RALEIGH – In the ever-dynamic digital sales and marketing environment, the metric for success is not just to grab a customer’s attention with relevant messaging, but to keep the relationship active and individualized long after an initial deal is made.

With that, marketing and sales teams are constantly thinking up new personalized outreach strategies to master the customer relationship-building process in order to outpace competitors.

A pair of Triangle marketing tech veterans, John Brown and Reid Overcash, are tackling this need with a new software platform they publicly unveiling last week.

ShareDirect enables B2C and B2B representatives to engage with their customers by interacting with “a personalized engagement site,” complete with information and categories that are relevant to customers and their particular interests.

Outreach channels are built into the software, allowing representatives to be in direct contact with the customer and send out personalized content based on the types of information gathered through the site. This makes it easier for representatives to find relevant information for their customers’ individualized needs and interests. The platform would then push content that’s informed by the customer’s usage behavior.

Overcash says the platform offers the potential to reach large customer networks. ”If you had 100 sales people and each had 100 accounts, you could have as many as 10,000 of these personalized engagement sites.”

ShareDirect also has the underlying potential to empower marketing and sales reps to be successful in not just reaching customers, but effectively maintaining relationships with them individually as time goes on—thus boosting overall revenue for their company.

Overcash says his target market is any B2B or B2C company that has a customer network. He believes the software can serve any channel, whether healthcare, medical or biopharma. “There’s a wide swathe of capabilities in all verticals,” he adds.

The demand for personalized sales messaging is high across the board.

Buyers are becoming less dependent on salespeople in the decision-making process. And in fact, the average B2B customer has already completed more than half of the decision-making process before even beginning to engage with a sales rep directly, according to CEB data. Increasingly, B2B customers are dictating the sales experience, making the rep-to-buyer relationship more complex than ever.

Going into the next decade, according to Walker’s Customers 2020 report, customers will expect reps to know their business and personalize the experience at the same time. Personal interaction will include effectively knowing and anticipating the customers’ needs.

With this new reality, B2B sales reps are prompted to update their strategy from the traditional “sales pitch,” to following through with keeping the relationship long-term. This involves personalized engagement during and after the sale, to ensure they become a repeat buyer.

“People don’t want order-takers anymore,” Overcash notes. “They want salespeople that are subject matter experts (SMEs). They want them to know what they’re talking about and help them with particular needs and interests. 65 to 75 percent of buyers and business people are only interested in seeing content and hearing about things that relate to what they’re doing.”

Though interactive marketing content already exists with multimedia channels and blogs and influencer marketing, Overcash says his goal is to offer a solution that’s even more relevant to the customer. “We reorient [the messaging] so that it goes to the right people, so they can see things that are relevant to their field.”

Reid Overcash is CEO of ShareDirect

John Brown is CTO of ShareDirect

Brown and Overcash both have a background in this space. Overcash was founder and CEO of marketing firm Strategic Insights, which Brown joined in 2007 as it spun off as SharedVue, building a content syndication platform for use by IT tech companies. SharedVue was then acquired by UBM, and later by Zift Solutions.

Overcash went on to invest in Raleigh location app Yillio in 2013. Later that year, he joined Yillio as CEO to further build the product’s reach. In 2017, he signed on with Washington-based mergers & acquisitions group Corum to find a potential acquirer who could integrate the technology. Overcash says the process is ongoing as they continue to filter through prospects. But in the meantime, he is spending the large majority of his days building out ShareDirect.

Part of that means delivering on the vision he and Brown share for ShareDirect going into its post-launch future. “This company will be very customer-centric, Overcash says. “We feel our customers are our reason for being. [This is] first and foremost how we will build out the company.”

Two technology companies are already using ShareDirect as pilot customers, and one more is in the works.

So far, Overcash and Brown have raised $150,000 from friends and family. They’re in talks with a couple of VC firms, hoping for potential investments in the coming months.

Overcash says his immediate goals are to build sales, marketing and PR initiatives in an effort to attract 6-10 more customers before the end of the year.