’t implement 6sense.
You summon it, with the help of a priest, a data engineer, and a therapist.
The Black Box Problem: “Trust the Algorithm” Is Not a Strategy
Sales teams are told:
“Don’t worry how it works. Just call the accounts we flag.”
That may have worked in 2018.
It doesn’t work now.
Not when AI models hallucinate.
Not when every GTM budget has to be defended.
Not when reps demand context, not commands.
If you can’t explain why an account is surging, the score becomes noise — and once reps stop trusting the score, the platform dies inside the org.
Buyers Have Moved — 6sense Hasn’t
The dark funnel isn’t keyword clicks and blog pageviews anymore.
It’s:
- ChatGPT queries
- Perplexity research
- Private Slack groups
- Reddit threads
- Internal committees
- Dark social
- Technical activity patterns
- Hiring and product expansion signals
None of this is captured by 6sense.
It can’t be — the data model wasn’t built for modern buyer behavior.
The buyer journey evolved.
The platform didn’t.
Here’s the Real Problem
6sense was designed for a world where:
- Intent was public
- Cookies were trackable
- Google search ruled discovery
- GTM teams tolerated generic data
- ABM meant ads + scoring
That world is gone.
Buyers now operate in private channels, rely on AI assistants, and reveal real intent through behavioral, operational, and organizational signals — not keyword trails.
ABM is shifting from pattern matching → signal decoding
From scores → behavior
From generic datasets → bespoke, real-time insights
Legacy platforms aren’t struggling because ABM failed.
They’re struggling because the data they depend on became obsolete.
