Pathmonk Presents Podcast
Garin Hess, Consensus Founder and CEO, walks through an origin story and shows How to Deliver a Better, More Personalized & In-Depth Buying Experience
Garin Hess recently joined Pathmonk Presents Podcast host Lukas Haensch to discuss how Consensus is ready to improve the buying experience through the use of intelligent demo automation to scale Presales teams and provide never before available visibility into the entire buying panel. It’s much less about what Consensus does and much more about the journey Garin has led Consensus through.
If there was anyone as passionate about creating in-depth, impactful, and engaging buying experiences, it’s the folks at Pathmonk.
Today’s digital buying environment is changing and has become more of a labyrinth as the digital world is fast-paced and instantaneous. To regain some control, many organizations have attempted to use video as a way to reach their customers. While this tactic is useful for customers – who can get the information they need without waiting for someone to have an opening in their calendar – it doesn’t help sellers.
This is where Consensus really found product market fit, as prospective customers get on-demand, interactive video demos, which they can share with other stakeholders, and which gives reps insights to engage the entire buying panel in a more meaningful way. Garin says, “Consensus is unique, not only with its personalized paths, but it adjusts the depth of the presentation. So if you mark something as not important, it’ll show less than a topic they rated as really important. Personalized experience for each stakeholder that engages.”
Because the platform focuses on demos, you’d think Consensus is probably an SE’s best friend. They are now, but it wasn’t always that way. This was something Garin realized after trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to get sales and marketing to buy into demo automation. The market was already saturated with tools for those areas and they only saw Consensus as a nice to have, but not a necessity.
The area that did see demo automation as a necessity was one that hadn’t received the attention they deserved: Presales. “It’s a huge overlooked piece in the go-to-market chain or buying experience. There’s so many tools for marketing automation, marketing lead automation, and so many sales automation tools. You could argue in a lot of ways that all of these miss the point in some way. If you’re going to take a dollar and invest it into the sales and marketing go-to-market approach, you could argue the best way to put it is into Sales Engineering because every Sales Engineer supports, on average, 4 Account Executives.”
Garin saw SEs weren’t getting much love. “The SE teams are struggling in most organizations to keep up with demands for demos. Sales is pulling on them and research has shown that up to 50% of their demos are unqualified. SEs are trying to not only figure out how to be more productive, how do we do less of these repetitive early stage demos and more of what we do best, the solution consulting?”
There weren’t even any numbers for salary information readily found. That’s when Garin decided to make the first SE Compensation and Workload report to compile salary and workload information surrounding Presales.
Creating the report was a lot of work, but it was worth it because it brought their audience to them, and it allowed Consensus to provide SEs with some information and tools they were missing. “Philosophically, I’ve always wanted to build a business that does things in what I consider the right way, which is to give first and then get second. Instead of trying to ask someone to give you something, give them something first and then hopefully the industry will give back to you. So far it’s been, really, and gratefully so, very successful.”
While diving into the conception of Consensus and how we support our own buyer’s journey, Garin emphasized the crucial role of sales engineers and how our solution can better automate and fulfill the role. Sales engineers and solution consultants are trained to provide B2B buyers with knowledge about product use cases, impact, architecture, and integrations, but mostly about the product, and yet they spend time in meetings repeating the same demos to unqualified leads. We amplify the presales and simplify the buying journey with guided, personalized—dare we even say pleasant—digital demo experiences so you close more deals more often.
Listen in to discover more about our people and business with a little touch of insight into Garin’s strategies and ideas for successful business growth and how we practice what we preach.
With Consensus, you can begin closing conversations sooner, shorten the sales cycle and generate an overall better buying experience
What’s Pathmonk Presents Podcast? Pathmonk Presents is a fast and effective show to sharpen your growth marketing skills. The 20 min episodes offer data-backed success and failure stories featuring top business leaders. The host is always sure to work his magic and reveal the inner workings of both the business and the leader.
