Unlocking Exponential Growth: How 6sense Revolutionized Customer Marketing

We begin, as so many strange journeys do, in the quiet, numerical landscape of B2B SaaS. It is here, among the shifting decimals of churn and expansion, that the Chief Marketing Officer of 6sense spotted a fundamental miscalculation. It was less a mistake than a misplaced emphasis, like using a meticulously crafted Japanese carpentry saw to slice a tomato.

The tool was excellent, but the target was wrong.

This insight suggested that the powerful engine of customer marketing—a mechanism designed to foster long-term relationships—was being aimed at a phantom. Most teams treat this function merely as an advocacy program—a necessary routine to gather shiny case studies, favorable product reviews, and reference calls that sound like whispered promises in a dark room.

These are marvelous results, certainly. They taste like success. But they are merely the exhaust fumes of value already realized, not the true mechanism that creates it.

The Misdirected Arrow

The CMO’s reframing of the entire purpose centered on one existential question: How do we help customers extract exponentially more value from the thing they already decided they needed?

At 6sense, they learned that customer marketing is far more powerful when it operates as a usage engine—a system meticulously designed to drive adoption, stimulate expansion, and cultivate deep, long-term growth. When you answer that core question consistently, the customers stay longer, they expand their territory faster, and only then do they become the organic advocates every CMO dreams of.

We chase the visible effect and miss the invisible cause.

The Geometry of Adoption

CMOs intuitively grasp the math of acquisition; the atomic unit there is simply a booked meeting. A firm handshake across a virtual table. For customer growth, however, the atomic structure is different. It is adoption.

How deeply are they breathing your product’s air?

Our own internal research bears out these specific, undeniable patterns. When we crunch our customer data, we observe a peculiar stability tied to a seemingly arbitrary number. When a customer organization manages to involve three or more engaged users—three minds consistently interacting with the capabilities—they become 25% to 30% more likely to renew their contract.

Three users. It is an arbitrary number, yet it holds the key. Like finding the exact key in a vast, unlabeled keyring that opens the smallest, most important drawer.

This realization restructured everything. Adoption became the new top-of-funnel metric for both upsell opportunities and retaining the existing structure.

The customer marketing group now focuses its energy solely on driving usage of specific product capabilities—the features most highly correlated with the customer’s internal definition of victory. It is measurable. It is wonderfully repeatable.

Reading the Invisible Signals

The next logical evolution was moving from the clumsy, reactive world to a predictive foresight.

Waiting for a Customer Success Manager (CSM) to manually raise a red flag about declining usage is slow. Instead, the company embraced AI and the machine’s foresight.

Telemetry became the guiding map, tracking usage across every stage: the baseline adoption, the specific plays executed during marketing campaigns, and the subsequent usage lift after each interaction.

Success became quantifiable in a precise, digital sense.

The system now automates around signals—specific patterns in the data that tell us exactly where to focus attention and energy. This shift from reactive action to predictive focus is the quiet revolution. It is like listening to the gentle shift of tectonic plates before the earthquake happens, only this tremor results not in destruction, but in deeper commitment.

Silly, isn't it? That the secret to accelerated future growth was already living, quietly, within the walls of the existing customer base. Just waiting for someone to ask the right question.