AMERICAN FORK, UT – April 9, 2015 – Consensus, a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, today announced that it has raised $2.8 million in seed funding from institutional venture capital firms and angel investors led by Peak Ventures, along with Albion Financial, Seed Equity, Select Venture Partners, Paul Ahlstrom, Scott Frazier, and Greg Schenk. The funding accelerates the growth of Consensus’s intelligent demo automation platform, which automates personalized product demos so buyers can reach consensus early in the sales process, and helps business-to-business (B2B) sales teams increase close rates and shorten sales cycles with proven ROI.
“Consensus solves the biggest problem in enterprise sales—building buying consensus,” said Garin Hess, co-founder and CEO, Consensus. “Research shows that more than 5 buyers are involved in the average B2B buying committee. Our interactive technology delivers a personalized experience to each buyer, all at the same time, and at the beginning of the sales process. This drives consensus for buyers around the type of problem they’re trying to solve and helps them identify potential solutions so they can make a purchasing decision more quickly than with traditional methods.”
“We invested in Consensus because it’s the fastest way we know to grow enterprise revenue and accelerate sales,” said Sid Krommenhoek, partner, Peak Ventures. “With Consensus’s analytics platform, you don’t have to sell in the dark anymore. Now sales and product teams have real-time visibility into what’s important to each buyer so sales conversations and product priorities can address buyers’ specific needs. That’s a big win for buyers and sellers.”
Intelligent Demo Automation and Analytics for Significant ROI
Consensus automatically creates a personalized demo for each prospect based on their unique buying criteria and then tracks their engagement with it. Personalization helps each prospect educate themselves about a new product’s benefits in a way that is most relevant to them, and then feeds their analytics to a salesperson who can address that prospect’s specific needs in sales conversations. The Consensus intelligent demo automation platform includes these key features:
- Personalization: Configure a demo to each buyer’s unique interests, just like an expert salesperson.
- Sharing: Encourage sharing with other members of the buying committee to build internal viral engagement around the solution.
- Notifications: Receive an alert when someone views or shares the demo to instantly follow up with them.
- Demolytics™: See what features and benefits individuals prioritized as most important to them, before having a sales conversation. Salespeople can drill down to see who viewed video segments and how much time they spent with on product benefit to know what to talk about first and what to spend the most time on.
- Integrations: Connect with advanced integration capabilities with an open API for custom integrations, in addition to ready-made integrations with top CRM and marketing tools such as Infusionsoft, Marketo, Salesforce, and Zapier.
- Confidentiality: Protect proprietary information by turning sharing on or off and by deactivating the demo after a pre-determined number of views.
- Targeted Versions: Create different versions of a single demo and change features with each version to fit specific sales or marketing needs.
Since its launch in February 2014, more than 100 companies in the software, financial services software, and healthcare software sectors have deployed Consensus, including Autodesk, HP, and Microsoft. Enterprises have seen unprecedented sales acceleration ROI, including increased close rates by up to 44 percent and reduced sales cycles by as much as 68 percent. Marketing teams also use automated demos created and powered by Consensus to qualify leads on their websites, resulting in lead gen conversion rates that are as much as four times higher than traditional website conversion methods.
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About Consensus
Consensus is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company that intelligently automates product demos to accelerate sales. The company’s interactive demo platform personalizes video and documents so each prospect automatically learns about a solution in the most relevant way. Its Demolytics™ dashboard helps companies discover and engage the entire buying group by gathering analytics and tracking who’s involved, what’s important to them, what they watched, and who they shared it with. This drives consensus and gets to a purchase decision much faster than traditional sales methods. With Consensus, clients have cut their sales cycles by 68% and