alarm:clock

Enterprise Software - Tuesday, March 9, 2010

ClearSlide Emerging As Killer Sales App

We have been testing ClearSlide the past 48 hours and are impressed. One of our beefs with the business world is that while people are often open to taking meetings, they are more often than not poor at providing feedback on the presentation. So we see opportunities for companies to help sales people to implicitly or explicitly get feedback.

ClearSlide is a presentation tool that allows you to upload your Powerpoint file and have it converted to a Web page - that way you can get Web analytics on it. You can see when your client or prospect opened the file, which and how many pages they looked at and how much time they spent on it. We are interested to see how protocals will evolve - whether sales people will tell prospects they see that they did or didn't open a proposal or maybe they will keep that knowledge to themselves.

Our ClearSlide contact told us a use case where a ClearSlide user was pitching a big client who passed on their proposal. But the client could see through ClearSlide that they never looked at the proposal. We find that simple feedback invaluable.

Other features are the ability to do live presentations including demos and site walk throughs. You simply give your audience a URL like www.clearslide.com/yourname and they can follow your presentation.

Some readers will wonder what is new about this that you don't get with Webex and GoToMeeting. We have never liked either of of those products and think that ClearSlide is just designed better. And again, we think the analytics on the email version is something the market will want.

ClearSlide has been demoing at the Sales2.0 event in San Francisco this week but they say they are trying to keep a low profile. The boast of some client deals at places like Yelp and Oracle so far.

The company was co-founded by Jim Benton, who is VP of Sales and who was VP of Sales at Adbrite. They started building a company called MediaShield that plans to protect brand advertisers from inappropriate content, but somehow they developed Clearslide along the way and decided to make a company out of it.

View - site