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Garin Hess, a Utah-based tech entrepreneur, encountered what he calls “display bottleneck” at his early software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup. He theorized that a self-guided interactive demo, personalized for each stakeholder, would not only streamline the process and save time, but also help organically discover and engage. other Stakeholders who are normally unreachable.
That led Hess to found Consensus, a platform for interactive video displays, which announced today that it has raised $110 million from Sumeru Equity Partners. Consensus allows engineering teams to build a reusable library of interactive video demos that sales teams can send on demand.
“Consensus is like an ‘Iron Man mech suit’ for every sales engineer,” Hess told TechCrunch in an email interview. Assist buyers strategically as they shop.
In the year Launched in 2013 and now with more than $139 million in the bank (including today’s raise), Consensus allows users to build demo videos and then send those demos to viewers. Prospects choose what they want to learn about and receive a personalized presentation, which they can share with their wider teams and organizations.
Throughout the process, Consensus monitors engagement and engages new stakeholders independently and proactively.
“Unlike aggregated video platforms, Consensus tracks both video impressions and manual clicks based on answers to specific questions, which both engage and personalize,” Hess explained. “It uses a proprietary personalization engine, then collects data analytics for the sales team to help align within the buying team.”
Of course, the consensus isn’t the only game in town when it comes to declining production — far from it. There’s Arcade, which makes Chrome extensions for product demos, which raised $7.5 million last September. Another top competitor is Demostack, which in April spent $34 million on a “demo experience” platform for SaaS sales teams.
To set itself apart from the crowd, it recently released Consensus Tours, which allows a salesperson to demonstrate a product feature on video and then broadcast it to a viewer who can then autonomously click through to explore the same feature.
“Millions of dollars in revenue are locked away in the inefficiencies of the traditional sales engineering model of live demo after live demo. It artificially lengthens the buying cycle and adds risk to every deal, not to mention it’s very expensive,” Hess said. “With the Consensus Intelligent demo automation platform, enterprise software sales teams can not only improve their own efficiency, but more importantly improve the effectiveness of the target organization’s buying team, automating the buying process, reducing risk and resulting in more sales without increasing headcount.”
Is it very promising? in case. But Consensus has no trouble attracting business, it seems. Consensus’ current clients include 15 of the 30 largest software companies, Coupa, Oracle and Autodesk. According to Hess, revenue is expected to grow 60 percent by 2022.
“The pandemic has shifted the ‘pre-sales’ profession from a focus on ‘I have to be in person’ to ‘Hey, can we do this remotely?’ It helped him get over the spotlight,” Hess said. “This pandemic has forced the entire sales industry to question the status quo, which is helping to open minds to the importance of display automation as part of the process. We believe communication is uniquely positioned to thrive in this slowdown because we are automating the same tasks for many enterprise software companies.” [has] It has never been automatic before.
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