ClearSlide vs. Consensus vs. Qvidian RFP & Proposal Automation

Clearslide makes it easy to share files with anyone via a single link. It simplifies the process of document sharing in the new "work from home" age we have now and allows multiple parties to view the same document, either simultaneously or separately. It is less appropriate for sensitive information, as the link can easily be shared between parties or forwarded on, so there is no gatekeeping.

Incentivized

Within the last 6 months, I've run a personal A/B test on opportunities with and without Consensus videos being sent after every meeting. Those opportunities where I sent Consensus videos after every meeting had a >50% likelihood of closing and/or progressed past the Proposal phase. Those opportunities where I did not send Consensus video, I was left unanswered more often than not

This software is very well-suited to companies who find themselves expanding their footprint, the number of their Sales representatives, their territories, and/or their products and services and need to maximize their ability to both keep up with those demands whilst streamlining their proposal resources. Further, this is a very powerful tool with a lot of features and functionality including CRM plug-in and reporting. Thus, it may be less appropriate for a very small organization with only one product and that is also blessed with lengthy cradle-to-grave turnaround windows. In addition, to better the odds for success an investment in upfront personnel training and either a dedicated periodic window of time and/or dedicated person(s) for content upkeep are prudent. Finally, working with the vendor is a delight as they make every effort to maintain and deliver a product that both meets your needs and on which you can rely.

• Analytics: for sales, especially when selling virtually, it can be difficult to know if your customers are engaged with the presentation. Clearslide will give you reports that indicate how long customers were viewing what you were presenting, if/when you lost them, and at what place in your presentation you lost them. It can also show you how long potential customers spent reviewing follow-up materials you've sent them.
• Screenshare: the screenshare functionality, when using Google Chrome, is very seamless, and the customer can take over the screenshare without needing any downloads or plug-ins.
• Presenting: It's quite easy to present material with Clearslide, and to move between materials that you are presenting.

Incentivized

• The ability to tailor demos and demoboards to show various functionality of the product.
• We appreciate the features Consensus has to customize demos in various forms.
• The customer service and post-sales trainings the Consensus team has held for our company have been extremely beneficial. I personally appreciated learning how demos are better received when they're not 'perfect'

Incentivized

• Using Qvidian as an RFP tool has made a difference in our RFP process, turn-around time, and content development. It's helped us streamline our RFP process so that we are able to produce the majority of the document before the kick-off meeting, which means we have more time to customize and refine the document before it goes to print.
• Additionally, it took several hours before to gather all of the basic data we needed for an RFP, but now we can have the majority of the response ready in under 15 minutes in most cases. We are also able to start projects from our phones (iPhone thru Safari) or on an iPad. This has been extremely helpful while traveling.
• Finally, our content is centrally located on a searchable database. Previously we had used several free tools to aid in content storage that would allow us access easily via search. It never seemed to do what we wanted, and when we did find something, we weren't sure if it was the most current or usable. The library functions in Qvidian have been a huge help, and has changes the way we collect data, and retrieve it.

• Call quality with CS has always been an issue in my two (2) years of experience with the platform. CS upgraded their phone provider in winter 2018, but the call quality has only been marginally improved from my perspective. Also, with the switch to a new phone provider, users are required to use a new conference line, access number, and a leader pin. The leader pin is new and adds an extra step to setting up a conference line, which seems unnecessary.
• Content curation is probably my biggest issue with CS. With previous experience in a sales enablement company, I've seen how content can be curated to map to the seller's specific stage in a deal cycle, which is what most companies want. CS does not have this functionality from my perspective, and if it does, then overall curation capabilities are weak. Rather than curating content to match a seller's current point in a sales process, CS relies on surfacing content that is most popular or recently added. There is a search feature, which works well if you know what the collateral is called, but it is not scanning the content of documents to find what is most relevant. I equate the content feature of CS to a search that you would do in your computer's "Download" folder or even in Dropbox. If your company is smaller and only needs to surface a few pieces of collateral, then CS will work fine. If your organization is larger with large amounts of specific collateral, then I would look elsewhere.
• The CS plugins for Outlook, Gmail, or your web browser are great ideas but executed poorly. The integrations have caused a lot of headaches for colleagues and me since their release. They have caused our email to close unexpectedly, content to not be linked properly, or emails to not be tracked. The idea for these integrations was to reduce the amount of time a seller has to jump between windows, which is awesome, but the integrations are full of glitches. One of the biggest glitches I've seen is how CS, Grammarly, and Outlook all work together. CS is always the component of those three that causes everything to freeze or crash. In short, the integrations are a great idea but executed poorly at this time.

