Background
B2B SaaS company 6sense is making powerful shifts in sales and marketing through account-based data and analysis services. Started in 2013, the San Francisco-based company provides industry-leading marketing tools to enrich buyer journeys using AI-based predictions.
Painpoints
As 6sense’s growth patterns began to take shape, their three most recent additional acquisitions (Slintel, Saleswhale, and Fortella) needed to be folded into their current website experience. 6sense came to Solid with a variety of pain points around their current site:
- Did not incorporate content from acquired companies’ sites (Fortella, Slintel, Saleswhale)
- Did not follow best practices: slow page speeds, and not built with SEO in mind
- No clear strategy around different user pathways (i.e. calls-to-action, demos)
- Difficult to update
6sense’s current website was already large, and it was about to grow even larger—the issues had to be addressed before more products were launched, or more companies were acquired.
Approach
With website updates under the control of their previous developer, 6sense needed a partner that would set them up for creative independence—within an easy pattern—that allowed for growth, expansion, change, and new product launches.
Solid Digital fit the bill, and helped them build in flexibility. Additionally, the new Director of Marketing at 6sense was set on making an impact. He knew it was vital improve SEO and create better iterations. With a scattered site and a blog hosted on PathFactory, they needed to bring everything over to a single platform.
During the discovery process, the teams dove deep. New companies were added in that time, and during those acquisitions, conversations helped refine, refresh, and polish the 6sense brand—which better informed the website redesign and development.
Together, the teams created the following goals to be accomplished with the newly revamped site:
- Create one consolidated website under the 6sense brand that tells a clear and cohesive story
- Follow best practices: SEO optimization and page speed
- Build a powerful lead gen tool, improving UX to provide clear strategic journeys to guide users through the funnel
- Enable streamlined updates to the website without having to go through a developer
Process
The 6sense team was super collaborative and highly invested in making sure the website redesign and redevelopment was a success. Their full design team worked alongside Solid to shift the look and feel, with some extra ADA accessibility assistance from Solid’s side. The teams worked closely, constantly striving for improvement and better site management. Having full transparency from both teams was effective, and allowed changes and shifts to happen quickly anytime leadership decisions or product changes or launches necessitated it.
To create one consolidated website, the tech-savvy team at 6sense processed through the sunsetting of other brand sites, and positioned the (large amount of) content to encapsulate the services the acquired companies brought to their B2B software. Solid’s team brought the technical prep behind the consolidation, helping 6sense envision a blank slate, and building from there. With a high volume of pages, it was important to audit every page, find the right bucket for it and follow a consistent process to maintain SEO value. The entire site was reorganized, and every page was cleaned up—the value and information being pulled in from the new acquisitions was clear.
For easy site updates, Solid Digital implemented Elementor for Wordpress, giving 6sense’s team the capability to edit the entire site without hard coding. Solid Digital created an ideal design that worked within the user-friendly framework of Elementor, allowing excellent performance and a fully custom design. Solid Digital’s guidance and expertise helped keep the site from having issues with page speed, poor layout and design, and disorganized sections. Additionally, using global settings and rules in Elementor helped with consistency and cohesion.
The new site helps 6sense do exactly what their platform does: target specific individuals through a variety of data points, and direct them to specific articles and pages within the site through landing pages and interlinking. For example, a marketer at 6sense uses their tool to determine who they’re targeting, and the new website is set up to guide (whether they’re interested in PPC or social) and speak to that individual (“we know this person is interested in sales intelligence”). Now, their site speaks directly to visitors they’re actively pursuing, and it’s easy for a brand new user: the drop-downs give new visitors pathways of self-identification.
Solid Digital helped create 15 various product graphics, and aided in the visual direction for different types of resources users seek out from 6sense. Additionally, Solid’s team created clarity around the integrations (highlighting and distinguishing each) for the 6sense customer.
Challenges
When Solid logged in and began editing the site to contain all of the pieces 6sense required, the site speed began to slow down over time. Solid Digital brought all development hands on deck to work quickly, and determined the root cause: the mega nav. The massive navigation menu, vital to creating the user pathways for 6sense’s site, appears on every page. Solid’s team implemented a caching solution—applied only to the header—so that each page request already includes the menu after it has been loaded once. The site speed issue was solved, and the newly created user pathways, segmented around different industries and different teams, remained intact, thanks to Solid’s custom caching solution.
Additionally, the 6sense brand was mid-brand-refresh, yet the brand guidelines were tailored to non-web resources and content. To solve for this gap, Solid Digital created guides for different types of resources, whether it was for blogs, webinars, or e-books, all working off of enhancing the brand identity already created for 6sense.
Results
Given that 6sense’s team was one of the most technologically astute clients Solid Digital has worked with, feedback was able to be given in real time, the project kept up at a good pace, and small problems or bigger challenges were addressed right away, allowing for quick resolution.
Ultimately, 6sense, from the project managers and marketing team to the entire company, gave positive feedback about the project—their team felt heard in what they requested, particularly during the strategy presentation with Solid’s proposed wireframes and styleboard.
Solid’s team was able to help simplify the site for better management, updates, page speed, and integration guidance. Solid Digital leveraged global areas of the site to manage integrations, the footer CTA, and a variety of other items that may eventually shift—all it takes is one change in one place on the back-end to create easy, full site (global) changes. For the future, Solid Digital plans to support any additional architecture changes needed for product launches or user interface updates.
The new website wasn’t a huge overhaul in terms of content or approach; it was similar to a home renovation—creating an addition that worked and flowed and set up 6sense for ongoing growth. Now, 6sense’s team has the website they need to tell one cohesive story of a tool that can change the marketing landscape.
