ClearSlide Releases Polaris: Enhanced Customer Engagement with Guided Sales Content Delivered Directly Within Salesforce CRM

SAN FRANCISCO, March 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- ClearSlide today announced one of the most significant product and platform releases it has ever offered sellers, marketers, and their management. The company's new Polaris Release guides selling and recommends content to enhance customers and prospect engagement. Polaris offers the right content to reps at the right time in the sales process and delivers it within Salesforce, Gmail, and Outlook. ClearSlide Polaris ensures sales reps receive strong content and messaging as they need it, provides leaders confidence that their sales processes will be followed, and give marketers real-time insight on what content reps present and send customers, and how customers react to their outreach with this content.

The ClearSlide Polaris Release includes a new rules-based, content recommendation engine that leverages an organization's sales process and specific customer context like their industry, sales stage, and any identified competitors. This context tailors recommendations for the best content reps should leverage in upcoming customer interactions and delivers that content from within their core applications like Salesforce, Outlook, Gmail, and ClearSlide mobile experiences. Updates to ClearSlide Insights Dashboards in Salesforce helps sales and marketing leaders manage team and individual rep performance, onboard new reps faster, identify individuals and deals at-risk, and benchmark rep and content performance using real-time engagement data.

Accessing the right content and measuring its impact is a huge challenge for most organizations. Research shows that sales reps spend more than 440 hours per year searching for content, and overwhelmingly find that content is either outdated or irrelevant. Research also reveals that 65 percent of content created by marketing teams is never even used with customers, and 93 percent of organizations cannot effectively track sales content performance today.

"Every sales and marketing leader I speak to wants customers to have amazing experiences with their company – but too often their customer interactions fail to delight because they aren't using a unified system of engagement like ClearSlide," said Dustin Grosse, ClearSlide CEO. "Polaris brings new capabilities to our industry-leading Sales Engagement Platform, deeply embedding ClearSlide content, integrated communications and real-time insights in Salesforce, Outlook, and Gmail."

Aragon Research estimates the market for Sales Engagement Platforms will grow from $780 million today to over $5 billion by 2021. "Single-point enablement tools and CRM systems do not naturally help sellers identify and anticipate buyer needs," said Jim Lundy, CEO and Lead Analyst, Aragon Research. "Sales Engagement Platforms that include guided selling capabilities allow sales teams to hyper-personalize content based on engagement. ClearSlide continues to lead and innovate with its Polaris Release, and was one the first to offer a complete Sales Engagement Platform."

"Having ClearSlide content and recommendations embedded within Salesforce makes it easy for my team to find and use the right, approved content at every stage of the buyer journey," said Joseph Dressler, SVP of national sales for LiveIntent. "Now that I have team performance dashboards in Salesforce, it allows me to connect the ClearSlide content and conversations that we deliver to actual results – to quickly prioritize where managers need to spend time."

For marketing and sales enablement, the Polaris Release guides sellers to the right content, tailored to an organization's sales process and customer context:

• New Content Recommendation Engine enables creation of robust rules to map approved content and rich media to Salesforce account, opportunity, lead and contact records to make it easy for reps to find the right content from within Salesforce. Rules can be set by sales stage, customer-facing role, geography, industry, and more, including any custom fields. Recommended content is also surfaced through ClearSlide email plugins for Outlook and Gmail, and our mobile apps.
• New Notifications, Expirations and Archiving provides options to alert users of new content, define expiration dates on specific content, and easily archive outdated content.
• Locked Permissions designate certain content can only be changed by content owners, giving more control to restrict usage and maintain message consistency.
• Updates to Content Engagement Dashboards provide detailed analytics on how content is used across all communications channels. Drill into specific presentations, view direct customer comments and feedback, and listen to Replay recordings of full meetings or specific slides from multiple meetings to more deeply understand customer reactions.
• Account-Based Engagement allows sales and marketing to select and prioritize key accounts and measure success of ABM execution.

