This page discusses how 6sense handles company accounts.
6sense uses company accounts throughout 6sense product interfaces, including:
For building segments used in:
Information on account details pages
Web and third-party intent network activities
Monthly company data refresh
6sense performs a monthly data refresh during the 2nd week of the month. Customers should expect to see meaningful changes to the data, impact across their TAMs, segments, workflows etc.
How 6sense defines a “company account”
A 6sense company account, sometimes called an “MCD account”, is a valid business that you can consider to be a buying center.
Importantly, 6sense company accounts are at a country level, with some exceptions, to provide the best quality of activity attribution. Only one account can exist for a company in each country (except for franchisees).
To work with a your CRM or MAP accounts, 6sense matches them to an account in the MCD.
6sense Master Company Database and company accounts
6sense stores company account information in its master company database (MCD), also known as the “company graph”.
MCD curation processes
The MCD is the source of truth within 6sense for the identity of an account. 6sense curates its MCD from a variety of sources, and the data goes through extensive data cleansing processes that continuously improve the dataset through machine learning and human-in-the-loop processes. These processes constantly remove bad accounts and add new accounts into the MCD to retain industry-leading coverage and quality.
Updates for company firmographic data
The 6sense MCD is a highly curated data repository. Because of this, 6sense doesn’t allow you to directly data update existing MCD accounts.
However, if you can’t find an account, contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to request an update. If you find discrepancies in the firmographic data, please raise a firmographic feedback request that asks the 6sense team to review the account and fix any firmographic issues.
How 6sense matches company accounts to your CRM or MAP
To work with a your CRM or MAP accounts, 6sense matches them to an account in the MCD. This matching process is also called “mastering”.
when trying to match an MCD account to a CRM or MAP account, 6sense considers the following:
Account name
Website domain
Country
Emails of associated contacts (for a CRM account)
Multiple CRM or MAP accounts may be mapped to a given 6sense account to avoid duplication.
Resolving and normalizing domain URLs
6sense uses an internal aliasing mechanism for domains to match CRM or MAP accounts with accounts in MCD. Generally, this includes resolving a redirect to its final domain. For example, if a CRM account includes the domain siri.com (which redirects to apple.com), 6sense matches it to an account with the domain apple.com even if the 6sense MCD includes a siri.com account, assuming all other attributes are the same.
Apart from redirects, 6sense aliasing may also utilize country level domain match – such as matching hsbc.ca in a CRM account domain to hsbc.com, etc.
6sense normalizes domains. Normalization strips off parts at the beginning and end of a URL. For example, when 6sense normalizes watch.apple.com, it becomes apple.com. When it normalizes ibm.com/watson, it becomes ibm.com. Because of this normalization, a watch.apple.com account is considered a duplicate of apple.com, and an incoming CRM/MAP account with the watch.apple.com domain is matched to apple.com. Similarly, after normalization, 6sense considers ibm.com/watson the same as ibm.com.
You may have specific cases when you want to skip URL normalization and consider two URLs as different accounts. If so, 6sense will consider stopping URL normalization on a case-by-case basis. Contact Customer Support.
Email domain matching
In certain cases, 6sense may prefer to use the email domain of contacts associated with a CRM account, instead of the web domain of the account to perform the match. 6sense uses this to catch conflicts in manually entered data as we have found contact emails to be significantly less erroneous than web domain data in most CRMs.
However, if you want to turn this email matching feature off, please contact Customer Support and they can turn it off for all accounts in your CRM.
What happens if no accounts match
If 6sense cannot find an account to match, it creates an account in the MCD and matches that newly created account. This situation is rare. It usually occurs in either recently formed or very niche companies, or because 6sense was unable to match incorrect data to an account in the MCD.
What happens if there is no match and no new account is created
A CRM or MAP account may neither be matched to nor created in the MCD for a few key reasons.
The domain/website is not a legitimate or working domain. 6sense won’t consume or create records with irrelevant domains. These include:
Domains parked or for sale
Dead or junk domains
Domains not pertinent to a company (such as personal blogs)
Domain aliasing to another domain (for example, siri.com redirecting to apple.com)
The CRM or MAP account name is “junk”. 6sense curates a human-verified list of “junk names” and websites. No accounts can be created that have a site name matching this list.
The CRM or MAP account’s website and country pairing may be invalid. 6sense maintains a human-curated list of valid domain country pairings. No account can exist in the MCD that does not follow the rules (and documented exceptions), and no new CRM/MAP account can be created that doesn’t adhere to these rules.
The CRM or MAP account country is any of the following – ‘Cuba’, ‘Iran’, ‘North Korea’, ‘Syria’, ‘Russia’, ‘Belarus’. 6sense cannot create an account that is in these countries.
The CRM or MAP account may be missing its country, its name, or both. Both the country and name are mandatory attributes in the ABM platform. These requirements are different in Sales Intelligence. Country has no longer been mandatory since August 21, 2023. For more information on this enhancement, see the Enhancement to Account Matching August Release RevCity community post.
None of the lists and exceptions mentioned above can be shared beyond 6sense as 6sense considers them to be core intellectual property.
If an account is not matched or created in the 6sense platform for the above reasons, users of the Sales Intelligence iFrame (the 6sense Dashboards integrated in a CRM) might not see data for those accounts in their CRM.
Company account updates
A 6sense company account can be updated daily after it is created. These updates can be common in the firmographic fields due to a company’s natural evolution. For example, a company may gain employees or change its address.
Descoping and removing company accounts from the MCD
A company created in the MCD can also be descoped and removed from the MCD. A company can be removed because it has gone out of business and is no longer an active buying center. Infrequently, 6sense could also find data issues in the company accounts in the MCD during regularly scheduled checks. For example, 6sense periodically checks whether the account website is still active, or if the attached firmographics, such as address, are correct. If the data issues pass a certain threshold, 6sense removes a company from the MCD.
What happens when company accounts are removed
When 6sense removes a company account from the MCD:
The company account is no longer available when creating new segments, and is removed from any existing segments.
Any existing matches of CRM or MAP accounts to that 6sense account are invalidated, and the MCD tries to find a better match for the account.
6sense tries to provide a better replacement account for an invalid account. However, providing a replacement is not guaranteed. Commonly, 6sense cannot provide a replacement if the account data is “junk data” and no replacement is feasible. However, usually 6sense finds a replacement account. If 6sense can find a replacement account, a link to that replacement account appears in the banner on the invalid account’s detail page.
No new Advertising campaigns can be created on such an account, but existing ad campaigns show the account if an ad spend occurred on that account.
The company account ceases to be exported or shared using Data Packs, Audience or Data Workflows, or the 6sense API.
The company account also does not appear in global search box search results.
For account detail pages, 6sense places a banner on the removed account detail pages. The banner explains that the page is no longer valid and should not be used for details. The banner also indicates the date when the account became invalid.
The activities on an invalid page stop being updated. If there is a replacement page associated with the invalid account page, all new activities appear on that replacement page. Historical activities (those that appeared before the date an account page was marked invalid) are visible only in the invalid account page.