Brainshark Extends Sales Enablement Leadership With New Product Suite and Capabilities That Give Organizations a Smarter Way to Sell

WALTHAM, Mass., April 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Brainshark, Inc., the leading sales enablement platform provider, today introduced a new product as part of an integrated suite, designed to provide organizations with a smarter way to sell. The Brainshark Sales Enablement Portal, part of the company's new Sales Enablement Suite, extends Brainshark's leadership in the field of sales enablement – demonstrated by Brainshark supplying thousands of companies worldwide with the capabilities to more effectively prepare for customer interactions, engage with key audiences and advance sales opportunities.

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"We use Brainshark's solutions to help our globally dispersed sales reps communicate with and qualify potential customers," said Mike D'Onofrio, vice president of sales at Concur, a global leader in integrated travel and expense management. "With Brainshark, our reps – whether in the office or on the road – can send out high-impact presentations to prospects and then use Brainshark's analytics to pinpoint when interest is high, so they can time their follow-up. Since we began using Brainshark, our sales cycle time is a third of what it used to be – underscoring just how valuable Brainshark has been in improving sales productivity for our organization."

Supercharging Sales Communications
Industry research shows that 40 percent of an average sales rep's week is eaten up by creating customer-facing deliverables – with reps using less than half of the materials produced by marketing. Brainshark's solutions – for rapid content creation and the dissemination of approved, engaging and up-to-date content – create improved efficiencies for half of the Fortune 100 and many more. Relied on by companies across industries, Brainshark sees more than 75 percent of its business come from supporting customers in activities that advance their sales and marketing effectiveness.

Brainshark's product portfolio includes Brainshark On-Demand – for turning static documents like PowerPoints into online and mobile video presentations. These presentations can be shared, tracked and viewed anytime, anywhere, at the recipient's convenience. In addition, Brainshark powers SlideShark – the award-winning app for showing PowerPoints live on the iPad and iPhone. Both products are underpinned by Brainshark's cloud-based, business-class platform – the result of more than 450 man-years of development.

Introducing the Brainshark Sales Enablement Portal
For sales reps, chasing down support materials from disparate locations – emails, desktops, the company server and even the printer tray – can take a huge bite out of productivity. Now, with the launch of the Brainshark Sales Enablement Portal, companies can better organize content into a single, searchable repository – for instant, easy access by sales reps, marketing teams, channel partners and other users. The portal is mobile-optimized – making it even easier to find, filter and search for relevant sales, marketing and training materials.

With the new Sales Enablement Portal, users can take advantage of:

• Support for multiple content types. It's easy to find and access Brainshark video presentations, as well as content in other popular business formats including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and .PDF documents.
• Permission-based access. Users only see the content they're allowed to see. In this way, the portal can serve multiple audiences – field sales, channel sales and partners, for example – without concern that irrelevant or sensitive material will clutter the portal for each viewer.
• Content search and navigation. Users can browse content thumbnails and take advantage of powerful search functionality. They can filter results based on folder, topic, tags and author, and also sort by date, title and content popularity.
• Featured content. System administrators can designate featured content to be displayed at the top of the portal – ensuring maximum visibility and usage.
• Personal organization and favorites. Users can also organize content into their own lists, making it easy to access presentations related to particular customers, products, sales stages and more. Users can tag content they need frequently as 'favorites' for quick, anytime access.
• Landing page and content sharing. When accessed, each piece of content is displayed within its own landing page, providing an easy glimpse at related content. If permitted, users can share presentation links via email or social media, and comment on and rate materials.

Brainshark Sales Enablement Suite
The Brainshark Sales Enablement Portal is included in Brainshark's new Sales Enablement Suite, an end-to-end sales productivity solution encompassing tools for: content organization; sales training; creation of on-demand, video-based content; delivery of live, mobile presentations; and content analytics. In addition to the Sales Enablement Portal, the product suite also includes Brainshark's flagship solution, Brainshark On-Demand, along with Brainshark Rapid Learning, the Brainshark Connector for Salesforce.com and SlideShark Team Edition, the multi-user business version of SlideShark.

See www.brainshark.com/products/how-to-buy.aspx for additional Brainshark packages, suites and product offerings.

"Everyone wants to help their sales force be more effective, but random acts of support – including people across departments haphazardly pumping out documents – and an amalgamation of poorly organized 'point' products can cause more harm than good,"  said Jim Ninivaggi, service director for sales enablement strategies at SiriusDecisions, a leading analyst firm focused on sales and marketing effectiveness. "Companies today are in need of products that help them create better sales content, organize it for instant access, deliver it to mobile reps and analyze the impact. Those organizations that deploy these solutions can help maximize sales productivity and – most importantly – sales."

Prepare, Engage, Advance
Brainshark's solutions address all phases of sales enablement, helping sales teams prepare for meetings, engage their audiences and advance the sales cycle.

• Prepare – Sales reps can quickly access "just-in-time" Brainshark training content and presentation material from their computers, smartphones or tablets to better prepare for sales conversations.
• Engage – With Brainshark, sales teams and business professionals can capture the attention of live audiences, as well as provide powerful video presentations for on-demand, anytime viewing.
• Advance – Brainshark's analytics enable sales reps to follow up more effectively with prospects, and make it possible to gain insights into buyer behavior.

"Sales enablement is a major priority for organizations today – helping to drive their businesses forward," said Brainshark CEO Joe Gustafson. "As the category leader, Brainshark has award-winning and turnkey solutions that improve productivity at every stage of the sales cycle. Our new Sales Enablement Portal and product suite demonstrate Brainshark's commitment to innovation and to helping our customers improve the bottom line."

To watch a Brainshark presentation with more information on Brainshark's solutions for enhancing sales productivity, please see http://bit.ly/Brainshark-Overview. More details are also available at www.brainshark.com.

About Brainshark, Inc.
Brainshark provides the leading cloud-based platform for sales enablement, helping companies more effectively generate demand, prepare and train employees, engage with key audiences and advance business opportunities. Brainshark's easy-to-use solutions enable static documents to be transformed into dynamic, mobile-ready content that can be accessed quickly and viewed as on-demand video presentations or presented live – anytime, anywhere. Companies can also measure the effectiveness of their communications in ways never thought possible and use these insights to take action. Thousands of companies – including half of the Fortune 100 – and millions of individuals rely on Brainshark to increase the impact and reduce the cost of their sales, marketing, training and HR communications. Learn more at www.brainshark.com.

SOURCE Brainshark, Inc.