CONSENSUS Raises $4.2 Million To Accelerate Growth

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CONSENSUS is a SaaS company that automates custom product demos to accelerate sales. CONSENSUS drives agreement across the stakeholders in the buying group by delivering a custom video demo to each stakeholder based on each person’s unique interests. The CONSENSUS platform plays the videos in a personalized sequence, and at a level of detail tailored to each buyer’s interests so each buyer can automatically learn about your solution in the most relevant way. The company has recently raised a $4.2 Million Series A funding round led by Peak Ventures. Below is our interview with Garin Hess, CEO of CONSENSUS:

Q: Garin, please tell us how the idea to create CONSENSUS was born?

A: I’m a serial entrepreneur and in my last startup we were constantly struggling with the need to discover and engage the buying group. The best place to do that, we found, was in the demo, but live demos forced us to have multiple meetings pitching to each stakeholder differently. After I exited I was looking for a big problem to solve with my next project and we founded CONSENSUS to solve what we consider to be the largest unsolved problem in B2B sales today – group buying dysfunction. There isn’t a salesperson on the planet that hasn’t lost deals to an unknown stakeholder come into the deal late and killing the deal. Technology can help you discover and engage these stakeholders earlier and more effectively. CONSENSUS’ technology is designed to help shorten the sales cycle by helping the buying group make faster, more confident purchase decisions. This results in more deals.

Q: Could you please give us insights into CONSENSUS´ functionality?

A: CONSENSUS drives agreement across the stakeholders in the buying group by delivering a custom video demo to each stakeholder based on each person’s unique interests.

Buyers rate the relative importance of video topics that explain different aspects of the offering’s value proposition according to their unique interests, revealing both the identity and motivation of each stakeholder. The CONSENSUS platform plays the videos in a personalized sequence, and at a level of detail tailored to each buyer’s interests. CONSENSUS’ proprietary Demolytics™ dashboard shows customers when a buyer watches their demo, what’s important to them and who they shared it with — so salespeople can discover and engage the buying group earlier than every before. When they follow up, using what they learn from Demolytics, they can tailor their messages to the buying group’s shared priorities.

Q: What would you highlight as the CONSENSUS’ main feature in driving sales?

A: Our patent pending video personalization combined with the Demolytics. We’re not talking about superficial personalization–this is actually changing the content scope and length based on their needs. This breakthrough technology allows us to personalize sales and marketing messaging to each stakeholder in the B2B buying group. For sales leaders, this means increased close rates and shorter sales cycles. For marketing leaders, this translates to higher conversion rates, insights that drive better lead qualification, and a lower cost per lead. Because of this power and value, CONSENSUS is helping more than 200 B2B customers dramatically shorten sales cycles and increase close rates at leading enterprise and midmarket companies such as HP, Microsoft, AdvancedMD and InContact.

Q: You’ve recently raised a $4.2 million series A funding round, what are your plans?

A: Our main focus is to accelerate our growth. We plan to achieve this through advancements and innovations in our technology. We are also going to be focusing on sales and marketing and really honing in on enterprise customers.

Q: How does the future look like for CONSENSUS?

A: The future is exciting for CONSENSUS. We have grown rapidly, one of the fastest growing startups in Utah, but we believe we are just a fraction of the size we’ll be several years from now. We’re breaking ground in a new software category, one you might call Buying Acceleration, where the focus of the technology is not on what the salesperson is doing, but what is happening on the buyer side. It’s not the seller that is delaying the sale, it’s the buyer. So we’re excited to be leading the charge into this uncharted territory. And we look forward to continuing our growth trend in a smart way so that our customers are getting the best experience possible with our product.

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