Incentivized

• The front-end UX could be improved to look and feel more like a mature SaaS solution
• There's a limited amount of help resources to assist throughout the video building process
• I'd like to see more integrations with broader SaaS solutions to unlock more use cases (i.e. Engaging in group formats, long-form webinars, etc)

• One area where Qvidian occasionally struggles is feature regression. For instance, the editing option that puts multiple records into one document had always been present in Qvidian; however, when the multi-edit feature that only allows editing one record at a time was released in version 9.1, the original editing functionality was removed. This caused me a lot of frustration, as it severely slowed down my work flow since I could now only see and edit one record at a time. It wasn't until a year later when version 10 was released that the old editing functionality was added back. However, one bright spot of version 9.1 was an added feature that allowed organizing records by simply dragging and dropping them into different categories. This was much easier than having to right click on a record, select Move, then right click on a folder and select paste. However, with version 10, this feature was removed and I'm now back to having to right click on records instead of dragging and dropping. It seems that with each release, I never know if something I like will be taken away or if something I don't like will be added -- sometimes it's both.
• A recent change that was added in version 10.1 that I personally view as a negative is that Qvidian now handles all requests server side instead of on the user's computer. This means that if a user wants to export or edit a large number of records, they have to wait for Qvidian's server to generate a report of those records. Depending on the number of records, this can be very quick (a few seconds) or very long (I've waited up to 20 minutes before) depending on how taxed Qvidian's servers currently are. I understand the reasoning behind the move, in that it takes the load off of a user's computer so that other applications they currently have open aren't affected by added memory usage, but in practice I find that it only slows down my workflow. Any somewhat modern PC shouldn't have any trouble handling a large report request from Qvidian.
• Although Qvidian is certified for use in several different browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome for Windows), it doesn't offer the same functionality in each one. For instance, in Explorer, when a record is selected for editing or export, it will automatically open in Word. In Firefox, a pop-up dialog appears and a user has to click Open in order for the record to appear in Word. And in Chrome, the file is added to the download bar and a user must click on the file there for it to open, unless they add an exception to .docx file types to automatically open in Word (which I had to do, since I prefer using Chrome). Other simple features such as right clicking on a folder or record to bring up Qvidian's context menu are hit or miss depending on the browser. In Explorer, everything is generally smooth, though the browser itself is slower than the other choice. In Firefox, right clicking generally works but sometimes has some hiccups, and in Chrome, more often than not right clicking brings up Chrome's context menu instead of Qvidian's, which often leads to having to first select a folder and then click the dedicated Actions button in Qvidian to perform the desired action. No matter which browser you use, there will be some sort of functionality that doesn't quite work as expected.

ClearSlide is embedded in our culture and in our organization. The sales and marketing teams use ClearSlide on a daily basis to share information and presentations as well as communicate "what is working." Our leadership uses the analytics to provide improved feedback and coaching regarding bottlenecks our representatives are experiencing.

Incentivized

Consensus has been a valuable and vital sales tool at every stage of our sales cycle. In the very early stages of prospect education, you can send videos to get them familiar and up to speed with our product without a solution consultant's involvement. It is also a very powerful tool at the later stages of the sales cycle, with the ability to tailor demos and intro videos and record exec alignment itro videos, which we have had great success with

Incentivized

The tool provides us with the functionality we need to perform more efficiently and we have not identified another product that offers enough "nice to haves" in addition to the "must haves" to warrant a compelling reason for changing tools.

