UserGems and Vector have spent months running gloves-off campaigns aimed at 6sense customers, and their messaging is hitting real pain.
If you've been on LinkedIn lately, you've seen the campaigns.
Isaac from UserGems is running promoted posts saying most of the ABM teams he talks to open the call by complaining about 6sense, and another post from Corrina, a practitioner, is describing how 6sense became, in her words, "a very expensive CSV machine."
Jess, Vector's VP of Marketing, is posting that black-box account scores are a thing of the past, and Vector's ads ask reps whether they really want to prioritize an account because a black-box platform said so.
It's been fun to watch, and there's a playbook in it for anyone planning a competitor takeout of their own.
6sense vs. Vector
6sense vs. UserGems
UserGems named the competitor, on purpose
Most competitive campaigns tiptoe around the competitor's name. I respect that UserGems isn’t shying away and says "6sense" over and over. And while Vector never says the name in the ads I've seen, when you typically talk about "black-box scores" to an ABM audience, everyone knows who you mean.
Is naming a competitor risky? Sure.
But you only do it when you know exactly where you win and you're confident you can pull customers over. Both of these teams clearly are.
What makes a takeout campaign work
Strip away the jabs and both campaigns follow the same four steps:
Know the pain, not just the competitor. Both vendors are describing problems 6sense users actually have: scores nobody can explain, "in market" flags that don't say which contacts or who should own the account, and teams spending more time managing the tool than using it. That only comes from talking to a lot of frustrated users. Vector even put numbers behind it, since their own Reality of ABM research found only 18.4% of teams can consistently explain why an account's score changed.
Turn the pain into messaging in the user's words. None of these posts lead with features. They lead with the thing a frustrated user is already saying in their own Slack channels.
Distribute it across formats. Exec and employee posts, promoted thought leadership, customer stories, branded ads, and research. The same message shows up in five different places, so a 6sense user sees it everywhere.
Point it at the right accounts. This is the step most takeouts get wrong.
A takeout is only as good as the account list
Right now I'm being served an ad from a vendor that assumes my company uses Demandbase. We don't. Somewhere, a technographic filter got it wrong and now that budget is going to an account that will never convert.
But getting the install right is only half of it. "Uses the competitor" is a starting point, not a target account list. The better question is whether the account looks like your best customers, with the same size, use case, team structure, and maturity. If it doesn't, you might win the deal and lose the customer a year later, because a frustrated customer who was never a good fit for you will be just as frustrated on your platform. And then you end up on someone else's takeout list.
Before you run a takeout of your own
Pull the list of accounts using the competitor you want to displace, then cut it down to the ones that match the profile of your best current customers. If that list is a lot smaller than you expected, good, that's the list worth spending on.
As for UserGems, Vector, and 6sense, this only seems to be escalating as all three keep shipping, and how it shakes out over the rest of the year and into next will be fun to watch. I'll have my popcorn ready. 🍿
Are you thinking about running your own competitor takeout campaign? Let’s chat, I’d love to know what you’re planning.
