The original idea for this book was an initiative I called Project Bold Moves—an experiment in which we would test out a no-forms, no-spam, no-cold calls approach to the prospect experience. Our mission was twofold: (1) to figure out how to put these ideas into practice and (2) to make sure they would really work. But I always had a third part of the mission in the back of my head: To create the book you're holding right now.

That third part of the mission was inspired by another endeavor I took on around the time we started Project Bold Moves: advising companies and chief marketing officers (CMOs) on how to thrive in this new world of selling and marketing. In my work with them, I found myself repeating the same examples, sharing the same templates, and answering the same questions over and over. How do you roll out new messaging? What about a marketecture and category design? What key things do you measure? What's the makeup of your go-to market plan?

I kept thinking I should write it down and have it all in one place, if only to save myself the countless hours I spent digging around and emailing long explanations to everyone asking the same questions. But I also knew that what was really needed was something more comprehensive and thorough to help navigate all the changes in technology, roles, and expectations. It was time for a definitive guide to modern account engagement. I know that I would have loved to have had such a guide when I was figuring it all out. And since I once heard that you should write the book you wish you had, I decided to get started.

My goal for this book is to try to share all the things my team and I have figured out along the way, through mistakes, struggle, insights, and breakthroughs—from templates to frameworks to what to do when things go off the rails. I don't want to get bogged down in theory, since I know when I read business books, I skim those parts. After all, I'm not looking to earn a PhD; I'm just looking to do my job better.

The book I want to read tells me what works and what doesn't, and it gives me practical information that I can implement in real life. So that's the approach I take with this book. To our lawyer's dismay, I strive to provide detail and real examples, even if it have I had to divulge a secret here or there. Again, I want concrete examples to follow when I'm reading a book like this, so I took pains to provide those wherever possible. In my dreams,

I envision you highlighting, circling, and scribbling notes in the margins, just as I do with my favorite business books.

In the end, I may not succeed in including every piece of wisdom our team gleaned from the Project Bold Moves experiment, but I do believe I got a lot of the best “gold nuggets” in here. And I try to present them in a logical, practical fashion.

In Chapter 1, I confront the reality that traditional business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing tactics and technologies deliver market-qualified leads (MQLs), but horrendous experiences for our prospects (who are future customers!). I take you through the major “a-ha! moments” that led us to Project Bold Moves, and I describe the details of how we now put prospects and their experiences at the core of everything we do.

In Chapter 2, I call on CMOs to redefine themselves as chief market officers— the experts who deeply understand and advocate for their markets. I share my guidance on how CMOs can differentiate themselves by owning the company's strategic plan, deepening their knowledge of the market using customer's insights, embracing the principles of category design, and becoming unifiers who enable and embody the company's culture.

In Chapter 3, I address the bones of this new approach: the customer-first tech stack. In this chapter, we roll up our sleeves and dig into the capabilities needed to deliver the insights, collaboration, and data required to deliver a truly customer-centered buying experience. With a focus on engaging accounts over leads, I walk through my five-step approach to executing account-based marketing (ABM) at scale.

In Chapter 4, I explain how we put our plan into action. I show you the behind-the-scenes at 6sense, detailing how we create a comprehensive plan to build, understand, and align on a revenue operating model, address areas that need improvement, design the right go-to-market plan, execute account-based campaigns, and build trust through relentless transparency and communication.

In Chapter 5, I hand over the mic to Mark Ebert, our brilliant CRO, who shares what it takes to be a modern sales leader. He goes deep into setting sellers up to win, new-school territory design, getting into new verticals, hiring and retaining top sellers, and so much more. It's basically a cheat sheet that will give you a peek into how Mark leads one of the most effective, successful, and happy sales teams I've ever worked with.

In the final chapter, I break down what this transformation looks like for each role on the revenue team. I call on all the difference-makers out there to mobilize and to advocate for change. I then show you the before-and-after of what your life will look like when you embrace the No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls. vision.

In my mind, I think writing this book is a natural, maybe even effortless, culmination of our grand experiment at 6sense. I figure we execute Project Bold Moves, write about it as we go, and voilà, a book is born. We will document all our learning, share it with the world, and have lots of fun along the way. I may have even argued that it would be more interesting and “not that much more work” than writing blogs. Go team!

Well, as it turns out, creating this book was not as easy as my rallying speech made it out to be, and writing by committee is harder than it appears. So in the end, and much to my own surprise as a woman who majored in accounting just to avoid term papers, I ended up as the author of this book. But just because my name is on the cover doesn't mean I did it alone. One of my mentors used to always say, “Good things happen to good people.” I'm lucky as hell to have those good people all around me, and this book is proof of the good things that happen because of them. They support my ambitious ideas and help me turn them into reality. So this book is really the story—and the culmination of the hard work—of the entire 6sense team. I couldn't ask for a better group of people with whom to learn, make mistakes, grow, and break through to new heights of customer-driven selling and marketing.

As you know, the work we do as sellers and marketers is hard, and it's getting harder by the day. It's on us to figure it all out, without the benefit of some universally accepted textbook telling us what to do and how to do it. And while this book isn't likely to be on a university bookstore shelf anytime soon, I am hoping that the practical, real-world guidance it offers will give you a solid head start in navigating this intense, ever-changing, and opportunity-filled landscape we're lucky enough to find ourselves in.

Dedication

To the difference-makers (you know who you are). Keep breaking glass, and keep breaking through.