ClearSlide vs. InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

ClearSlide is quite easy to use and effective when presenting information and sharing screen. It's also easy for the prospect to access your site; they just click on a link. If an inside sales manager was looking to find out where his/her team might be losing prospects, Clearslide would be a great choice because the analytics show exactly how engaged a prospect is and at what point they start to lose interest. There is a monthly cost/annual contract involved to Clearslide, so for a startup that is very cost-conscious it might be best to investigate free conference/screenshare options, but the case could be made that the analytics will earn back the fee.

Incentivized

C9 is a good and economical solution for what it does. If evaluating them today, I would want to clearly understand their product roadmap and their ability to execute against it.

• Email Functionality - Creation of general templates to be constantly used as well as allowing the team to gain insight as to who is opening and viewing the material. That makes the follow up much easier to have.
• Presentations - Very easy to provide customers with a source link of where to view our presentation and also very easy to provide them with the ability to show their screen if needed. The fact that we can have several people on the presentation is helpful as well.
• Salesforce Integration - Very important in our organization as we like to have any and all activity pertaining to customers housed in our CRM.

Incentivized

• Pipeline management/ pipeline analytics: C9 is great for understanding changes in the pipeline. For example, comparing the sales pipeline today with with where it was at the beginning of the quarter.
• It also works very well for quota attainment visibility. We can easily set and track sales quotas for individual reps and for sales manager roll-up quotas.
• The product also offers some forecasting capabilities which we are not using yet, so I cannot comment on how strong these features are.

• I don't love the conference line. The recording message at the beginning is particularly annoying.
• I also wish it were easier to share multiple links quicker. It's somewhat of a cumbersome process.
• It can occasionally be challenging to find the right materials to share at the moment quick enough.

Incentivized

• We had uptime issues, weird error messages, sluggish performance, and bad data. I hope that some of this can be attributed to growing pains as the company was relatively new when we signed our initial contract. It actually was unavailable at EOQ one time.

This has become a vital tool for our sales process and as we grow as an organization, the ability to deliver content efficiently and effectively will become a key performance indicator in measuring our business goals for the coming fiscal year.

Incentivized

C9 is now part of the sales management culture here at IPC. There is no longer any guesswork about the funnel or the forecast. C9 does something that SFDC does not...it increases significantly the value of the information in SFDC by unlocking the meta data that we all need to run the business

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

From a sales manager’s perspective it was fairly easy to use the base functionality (just viewing current pipeline) and much harder to look at analytics (pipeline changes over time).

C9 made this easier by allowing sales ops to publish views to sales managers.

The query tool was harder to use than it had to be. For example, there were no out of the box relationships set up between Salesforce.com tables (e.g. accounts to opportunities), so I had to create those relationships myself.

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

• Usually there when I needed it, but not always, and sometimes not at key times.

We have found that queries are very slow and lock up.

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

In my experience, C9 has been very responsive, and provided access to their subject matter experts for advanced support questions.

Good assistance on set up and detailed training

They do a good job

Online information and training was done reasonably well compared to other vendors, but would benefit from being more polished and rounded out.

Web based so easy for them to configure account

Very simple implementation. They basically set up the imports and then they configure the tool per customer requests.

I wish there had been more consultation during the implementation, but it wasn’t bad given the effort expended. We ended up re-implementing after about a year and a half.

It is easier to see the full spate of files with Clearslide vs. Dropbox, and each slide shows individually in Clearslide vs. other products that just provide a file in name only. In addition, Clearslide provides direct intel on how customers view and interact with the content you send them, which other products don't provide.

Incentivized

Zoho CRM is less up to speed and much more out of date. The support at InsideSales.com Predictive Pipeline have been very helpful during the initial roll out face. Overall I was very happy!

Incentivized

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

• Reduced the amount of time that our sales staff have to spend searching for content or collateral. Everything is available in one area and can be surfaced as long as you know the keywords of the collateral you would like.
• CS doubles as a conference line and online presentation platform, which is incredibly helpful. Rather than having to use multiple systems or launch an application that requires a plugin, CS launches right from my browser. Prospects that are viewing our presentations have the same ease of use with CS as well.
• The integrations with Outlook, Gmail, and web browsers are a dual-edged sword sometimes. They do make it easier to link documents to emails, but they also tend to crash or cause issues with other software. I would say that overall the savings in terms of efficiency are greater than what has been caused by glitches, but not by much.
• The tracking details on collateral sent to prospects are incredibly insightful and help us improve our future communication strategy. This has made us smarter about our future engagements by providing targeted information that the client cares about.

Incentivized

• C9 enabled us to track our sales pipeline changes over time which ultimately led to a 17% increase in win rate.
• The product paid for itself in months because utilization is dependent upon the managers, not the salespeople. Managers have the license, but the benefits are applied to the salespeople. Most subscription based products are under utilized when every person must hold a license.
• 1 on 1 conversations between managers and salespeople were more meaningful because they were discussing long term pipeline growth and health, not short term status reports.