One week in, and I think we have found something special.
We on-boarded onto Sagetap last week, a matchmaking platform between vendors and end-user customers (they call them sages). The first week has been extraordinary.. so much new opportunity, which would have cost us 100x via conference sponsorship, advertising, and traditional demand gen approaches.
Here’s how it works....
Vendors list their products on the Sagetap platform, which has thousands of verified senior tech leaders, each of whom has disclosed their purchase making authority, sign-off budget, company size, industry, and role in the business (all very useful for a vendor.. it saves trying to BANT up front). The leaders research solutions for initiatives they are undertaking (there is a really nice search function that matches solutions to their criteria). The IT leader can then reach out to the vendors they feel are a good match, anonymously, express interest, chat in-platform, and when ready request a (strictly time boxed) platform-facilitated Zoom meeting.
Ok, so a listing platform is not that smart on its own.. what makes it smart is everything that happens around the meeting.
For most interactions, the vendor pays for the privilege, so we are incentivized to ask fit questions up front, before taking the call (what are they trying to achieve, what are their requirements, constraints etc). The Zoom meeting (like all prior engagement) is anonymous, and the IT leader only reveals who they are after the call ends, if it was worthwhile enough to want a follow on. Vendors are banned from attempting to uncover the persons identity too.
Just like Uber, both sides score the interaction. The IT leaders score every vendor after the call, and vendors who accumulate low scores get removed from the platform. Other users of the platform see the feedback score as part of their research, so a badly behaving (low score, but not low enough to be booted off) vendor likely gets discounted before the first message is even sent. We can see how other vendors rated each IT leader too, so we know whether they are a good candidate for a meeting.
Think about what that does for a senior IT leader. They get their product research done without an inbox full of vendor funnel management (and annoying BANT questioning, or being immediately forced onto a sales call). They only enter a vendors sales funnel once they are confident it is worth doing, after the Zoom meeting completes. It is basically a self-managing speed dating platform for IT buyers.. and I mean that as a compliment!!
For us, every conversation now starts with someone who went looking for our type of solution (for a problem they have today), told us what they are trying to solve, and decided the call was worth their time. Compare that with a conference lead scan. Yes this costs us money, but its money well spent.
This is gold. We are going all in.
If you are an IT leader in my network, I encourage you to take a look.