6sense vs Demandbase (+ One Option You Should Consider)

If you’re running an ABM program, these two names probably come up a lot. We’ve spoken with dozens of marketers navigating complex buying journeys, and when the conversation turns to tools, Demandbase and 6sense are usually in the mix. 

Not because one’s necessarily better than the other, but because both have built ABM platforms to help with account targeting, intent data, and campaign automation.

But while they check a lot of the same boxes, how they get there (and what you get out of them) can look pretty different. We'll break down how each platform approaches the core pillars of ABM—from targeting to analytics—so you can make a more informed decision based on your team’s needs.

And while we’re not comparing Influ2 directly here, we will point out where it fits in, especially when it comes to contact-level advertising and turning intent into action. Because reaching an account isn’t enough. You need to reach the right person inside that account, too.

Let’s get into it.

Here’s a quick overview of the main features of 6sense and Demandbase, and some of their key differences:

A full-stack ABM tool allows you to:

• Search and filter target accounts
• Get intent data
• Build and deliver campaigns
• See deep analytics

Both Demandbase and 6sense can tackle these tasks. But how they do it varies slightly. 

When you’re lining up your ABM plays, account selection and segmentation are your foundation. Both Demandbase and 6sense offer ways to zero in on the right companies, but they take different paths and have different end goals.

Demandbase leans heavily on IP address recognition and intent data to spot companies browsing content tied to your product or category.

In practice, it looks like this:

• Find net-new accounts by identifying who’s browsing your website: When someone in an account visits your website, Demandbase uses their identity graph (a combination of IP and cookie signals) and a probabilistic AI model to figure out which account is active, even before they fill out a form.
• Combine and enrich your data: Demandbase collates first-party and third-party data, meaning you can import accounts from your CRM and enrich them with firmographic, technographic, contact, and intent data.
• Create granular segments with the “Selectors” engine: Selectors allow you to add specific criteria to your audiences, and then use that to customize the marketing initiatives they see. For example, you can make a list of accounts that have engaged on your website in the last week, with at least 1,000 employees, in the healthtech industry. You can even narrow that further by creating ideal buying group profiles, and identifying roles that are more likely to be involved in a purchase.

Overall, Demandbase’s targeting is very broad—leveraging its huge company database—but can be complex to configure.

6sense focuses first on the type of customers you want to target, then helps you build account lists that adapt to the criteria you set. Then, it combines first-party site data with third-party data enrichment providers, and adds a layer of AI to predict which accounts are truly in market.

Here’s what that looks like:

• Use the Audience Builder to define what your ideal customer looks like: There are more than 80 filters to choose from, including firmographic, technographic, and behavioral filters to define your ideal customer profile. 
• Get dynamic segments based on buyer behavior: Nothing in B2B is static. So, as conditions change (e.g., new accounts that match your criteria start engaging with content related to your industry, or browse your website), your segmented audience lists will automatically update as these accounts fit the criteria you’ve defined. 
• See which accounts should be your top priority: 6sense uses Predictive Modeling to translate the billions of signals it receives into actual insights. For example, this model scores accounts based on how well they fit your defined ICP, the buying stage of the account, and the revenue potential.

Key takeaways:

• Both tools can identify accounts browsing your website (with a margin for error).
• Both tools can help you enrich existing accounts with firmographic, technographic, and contact data.
• Demandbase focuses on intent and engagement signals from accounts that are already identified in your CRM, while 6sense uses its B2B database to help you identify the best-fit accounts based on your own ICP criteria.

Intent data is a key piece of your ABM strategy, showing you which accounts are more likely to be interested in what you’re selling. Most ABM tools will use intent data to help you prioritize the accounts that are actively engaging with content that’s related to your industry.

Demandbase sources its intent signals through the bidstream, meaning they can see keyword research information from over one million web publishers.

Here’s what you can do with it:

• Get a list of top accounts researching your industry keywords: Once you create your keyword sets, Demandbase uses natural language processing models to analyze keyword data, and tell you which accounts are researching topics related to your product. It will also give you a score for each keyword in your lists, and automatically remove keywords that are giving false positives.
• See trending intent and intent strength scores: When an account starts reading about a particular keyword more than usual, or when multiple people inside the same account are researching a topic, you’ll see specific scores showing this increase in intent.
• Automate accounts selection and dynamic advertising bidding: If you’re a true data geek, you can use Demandbase’s machine learning tools to set up your own predictive model and get ultra-specific on the accounts you prioritize. Combined with their advertising tools, Demandbase can also use the models you create to adapt ad budgets and focus on high-intent accounts.

Here’s what one user said: “Demandbase provides a data-centric conversation so we can look at what is happening in accounts, what is working and not just rely on hunches and guesses around which accounts are engaging with us, might be active in market, etc.”

