Disruptor Profile: ClearSlide’s Disruptive Platform Is Changing The Way Sales Teams Do Business

Profiled By Bill Klump – Daily Disruption

October 3rd, 2011 – Since beginning operations two-and-a-half years ago under the leadership of successful Internet entrepreneur and Evite co-founder Al Lieb, CEO, and seasoned sales executive Jim Benton, COO, the company has grown to become a competitive advantage for top sales performers at powerhouse brands including Expedia, Rackspace and Dow Jones.  ClearSlide is a sales communications platform providing a fully web-based service designed specifically for the communication needs of sales teams.  They strive to make customer facing interactions more effective and to ultimately help sales close more business.  They’ve designed a broad, well-integrated platform that covers many different aspects of the sales process.

Sales teams start by uploading their sales collateral to ClearSlide, including everything from presentations, PDFs, videos, interactive web pages, and more.  Sales can deliver this content through several different methods, including phone calls, emails, and in-person presentations.  Sales teams can work together to share effective content and strategies, even with remote offices.

ClearSlide’s focus is on solving the communication needs that are specific to sales and to deliver technology that actually helps make sales calls more effective.  For example, they work to minimize the time it takes to start a call with a prospect, freeing up sales teams from having to email huge attachments back and forth all day long, and they help deliver high-fidelity, enterprise-appropriate content to customers.

ClearSlide enable sales teams to build the perfectly scripted pitch with rich content, and then mix in live demos and impromptu answers to customer questions.  They provide a clean, easy to use interface, but also make additional power-user features available as needed.

ClearSlide collects useful analytics on how both the sales team and customers interact with the content.  This allows sales representatives to better focus their time and drives smarter follow-ups. Sales management can also use these insights to better understand their team’s activity and to coach towards more effective processes.  Also marketing can understand how the content they produce is actually used by the sales teams and can encourage sales to use the most up to date collateral.

The company has also recently announced that it has received $11 million in Series A round funding from Silicon Valley investors led by Greylock Partners. Existing investor Felicis Ventures also participated in the round.

“ClearSlide has built something really special: a platform specifically for sales people that makes it extremely easy to communicate with customers,” said John Lilly, partner at Greylock Partners. “They replace the awful, cumbersome tools – with something that’s radically simpler – and they’ve built an incredibly rapidly growing customer base.”

“We focus on providing sales organizations with the gold standard in sales communications,” said Lieb. “We’ve connected with thousands of sales teams and we listen very closely to their daily challenges.  ClearSlide’s growth is rocketing because we deliver services that precisely solve our customers’ needs and directly increase their revenues.”

To learn more about ClearSlide, you can visit their website at www.clearslide.com