ClearSlide, a SaaS company that helps make sales representatives more productive, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership with all current venture investors, including Greylock Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Felicis Ventures participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to $90 million.
As part of the investment, Mamoon Hamid, General Partner at The Social+Capital Partnership has joined the company’s board of directors. Also participating in the round was Comcast Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.
ClearSlide’s broad service makes salespeople more productive — it’s the features that make the SaaS disruptive. Users easily upload their sales presentations to the platform and then teams can edit and share information in a collaborative manner, designed for the sales process (ClearSlide bought slide creation tool SlideRocket from VMware last year). ClearSlide also offers analytics that show how the presentation was accepted by customers, and how this affected the conversion rates. That data can then be used to determine what sales presentations are more effective than others.
For example, you could see how high the percentage of a closing deal is with a given slide in the presentation. It also serves as a coaching tool to improve a sales person’s effectiveness. Other features include engagement metrics, performance stats of sales reps, and predictive modeling around deals.
Over the last year, ClearSlide increased its revenues by 2.5x and doubled its customer base, which includes sales teams at LinkedIn, Intuit, Expedia, Comcast, Rackspace, Amazon, and The Wall Street Journal.
As Al Lieb, CEO of ClearSlide, explains, sales reps used to use separate applications for screen sharing, PowerPoint, and more. ClearSlide brings together everything under one service and provides analytics and data that can improve sales productivity. He adds that the product has expanded more heavily into mobile as field sales reps want to access presentations and more on their tablets and phones. So the product has evolved into a mix of usage between web and mobile. The funding will be used towards hiring and product development, says Lieb.
The idea behind using data from the actual pitch to make sales teams more productive is compelling — in a world where data and analytics are the differentiator, it makes sense for sales reps to be using insights to increase their own success and productivity.