Its easy to use from a presenter's perspective. Its web based so anyone who can navigate Facebook can open a live pitch or shared file. This makes it easy to give live demos, share files, and share screens with out downloading any software or installing java patches

Incentivized

It only took me a matter of minutes to onboard myself to Consensus and start utilizing it with my clients. The platform is very simple to set up and straight forward to use. Most platforms take time to learn how to use and navigate but Consensus was very easy to pick up and use as a first time user.

Incentivized

The shift they made in architecting documents from content to outline, is now reversed allowing outline creation first, then content which is more natural. But, due to the fact that we went through a migration of content to get to the new version, it feels less optimized than if we would have re-implemented.

End users having to configure settings more often than desired

It wasn't 100% but it was better than our experience with GoToMeeting.

Qvidian system maintenance is performed on weekends, usually at odd hours, and advanced notice is given so that teams can plan accordingly.

Remote or VPN employees seem to have somewhat slower access time. Server maintenance has improved performance.

Finding occasional recurring prompts to update settings in Microsoft (Explorer, Word, Excel, Powerpoint)

I was mostly involved in the implementation process and syncing ClearSlide with Salesforce, and I would say the support was mostly average. It took a few times to get everything scheduled, and a lot of the process was left up to me. I was reading through the documents that they supplied. It wasn't complicated, but more direct support would have been appreciated.

Incentivized

They are very much in support of great customer service. They respond quickly with emails and in some cases phone calls to resolve any issues and often times user questions in the past when I could not figure something out.

Incentivized

Live instructor training is expensive, though we have had instructors come to our offices for a ‘refresher’ before. The refresher was more of a “let us fix that for you” than a training on how to do it ourselves.

They do a good job

Online training is limited in my opinion.

Web based so easy for them to configure account

IT works great. UPgrades are handled automatically. I was not involved in setup but I know they are there when we need them

Incentivized

ClearSlide stacks up to be as good as any of the aforementioned tools. We selected Clearslide because of its ease of use and implementation. It did not take our team too long to get acclimated with how ClearSlide works and how they would be using it, allowing them to generate more meetings and more revenue.

Incentivized

We did not find a similar solution that could provide the prospect experience Consensus provides. We did not seriously evaluate any other platform like we did with Consensus. Consensus allows your prospects to select their interests and only show them the relevant parts of your product. No other software we evaluated could do it like Consensus

We have been using Qvidian for years, when Compass was introduced in our company. Having spent over a year using Compass, I would not recommend it for writing proposals. In all fairness, that is not Compass' strength. Compass is ok for general document sharing for informational purposes. It does have a Presentation Builder function for creating PowerPoint presentations, but it is cumbersome and not very flexible. Specifically, the linkage is awkward and files may have to be re-linked when they are updated. In addition, the architecture only allows you to create a couple of levels of content. The search function is very limited. Compass is a newer project and has not fully matured.

This product ROCKS!!!! ClearSlide shortened my sales cycle by over 50% by enabling to jump right into a LIVE demo on an initial client call so I don't have to waste time scheduling a demo at later date. People are busy and finding a time to schedule a call can take days or weeks

• Has helped us close more deals because of the easy "on the fly" screen share
• Also, you get a notification when people view your information so having that, I have followed up shortly after and closed the deal
• Helps my team with all external presentations

Incentivized

• I closed 3 deals last year by prospects using Consensus and finding additional modules they wanted to purchase.
• Consensus speed up the buying process in 6 of my deals last year to close in quarter.
• Consensus saved me time from doing additional live demos.

• The positive impact has been to know we have a system that can house legally-approved responses to questionnaires. The good about this is that if we have a simple RFI that does not require a lot of response customization, we can draw upon previously-approved responses and create output MUCH quicker, without the need of laborious and time-consuming legal reviews of RFIs or DDQs we produce for prospective clients. Quicker, easier output with less internal review = efficient RFI process and quicker turnaround time to respond to our client/prospective client base.
• The negative impact has only been the time it takes to orient oneself with the program, and REMAIN oriented. As we do not do RFIs on a daily basis, it is easy for us to become rusty, or to take short-cuts because we do not have time to re-train on the program. Those shortcuts and workarounds tend to cause us not to use the program to its full potential and lead to counter-productivity in some cases.