Garin Hess, a tech entrepreneur based in Utah, experienced what he called the “demo bottleneckat a previous software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup during a pitch to potential clients. He theorized that a self-driven interactive demo, personalized to each stakeholder, could not only streamline the process and save time, but also help organically discover and engage other stakeholders that are not normally reached.
That led Hess to found Consensus, a platform for interactive video demos, which today announced it was raising $110 million from Sumeru Equity Partners. With Consensus, technical teams can build a library of reusable, interactive video demos that sales teams can send on demand.
“Consensus is like an ‘Iron Man mech suit’ for any sales engineer to be able to do more with what they have,” Hess told businesskinda.com in an email interview. “For example, consensus automates the routine”harbor tourso consultants can spend more time doing what they do best: helping buyers strategically through complexity to purchase solutions with many puzzle pieces.”
Launched in 2013 and now with over $139 million in the bank (including today’s raise), Consensus allows users to create demo videos and then email those demos to potential customers. Prospects choose what they want to learn more about and get a personalized demo, which they can share with their wider teams and organization.
Throughout the process, Consensus tracks engagement and automatically finds new stakeholders based on role and priority.
“Unlike generalized video platforms, Consensus tracks who enters both a video demonstration and hands-on, click-through product tour and personalizes it based on answers to specific questions asked in advance,” explains Hess. “It uses its own personalization engine and then aggregates data analytics for the sales team to drive alignment across the buying group.”
Of course, Consensus isn’t the only game in town when it comes to product demos – far from it. There’s Arcade, a startup developing a Chrome extension for product demos, which raised $7.5 million last September. Another big rival is Demostack, which raised $34 million in April for its “demo experience” platform for SaaS sales teams.
To further stand out from the crowd, Consensus recently released Tours, which allow a salesperson to demonstrate a product feature via video and then hand it to a potential customer so they can explore the same feature through a self-guided click-through experience.
“Millions of dollars in revenue are tied up in the inefficiencies of the traditional sales engineering model of doing live demo after live demo. It artificially lengthens the buying cycle and adds risk to every deal, not to mention it’s hugely expensive,” Hess said. “With Consensus’ intelligent demo automation platform, enterprise software sales teams not only improve their own efficiency, but more importantly, improve the efficiency of the target organization’s purchasing group, which automatically speeds up the buying process, reduces risk, and results in more sales without adding staff.”
Is that too much promise? Maybe. But Consensus apparently has had no trouble attracting customers. Consensus’ current customers include 15 of the top 30 software companies, including Coupa, Oracle, and Autodesk. According to Hess, sales will grow by 60% in 2022.
“The pandemic has helped shift the ‘pre-sales’ profession from a ‘must be there in person’ focus to ‘Hey, can we do this remotely?'” Hess said. “This coercive feature of the pandemic caused the entire sales industry to sit up and question the status quo, helping to open minds to the utility of demo automation as part of the process. We believe Consensus is uniquely positioned to grow effectively in this slowdown because we are automating a feature that many enterprise software companies [has] never automated before.”
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