6sense
/
2026
Per-country Do Not Call controls for admins instead of hiding every number, with clear warnings for sales reps.
Result
Shipped Do Not Call compliance asked for by 20+ customers worth $6M+ in revenue, without hiding numbers by default.
Company
6sense
Year
2026
Role
Product Designer III · with Legal, 1 PM and 2 engineers
Screens on this page are recreated to protect confidential data. They match what shipped.
The problem
6sense Sales Intelligence helps sales teams find prospects showing buying intent and contact them, and phone numbers are central to that. Some of those numbers are on government Do Not Call registries, and calling them can break telemarketing laws.
More than 20 customers had asked for DNC handling, from organisations worth over $6M in revenue. It was essential for selling to European customers, especially in the UK, and every major competitor already offered some DNC checks.
Two people needed different things:
Admins needed to set their company's compliance policy for each country.
Sales reps needed to know, at a glance, when a number was restricted, before they called it.
Legal and Customer Success proposed the obvious fix: hide every number on a DNC registry automatically. It would have made us compliant, but it would have removed numbers in exactly the markets these customers sell into, and contacting prospects is what they pay 6sense for.
How I worked
I worked with Legal to turn the regulations into product rules, and mapped three flows before designing any screens: the admin setting up DNC, a rep viewing contacts, and a rep exporting them.
In Image: The three user flows side by side
Three decisions
1. Let admins decide, country by country. My PM and I pushed back on auto-hiding and proposed a different model. Admins choose which of the 7 supported countries to hide, with a “Select all countries” shortcut, because they know their own legal position and markets. Nothing is hidden by default. A before/after preview on the settings page shows admins exactly what their reps will see before they save.
In Image: Admin settings with the 7 countries, hide checkboxes and the before/after preview.
2. Two kinds of DNC, two visual signals. Legal agreed to this model on one condition: reps must always know when a number is on a government registry. Customers already had “do not contact” flags in their CRM, set on the whole contact, while government DNC applies to a single phone number. Mixing them would confuse reps, so I kept them apart:
CRM do-not-contact: an icon next to the contact's name.
Government DNC: a DNC badge next to the specific number.
When an admin hides a country, the number reads “Hidden by Admin” and keeps its DNC badge, so a rep always knows why a number is missing. In list views, the badge appears only when every number on a contact is restricted, so lists don't fill up with warnings.
In Image: Contact details and a recommended-contacts list: the CRM icon sits by the name, the DNC badge by each number. In the list, the badge shows only when every number is DNC.
3. The rule follows the number everywhere. The same setting applies across the web app, the Chrome extension, and export and unlock history. In exports, hidden numbers come out blank and every number gets a DNC Yes/No column, which admins can map to a field in their CRM or sales engagement tool.
What I argued against
Hiding every DNC number automatically. It was the first proposal, from Legal and Customer Success. It solved compliance by taking away what customers pay for: a way to contact the prospects 6sense finds for them.
Results
30 organisations changed their DNC settings in the first month; 26 hid Germany, the strictest market. Admins used the per-country control to tighten where their law required it.
20+ customer requests answered, from organisations worth $6M+ in revenue.
7 countries at launch, each controlled separately.
One consistent rule across the web app, the Chrome extension and exports.
What I learned
The obvious way to comply would have hurt the product. Giving the decision to the people who own the legal risk, and keeping the warning visible, met Legal's requirement without taking data away from reps.
