6sense Breakthrough Preview: CRO Latané Conant On How The Event Will Help Marketers ‘Be More’

The fifth annual conference will feature expanded programming, with full content tracks for sales and business development reps and leaders to ensure alignment. Specifically, attendees can expect:

• Actionable presentations from global brands including NVIDIA, Conga, Red Hat and Twilio;
• Exclusive executive track experiences for CMOs and CROs;
• Perspectives from 6sense CEO Jason Zintak and Chief Revenue Officer Latané Conant to help revenue leaders meet customers’ rising demands, conquer overload and burnout and thrive in the new age of intelligence; and
• A look into the future with 6sense Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Viral Bajaria, who will reveal how sales, marketing and RevOps teams can fully leverage the power of AI, better intelligence and smarter workflows.

To get a behind-the-scenes look into the event, I sat down with Conant to get the scoop.

Demand Gen Report: Can you tell us more about the event’s ‘be more’ theme and how it came to fruition?

Latané Conant: We’ve all been eye-rolling and heavy sighing when we hear people tell us to ‘do more with less.’ The truth is we don’t want to do more — we’re tired. Research found that 81% of salespeople and marketers are experiencing burnout, so doing more doesn’t feel like a solution. What we need to do is redefine how we work so we’re not doing more: We’re being more.

We want to help people get to a place where they actualize who they want to be, whether that includes leveraging AI and big data or building a community so that we can be more at work and in our personal lives.

DGR: For those who might not have attended the conference before, can you share a little bit about what they can expect?

Conant: Last year, we had attendees say it was a cross between an Apple product launch and Dreamforce. We work hard to make the event exciting by discussing technology and the future of technology, and we bring people together in meaningful ways. We tend to be innovators on the technology front, and our product roadmap session is always as ‘out there’ as we can be.

We will have more partners this year than we’ve ever had, which are a huge part of ecosystems.  What’s also interesting this year is that it’s about sales and marketing; in the past, it’s mostly been an event for key marketing roles. We have a track dedicated to aligning marketing and sales executives, so we’ll discuss collaboration and how to build pipeline goals and manage pipeline together.

DGR: How is Breakthrough getting to the heart of the challenges the industry has been facing?

Conant: What we’re seeing in our research, which we’ll unveil at the conference, is what we call B2B inflation. We have an equal or lesser number of resources, and it’s harder to get opt-ins and deals created/won. It takes more touches, a higher level of personalization and there’s more people involved in the buying decisions. There’s also less time spent with vendors, so a lot more of the buyer’s journey is anonymous. We’re going to focus on how to work differently — you can’t just stay late another night or work another weekend.

There’s also a lot of hype around generative AI, but it’s not practical — it doesn’t discuss how to actually apply the technology. Our coverage of generative AI will focus on the real things people are doing with it, not just making fun predictions. And we’re also going to talk about AI in general, because there’s also directive AI and all these different applications people haven’t even used yet.

DGR: As attendees leave the Omni PGA Golf Resort on Oct. 19, what do you want them to walk away with? What will the follow-up conversations around Breakthrough look like?

Conant: I saw a presentation from an esteemed private equity company that talked about go-to-market budgets and forecasted how they’ll change over time, and it involves a lot less headcount and a lot more technology. In the next two to three years, there will be an expectation that our spend ratios will change, so we must start thinking about that now.

This might sound unpopular, but it’s about being more — let’s make sure our humans are being as human as possible, and the things that are routine and mundane can be automated or we can leverage AI. And while the sales and marketing alignment conversation seems overly cliché, we’ll start seeing more joint operating models around shared KPIs, analytics and operations that drive the right behavior across revenue teams.

The culture you create is going to be a bigger part of your formula as a GTM leader.
Burnout and quiet quitting are real, so we’ll continue to see teams adjust and change to optimize for the people who want to be there. If you want to keep top talent, you need to capture their heart and minds — otherwise your business is just a side hustle for them.

It’s not too late to join your peers in Texas for the fifth annual Breakthrough Conference! Register now and prepare to be more.