6sense integrates intent data from its own Signalverse (research data from millions of B2B publisher pages), as well as partnering with B2B research sites like G2, TrustRadius, Bombora, PeerSpot, and Gartner to get even more signals. Their 6AI prediction models process that information and turn it into useful data.

With this, you can:

• Surface hot accounts directly to Sales: When an account is showing higher intent, the sales team is pinged directly to follow up fast.
• Prioritize accounts that are in-market: Pulling data from deanonymized web visitors, intent scores, profile fit insights, and your own ICP criteria, 6sense will give you a clear place to start with the accounts that are overall showing more interest in your product or industry.
• Launch real action based on triggers: 6sense’s Workflow canvas can launch emails, ads, or Salesforce tasks when an account’s score crosses the threshold that you set.

Key takeaways:

• Both tools use intent data to give you a list of priority accounts.
• Both tools can surface priority accounts directly to your sales team.
• While Demandbase has a wide dataset to see what the account is researching across the internet, 6sense has a more developed predictive model, and is better at matching that intent data to your specific ICP criteria.

Want to take this a step further?

With both Demandbase and 6sense, you can only see information at an account level until an individual raises their hand (by submitting a form, booking a demo, etc.). But, what if you could target individuals and see intent on a contact level?

That’s exactly what Influ2 allows you to do. Use your ABM tool to identify key accounts, then use Influ2 to target named buyers from those accounts with ads relevant to their role or use case. Track their engagement, and you’ll see which contacts at an account are actively interested in your product.

When it’s time to take action on intent data, both Demandbase and 6sense offer features for setting up, running, and tracking ad campaigns. 

One of the most powerful ways is through automated workflows that are shared between Sales and Marketing.

Demandbase does this through Orchestration, a tool that allows you to automate account-based plays.

Here’s how it works:

• Create automated ABM plays: Choose your triggers, and set up multi-step campaigns that run across display ads, web personalization, and sales sequences. 
• Push your audiences to third-party platforms for better engagement: Using the Selectors we mentioned above, you can create targeted audiences, and push them to marketing automation software like Pardot or Marketo.
• Keep everyone on the same page: When all of this is connected to your CRM, you can also update status fields automatically and clean up account data.

Here’s what one Demandbase user says: “By aligning sales and marketing teams through shared insights and workflows, it improves coordination and effectiveness. Additionally, it automates cross-channel execution, reducing manual processes.”

6sense also offers automation for your ABM campaigns, in the form of their drag-and-drop workflow builder.

In practice, it looks like this:

• Build workflows with a variety of triggers: This includes behavioral triggers, like visits to your website or hitting a specific intent score, or even predicted account behavior and buying stages powered by 6AI.
• Run an entire campaign from one place: Build multi-channel campaigns—including ads, email, web, and sales—inside one workspace. You can combine email outreach to individual buyers with broader account-based advertising, all within the same workflow.
• Clean and enrich data automatically: Workflows can also be used to enrich and deduplicate your data across different platforms. For example, you might run a recurring workflow that checks which accounts in a specific industry have a VP of Marketing, then check if you have contact information for that person, and if not, automatically enrich the contact through a third-party tool.

Here’s what one user says about using 6sense’s workflow builder: “The UI/UX is super intuitive. It’s easy to set up campaigns, route alerts, and get things moving, whether you’re a beginner or an expert. New users ramp up quickly, but there’s also enough depth for advanced workflows when needed.”

Key takeaways:

• Demandbase offers a demand-side platform (DSP) that is solely targeted to B2B audiences. That means your ad spend is focused on the places where your target accounts are more likely to be active.
• 6sense gives you an intuitive workflow builder, plus more than 20 pre-built plays that give you a starting point for your campaigns. This includes specific campaign templates to re-engage a dormant audience, drive event attendance, engage accounts with open opportunities, and more.

Want to make sure your ads reach the right people? 

While both Demandbase and 6sense allow you to target accounts with ads, Influ2 drills down to the contact level. With a clear target account list and identified buying groups in your CRM, you can use Influ2 to deliver ads to the people you choose, and know who saw or clicked which ad, even if they never fill out a form (no other tool can do that).

Work that isn’t reported on can easily go unnoticed. So, when you’re building and executing major ABM campaigns, you need a tool that will back you up with data.

Demandbase focuses on metrics that track account activity instead of lead-based metrics. This is great for teams that have a clear ABM strategy in place and want to focus their reporting on accounts.

Here’s what it looks like:

• Automatically match leads to accounts: Other sales tools, like your CRM, tracks leads. To make reporting simpler, Demandbase automatically matches those leads to the accounts your targeting in your ABM strategy (and vice versa). Then, your team can act on the same data, and avoid duplicate leads.
• See the specific impact of your ABM campaigns on revenue: When you link Demandbase to your CRM, you can see how many opportunities were created from accounts you targeted, and which campaigns drove the most pipeline.

