6sense · Research
/
2025
Research into why customers didn't trust reporting data; findings built into the Sales Intelligence roadmap.
Result
Research with 10 enterprise customers shaped the Sales Intelligence reporting roadmap across 3 quarters.
Company
6sense · Research
Year
2025
Role
Product Designer III · led the research · with PM and design · 8 weeks
In short
Problem: 6sense customers didn't trust the reports in Sales Intelligence. They exported the data to spreadsheets, Salesforce and outside dashboards instead.
What I did: led interviews and workflow walkthroughs with 10 enterprise customers across four roles, built around real reporting tasks.
What I found: customers use reports to prove value, not to find insights, and manual workarounds were eroding their trust.
Result: four findings, each turned into a recommendation, shaped the reporting roadmap across 3 quarters.
Context: built for insights, used for exports
Reporting was central to Sales Intelligence, but customers didn't treat it as their source of truth. To answer their real questions, they exported data to spreadsheets, checked numbers in Salesforce or built dashboards elsewhere:
Are we driving adoption?
Are our campaigns working?
Are we seeing a return on 6sense?
The reports existed. The question was whether customers could trust them, explain them and act on them.
Why it mattered
Customers relied on reporting to:
Prove impact to leadership and justify the investment in 6sense.
Check that campaigns and workflows were working.
Show return on investment in quarterly business reviews and executive meetings.
Build confidence with stakeholders who don't use the platform every day.
Because the reports didn't fully answer those questions, teams built manual systems around 6sense, spending hours exporting data and reconciling numbers in spreadsheets. For a product that sells on insight, that's a renewal risk.
What I set out to learn
A. How reporting is used today
Why do users open reports?
What makes them use reports, or stops them?
How does reporting differ by role?
B. Where the friction is
How easy is it to find the right data?
Which tasks feel difficult or confusing?
What feels incomplete?
C. What would make reporting worth using
How do people use reporting in their day-to-day work?
Which metrics matter most?
What would make reports more valuable?
How I ran it
Participants: 10 customers across Sales Ops, Marketing Ops, Revenue Enablement and Demand Generation, with between 1 month and 5+ years of using 6sense.
Format: remote interviews combined with workflow walkthroughs, about 600 minutes of sessions in total.
Real tasks, not opinions: each participant shared their reporting routine, completed tasks inside Reports, rated each experience from 1 to 5, and talked through their frustrations. Watching real tasks showed the hesitations, the cross-checking, and the moments people left the product to finish their story somewhere else.
Synthesis: I mapped every observation in FigJam and grouped them into themes.
In Image: FigJam synthesis board
Four things we didn't expect to hear
1. People open reports to prove value, not to find insights. Most participants used reports to show adoption, justify the investment or confirm a campaign worked. Almost nobody used them to explore or decide what to do next. When reporting becomes proof rather than a decision tool, chances to improve get missed.
2. Manual workflows are breaking trust. Customers exported data, tagged it by hand, and reconciled numbers across Salesforce, Outreach, Power BI and spreadsheets. They spent more time checking data than interpreting it, so 6sense struggled to become the trusted source.
3. One report doesn't fit every team. Marketing, Enablement and Operations needed different answers, metrics and timings. A rigid report pushed each team back into outside tools to make sense of their data.
4. Customers want context, not more data. Nobody asked for more dashboards. They asked for clarity and confidence: one view showing adoption, return on investment and pipeline contribution, tailored to their role and easy to share.
“We have the data, we just don't have the story.” A 6sense Sales Intelligence customer
From findings to recommendations
Users struggle to find the right report → simplify report names, structure and organisation.
Teams define success differently → agree a shared reporting vocabulary.
Reports lack context → add benchmarks, comparisons and historical trends.
Different roles need different things → build role-based dashboards and alerts.
Impact
Roadmap: the recommendations shaped reporting investment in Sales Intelligence across 3 quarters.
Direction: reporting was reframed from a place to store data into a way for customers to tell their performance story.
Alignment: PM and design shared one understanding of customer pain points, grounded in what customers actually did, not what they said.
Reuse: the findings gave future reporting work a research foundation and were shared beyond the immediate team.
What I learned
Data products don't only fail when the data is wrong. They fail when people can't explain, trust or act on what they see. My job was to turn scattered customer behaviour into a direction the team could act on.
