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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Scratchpad
Score 9.6 out of 10
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Scratchpad is a productivity tool for account executives, built for sales to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and daily todos.
The software can be installed as a Google Chrome plugin or as a web application. It connects to Salesforce and provides an interface where sales professionals can keep all their notes, process workflows, spreadsheets, and tasks.
Co-founders Pouyan Salehi and Cyrus Karbassiyoon started the company in San Francisco, California in 2019.
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.
Frankly, if I can do something in Scratchpad instead of Salesforce, I prefer Scratchpad because it's faster, easier, simpler, with a much more readable and useable interface. Salesforce has been getting requests to allow font size modification for over a decade and hasn't even done that. That's what sent me looking for something like Scratchpad. I sort of view it as a much more user-friendly UI to layover SF. It's faster and less frustrating than SF for frequent daily activities. It's great for creating notes and tracking tasks at a basic level in a much more user friendly environment than Salesforce. But it interacts w/ SF, which is great!
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
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.
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.
It doesn't. Scratchpad is more agile and much easier to use as a seller managing a large patch with lots of opportunities. SAP is robust but is far more complicated and involves a lot more inputs to get the same outputs that you can get with Scratchpad in half the time and effort.
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