With 6sense, you’ll also get reports and dashboards that are continuously updated, and give you an overview of the full pipeline.

Since the goal of this tool is to bring all of your ABM activities under one roof, its reporting goes beyond campaigns and shows how accounts move through the funnel across all connected channels (including email, ads, online behavior, or other actions reported in your CRM).

This means you can:

• Get specific, full-funnel reports: Buying Stage reports show how marketing and sales activities helped accounts progress, while Funnel Insights shows exactly what happened from ICP to closed deals, highlighting what went right and what you could do differently.
• See campaign highlights and performance trend dashboards: For every campaign, you’ll see how your ad spend was distributed, the impressions and accounts engaged, and can even drill down into the performance on specific accounts.

Key takeaways:

• Both tools give you in-depth reporting (with some level of customization) on your audience and campaign performance.
• Demandbase focuses on translating your data into account-level metrics, while 6sense gives you more variety when it comes to what data you want to see (including more pre-built dashboards).

Every SaaS tool has its own strengths and weaknesses. Let’s compare to get a full view of what you’re getting (and what you’re missing) with each tool:

With Demandbase, you’re getting these clear strengths:

• A B2B-focused DSP: If you want to run advertising campaigns through your ABM tool, Demandbase will give you a more focused DSP. They only serve ad impressions on 5,000 vetted, B2B-focused sites. 
• Audience segmentation: Demandbase’s Selectors allow you to narrow down your target audience to accounts with specific roles, with a certain level of engagements, in a specific buying stage, who have performed certain actions on your website, in a specific industry, with open opportunities, etc. Drill down to the most clear picture of your audience, and build your campaigns accordingly.

On the other hand, 6sense’s strengths are:

• The OG of AI for ABM: That’s a lot of acronyms to say, basically, that 6sense was one of the first tools to build predictive analytics for ABM. 6AI is a tool that’s been 10 years in the making, and is continuing to improve. Not only can you see predictive insights based on the online behavior of your target accounts: 6sense’s AI bots can even handle repetitive tasks like adjusting your audience segmentation or personalizing follow-ups.
• Integrated data from multiple intent data sources: 6sense is a hub for intent data based on millions of websites, alongside partner data from G2, TrustRadius, PeerSpot, Bombora, and other places.

But with each strength comes a tradeoff. 

For Demandsense, that means AI tools that are less polished. For 6sense, it’s a DSP that’s not focused on B2B audiences, meaning your ad spend may not go where your audience is most active.

And let’s not forget: both of these tools have a steep learning curve.

The tool you choose will depend mainly on how developed your audience segmentation is, how you like to see your metrics, and how heavily your team leans on intent data to make decisions.

While all-in-one tools are great, there are two key features that both Demandbase and 6sense are missing:

• First, the ability to target named buyers with ads
• Second, a proactive approach to creating intent data

Let’s say you have a list of target accounts. But while your ABM tool of choice will tell you to focus on a few accounts because they’re actively researching things relevant to your category, there are other accounts that never show up as priorities because they’re not aware your solution exists.

At least, not yet.

This is where Influ2 can make the difference.

Once you’ve identified potential buyers inside that account and added them to your CRM, you can use Influ2 to target that buying group with contact-level ads.

As those individuals see your ads and engage with them, you’ll not only build awareness within the account—you’ll be able to tell Sales exactly who inside an account is showing interest.

And this works throughout the sales funnel: you can build ad campaigns to encourage meeting attendance, engage decision-makers aside from your point of contact, build awareness, and answer doubts of key individuals who sign off on a purchase, and even re-engage accounts that have gone cold.

You can choose an all-in-one ABM tool to surface accounts who are actively searching, and give your team focus. But when you layer in Influ2, you’ll get a deeper contact-level connection, and first-party intent data that your sales team can actually act on.

There is no right or wrong answer. The only thing that matters is deciding which tool fits your unique needs.

So, here are some things to think about when considering an ABM solution:

• Which stage of the funnel needs the most help right now?
• What level of AI involvement does my team need within the ABM process?
• How much work do I want to do in a single, all-in-one tool? Do we have established workflows in other tools that will need to play nicely with a new ABM platform?
• Does my team have the resources and time to translate complex data into actions?
• How much customization do I want when creating workflows and analytics dashboards?
• Do I need contact-level insights for my ABM strategy?

For that last question, remember that Demandbase and 6sense specialize in account-level insights. 

But with Influ2, you can directly target individuals in your key accounts, and get contact-level insights based on their engagement with those ads.

Want to see how it works? Book a demo with our team.