About Consensus

Consensus is a software offering that automates product demos and provides visibility into the entire buying panel. It allows prospective customers to get a personalized demo they can share with other stakeholders in the organization. Using Consensus shortens the sales cycle by decreasing the number of live product demos sales teams need to conduct, which improves sales teams’ productivity by up to 3x. It also provides sales teams the analytics necessary to engage the entire buying panel in a new way and begin closing conversations sooner.

Challenge

After personally closing hundreds of deals as the head of sales at Consensus, Rex Galbraith was tasked with quickly growing the sales team. Galbraith had figured out how to win deals, but he couldn’t specifically identify why he won them.

Training his new salespeople on the specific reasons Consensus was winning and losing was critical to Galbraith, so he set out to get that information on his own. Galbraith quickly found that conducting win-loss interviews himself was a lot more work than he'd anticipated. He noticed that he didn’t have the necessary skills to ask the correct questions and take valuable notes, and that those he interviewed wouldn’t always be candid with him. “People don’t give you the same feedback to your face," he said. "They would say one thing to me, but if they talked to someone else, they’d say something else."

His DIY approach didn’t yield the desired results.

Solution

Galbraith had heard about Clozd from a colleague, and he decided to investigate. After talking to the sales rep from Clozd, Galbraith was ready to invest. He found it easy to justify the cost of the solution: “It only takes us winning one deal to make Clozd worth it,” he said.

Other internal stakeholders quickly agreed that the program would be a smart business investment.

After buying in to Clozd’s win-loss methodology, Consensus immediately saw value from the program. “Clozd will do a better job than I would, even if I cleared out a month of my calendar to focus on win-loss,” Galbraith said.

Results

Implementing the solution went smoothly because Clozd understood Consensus’ business objectives and other goals for the program. “What made implementation easy was that I was confident the Clozd consultants do a good job asking the questions we wanted," Galbraith said. "They understood what we were looking for." It only took Consensus a few hours internally to stand the program up.

Galbraith was immediately impressed with the Clozd consultant’s interviewing skills, “I feel like the Clozd consultants are psychologists, because they ask small, little questions and get huge paragraphs back,” he said. The consultants worked with Consensus to align with what the organization wanted to get out of the win-loss program. Because of the work Clozd did before conducting interviews, the consultants were able to ask follow-up questions to drill down on the reasons each deal was won or lost and focus on the aspects of the buying process that would help Consensus gain the most value.

Clozd’s win-loss findings have rippled throughout Consensus' organization. They’ve used buyer quotes from the Clozd Platform to improve website messaging. “We’ve pulled some of the best quotes and materials we have directly from the Clozd Platform," Galbraith said.

Consensus has even used these win-loss findings as a recruiting tool, utilizing the Clozd Platform to show candidates what customers think of the organization. “[The Clozd Platform] shows salespeople that Consensus is the type of product they want to sell,” Galbraith said.

The most valuable changes driven by Clozd’s findings, however, were those involving Consensus’ ideal customer profile (ICP). Because of the information Clozd uncovered, Galbraith refined and was more confident in his ICP because he eliminated what he called “UCPs,” or unideal customer profiles. “We now know exactly what a bad prospect looks like," Galbraith said. "Clozd validated a lot of what we previously hypothesized.” Now Galbraith knows that if he sees leads coming into the pipeline that fit this UCP, the team needs to adjust its approach to lead generation. This knowledge provides value by streamlining the sales process, and it leads to happier customers and lower churn rates.

Refining their ICP has helped Consensus adjust how they move forward with product innovation. They've been exploring a new use case for their product that appeals to the UCP Clozd helped them discover, which was problematic because of the much higher attrition rates. “The Clozd reports helped us see that this was more than just a technology misalignment," Galbraith said. "It was a vision misalignment. The industry isn’t quite ready for [the new feature] yet.” Consensus changed how they would introduce this feature to customers to ensure that UCPs within their customers’ organizations wouldn’t begin using Consensus’ product before they were ready.

"Win rate is so important, but how do you impact the number? More phone calls, try harder, negotiate harder? The numbers are important but what feeds the numbers is what Clozd provides.”

Rex Galbraith | CRO at Consensus

Going forward

Consensus has gone all-in on Clozd’s win-loss methodology. “We have a portion of our leadership meetings where we talk about Clozd’s findings," Galbraith said. "It’s an agenda item.” Galbraith also said that Clozd has become synonymous with win-loss, and that the data has become core to how they make strategic decisions.