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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VanillaSoft
Score 8.9 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
VanillaSoft is a solution for managing inside sales and lead management processes. The vendor says typical CRM software requires manual intervention and decision making by salespeople before they ever pick up the phone or send an email. In comparison, the vendor says VanillaSoft facilitates faster, more productive sales conversations. The vendor’s value proposition is that data-driven workflows and automated functionality let salespeople focus on selling -- not operating software.…
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Pricing
ClearSlide
VanillaSoft
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ClearSlide
VanillaSoft
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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VanillaSoft offers several add-ons to use in conjunction with our base platforms including:
Auto Dialing
Call Recording
VoIP
SmartCaller ID
SMS
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.
VanillaSoft is well suited for any marketing operations or sales operations team looking for a tool to help them efficiently reach prospects and engage with them through a streamlined method. This can be a great way to manage that engagement, measure it, and keep track of various aspects of prospects.
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.
Our employees love it - very user friendly, easy to grasp, very little down time to learn it. They feel very confident immediately.
Great technical support - I can get solutions to customer problems that make our company look more responsive to our clients. Our clients appreciate our solving their problems immediately.
Because of the real time analytics - we can address immediate issues with marketing campaigns to make our client's personnel look great to their superiors.
Because of all the functionality - we can provide a turnkey approach from a small company with big company capabilities.
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.
It really needs an "undo" button. I can't tell you how many times I was typing notes etc and hit a wrong button and all was gone so I had to start over.
This may be the way we have it set up....we have term codes which are how the callers terminate a call they were on. They finish the call, then type notes in the notepad section of what happened, then they terminate the call. But there are times that I need to go onto a record and just leave a note but don't need to terminate it as anything. If there is a way to do that, it would make my life a lot easier.
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.
We have no reason not to renew. VanillaSoft has been the best CRM (for us) that we have ever used. The value is great, we love the system, and it's easy to get assistance from VanillaSoft team when needed. Our team is so used to the calling and admin functions there is no desire to change.
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 entire system is set up so perfectly. It makes training callers much quicker, and admin tools are so easy to navigate when you get used to using it. Also, if there is ever something I cannot figure out, I can get support from VanillaSoft very quickly to resolve and get my task accomplished.
It is very rare that we have system issues. Maybe a handful of times over the years, we had to contact support about being unable to access. It was always a quick response from the VanillaSoft team, and they would clearly explain the issue and usually give time frame on fixing, or have it fixed immediately.
I work on all aspects for VanillaSoft for our company. The pages overall do load very quickly. Reports are amazing, I can get quick report, customized reports, and anything I may need to present to client in very little time. It has made my job so much simpler. As far as I know, integration goes smoothly as well.
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.
It was very thorough. VanillaSoft team did not rush us. They explained the various functions clearly and were open to any and all questions we had as we began to learn the system. Also, once training completed, if we encountered anything we could not figure out, the support team was fantastic in helping us out.
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.
VanillaSoft stacks up against Microsoft Power BI very well by allowing the data visualization in a more effective way, Power BI has positioned itself as one of the more robust and intuitive tools for business intelligence and data presentation. VanillaSoft and Microsoft Power BI are a great bundle for the report and analytics team.
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
VanillaSoft has been great. The flexibility of the system is wonderful. The scalable software options are impressive as well. I would strongly support VanillaSoft's capabilities in this area. You really can do just about anything to get the setup and or integrations you may desire for your company needs.
The ability to save my correspondence and notes on each interaction allowing for the appearance to the customer that I am very engaged when we are speaking.
Increased sales from the calendar setting and saving my notes.
