ClearSlide enables sales and marketing teams to find content, communicate it whether in-person, on the phone or through email, and get insights into how customers engage, with the goal of helping sales and marketing teams make every interaction count and create amazing customer experiences. ClearSlide is a system of engagement for sales, marketing & services teams. For managers and leaders, ClearSlide provides engagement dashboards to improve deal visibility, coaching, and stronger…
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Outreach
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Outreach is a sales execution platform that helps market-facing teams create and predictably close more pipeline. From prospecting to deal management to forecasting, Outreach leverages automation and artificial intelligence to help revenue leaders increase the efficiency and effectiveness of go-to-market activities and personnel across the revenue cycle. Outreach offers sales engagement, revenue intelligence, and revenue operations functionalities in a unified platform. The software…
I've sometime used GoToMeeting as an alternative when setting up demonstrations. It's far more complicated and the user experience is much more antiquated. Google Hangouts also works for online meetings but also harder for prospects to figure out and the video chat is …
I have used ClearSlide, but it was very subpar in scheduling email campaigns. However, I wish Outreach would have the ability to send presentations and track engagement.
Compared to ToutApp, I prefer Outreach. In my experience at the time, Tout lacked functionality and UI to compete with Outreach. Their support team has been incredibly responsive.
It was more affordable and allowed for more dynamic outreach campaigns. Took a bit of time to get up and running, loaded with copy, and the team trained but now saves us time.
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.
Outreach is well suited for teams that need to do cold outbound to prospects. It's easy enough to create sequences that will use a variety of touchpoints (email, inMail, call, etc...). It's also easy to share sequences with team members to collaborate and the very best messaging. Outreach's integration over Salesforce and Gmail is also invaluable, without it each team member would probably spend hours per week clicking between tabs just to get to prospect information On the other hand, Outreach is not the best to help you create content, as of this writing there is no AI support. It is also worth noting that Outreach's permission structure can create a lot of confusion for team members and that untangling errors at times can become complex
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.
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.
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.
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
The ease of use for outreach is next to none. Everything is clearly explained, you can hop on a call with their support team whenever, and it effortlessly integrates into your computer. You can do everything you need sales related on it, and the learning curve is small. I'd recommend it as a first and last CRM.
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.
The overall support of Outreach has been great. Whenever I have a problem, they were quick to fix it and typically respond within one business day. I don't typically have many requests for support because a lot of my questions can be answered through their knowledge panel. They have been fantastic to work with overall.
Lots of attention from the Outreach training team, with a great willingness to customize to our needs. To be clear, you get out what you put in. If you don't work with them, you'll get cookie-cutter training. But we asked for a lot of customization, and they delivered what we asked for.
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.
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
The huge positive impact it had was the team not needing to spend as much time as disengaged opps as they were engaged ones. We were able to set sequences to work with them while the team could focus on generating new leads or converting Opps.
For an AE - post demo communication is important. With templates and snippets we could just click a few buttons and have a really nice email sent out with the relevant information and then the next several steps already planned out. This freed up time for us and even allowed us to take calls a lot sooner after demo's then before. For busy days this was very helpful.