For sales managers and operations leaders, the Polaris Release provides new engagement dashboards and insights in Salesforce to manage team and individual performance:

• New Team and Individual Insights give views of ClearSlide activity and customer engagement to help onboard new reps faster, prioritize where to spend time, and benchmark performance. Managers can compare teams and individual reps, as well as export ClearSlide data to use in various business intelligence tools.
• Updated Engagement Quadrant (EQ) Dashboards helps leaders quickly visualize and identify at-risk opportunities based on real-time engagement data. Forecast categories and stage filters help narrow datasets for productive, metrics-based coaching. 
• ClearSlide for Salesforce connector is even easier to install, test and deploy across organizations. New ClearSlide custom fields provide better data accuracy and quality.
• Slide Replay, now with premium audio, helps managers shadow more calls, hear actual customer feedback and objections, and reinforce and scale best practices. Replay videos are accessible in the content library for training.

For sales and service reps, the Polaris Release delivers recommended content in context to drive more personalized account-based engagement:

• New Contextual Content in Salesforce ensures that ClearSlide content is available on all account, opportunity, contact and lead records. Recommended content is mapped to pre-defined rules, and users still have access to their entire ClearSlide content library.
• Next-Action Buttons make it easy to engage with and respond to customers directly from Salesforce. When content is used, ClearSlide activity and engagement data is auto-logged to the right Salesforce object or opportunity.
• Updates to the Outlook and Gmail plugins take advantage of ClearSlide's rules-based engine to recommend content based on the context of the deal, as well as schedule and start meetings directly from Outlook and Gmail.
• Improvements to ClearSlide video mail make it even easier to hyper-personalize customer outreach with video.

For IT, Developers, and Partners, Polaris offers enterprise-grade security and compliance, as well as new APIs to integrate ClearSlide into existing business systems and workflows:

• SOC 2 Type II Audit Certification provides additional validation of ClearSlide's strict security compliance policies and procedures to complement existing TRUSTe and EU-US Privacy Shield certifications.
• Updated Disaster Recovery Capabilities ensure that ClearSlide exceeds enterprise requirements and standards for mission-critical applications.
• Improved, enterprise-class Audio Conferencing now supports more than 70 countries with toll-free and local numbers that integrate directly into the ClearSlide user experience.
• ClearSlide for Slack connector allows Slack channel members to instantly start ClearSlide meetings, screen sharing, and more.
• New REST APIs and Developer Kit extend ClearSlide activity, notifications, and real-time engagement data into existing business and reporting systems.

"Based on early customer feedback, we've already seen the Polaris Release become a game-changer for customers," said Raj Gossain, VP product and design for ClearSlide. "By bringing guided selling and recommended ClearSlide content even more deeply into Salesforce, Outlook and Gmail plugins, and our mobile experiences, users are engaging with customers more successfully across channels. The outcome is better insights in Salesforce to proactively manage team performance." 

To learn more about ClearSlide or get started with a 30-day free trial, go to www.clearslide.com. Customers can sign up for live demos of the Polaris Release March 20-24, or visit the ClearSlide Help Center. The latest ClearSlide for Salesforce app is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange.

About ClearSlide
ClearSlide offers the most complete and open Sales Engagement Platform that integrates content, communications, actionable insights, and guided selling to improve business results. Customers achieve higher seller productivity, increased sales management effectiveness, and stronger content ROI. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, ClearSlide serves over 2,000 companies with over 750 million minutes of engagement from customers like Comcast, Expedia, LinkedIn, Medtronic, The Economist, Thomson Reuters, VSP and more.

Powered by the Polaris Release, ClearSlide is the system of engagement for sales, marketing and services teams that makes every customer interaction more successful. For managers and leaders, ClearSlide provides engagement dashboards to improve deal visibility, coaching, and stronger forecasting. For content users and creators, ClearSlide makes it easy to recommend content tailored by sales stage, with next-step interaction suggestions. For reps, ClearSlide intuitively delivers content, communications, and analytics in a single, unified platform experience. Visit www.clearslide.com for more information, or follow the company on Twitter @ClearSlide. 

Contact:
Meera Mehta, 877.360.3366, [email protected]

SOURCE ClearSlide

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