Autoklose, a VanillaSoft brand, is an SEP solution, presenting a combined package of sales email automation and tracking, contact and email campaign management with sequence templates and optimization.
$59.99
per month per user
ClearSlide
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
ClearSlide enables sales and marketing teams to find content, communicate it whether in-person, on the phone or through email, and get insights into how customers engage, with the goal of helping sales and marketing teams make every interaction count and create amazing customer experiences. ClearSlide is a system of engagement for sales, marketing & services teams. For managers and leaders, ClearSlide provides engagement dashboards to improve deal visibility, coaching, and stronger…
If someone only runs a campaign using email and telephone communication, Autoklose is perfect, and I highly recommend it. If someone uses a more diverse set of tools and wants a more complex type of sequence, Autoklose does not allow their users to program communication tools that some other tools and software allow.
Clearslide makes it easy to share files with anyone via a single link. It simplifies the process of document sharing in the new "work from home" age we have now and allows multiple parties to view the same document, either simultaneously or separately. It is less appropriate for sensitive information, as the link can easily be shared between parties or forwarded on, so there is no gatekeeping.
Analytics: for sales, especially when selling virtually, it can be difficult to know if your customers are engaged with the presentation. Clearslide will give you reports that indicate how long customers were viewing what you were presenting, if/when you lost them, and at what place in your presentation you lost them. It can also show you how long potential customers spent reviewing follow-up materials you've sent them.
Screenshare: the screenshare functionality, when using Google Chrome, is very seamless, and the customer can take over the screenshare without needing any downloads or plug-ins.
Presenting: It's quite easy to present material with Clearslide, and to move between materials that you are presenting.
AutoKlose uses your own email, (e.g. Microsoft Outlook), so it runs the risk of exceeding the Microsoft Message Rate Limit, which can be problematic for your Outlook account.
Additional throttling limits for the SMTP Authentication protocol are:
30 messages per minute
Recipient rate limit of 10,000 recipients per day.
Exceeding these limits will cause the following issues:
Exceeding the per minute limit causes email delivery delays, any excess in message submission will be throttled and successively carried over to the following minutes.
Exceeding the per day limit causes the following error message:
Call quality with CS has always been an issue in my two (2) years of experience with the platform. CS upgraded their phone provider in winter 2018, but the call quality has only been marginally improved from my perspective. Also, with the switch to a new phone provider, users are required to use a new conference line, access number, and a leader pin. The leader pin is new and adds an extra step to setting up a conference line, which seems unnecessary.
Content curation is probably my biggest issue with CS. With previous experience in a sales enablement company, I've seen how content can be curated to map to the seller's specific stage in a deal cycle, which is what most companies want. CS does not have this functionality from my perspective, and if it does, then overall curation capabilities are weak. Rather than curating content to match a seller's current point in a sales process, CS relies on surfacing content that is most popular or recently added. There is a search feature, which works well if you know what the collateral is called, but it is not scanning the content of documents to find what is most relevant. I equate the content feature of CS to a search that you would do in your computer's "Download" folder or even in Dropbox. If your company is smaller and only needs to surface a few pieces of collateral, then CS will work fine. If your organization is larger with large amounts of specific collateral, then I would look elsewhere.
The CS plugins for Outlook, Gmail, or your web browser are great ideas but executed poorly. The integrations have caused a lot of headaches for colleagues and me since their release. They have caused our email to close unexpectedly, content to not be linked properly, or emails to not be tracked. The idea for these integrations was to reduce the amount of time a seller has to jump between windows, which is awesome, but the integrations are full of glitches. One of the biggest glitches I've seen is how CS, Grammarly, and Outlook all work together. CS is always the component of those three that causes everything to freeze or crash. In short, the integrations are a great idea but executed poorly at this time.
ClearSlide is embedded in our culture and in our organization. The sales and marketing teams use ClearSlide on a daily basis to share information and presentations as well as communicate "what is working." Our leadership uses the analytics to provide improved feedback and coaching regarding bottlenecks our representatives are experiencing.
Whether it's setting up integrations, creating email campaigns, managing conversations with prospects, Autoklose is a well-designed tool that provides clarity along the way for users to find their bearings, and understand what to do. The help documentation is excellent, the support is great, but the tool is built in a way that simply makes sense when you're using it.
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
Our Autoklose rep is amazing! Jelena has always gotten back to us within 24 hours, despite living on a different continent. She is completely proficient with the tool and is usually able to answer our questions with a brief email or short virtual meeting.
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.
I think that I have already said it, Autoklose has much better support and is really quick to set up and use compared with any of the other systems that I have used over the years.
ClearSlide stacks up to be as good as any of the aforementioned tools. We selected Clearslide because of its ease of use and implementation. It did not take our team too long to get acclimated with how ClearSlide works and how they would be using it, allowing them to generate more meetings and more revenue.
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
I feel the increased prospect engagement and business opportunities created supported the cost. In my industry 1 customer can support positive ROI.
I saw an overall increase in mass emailing effectiveness and we were able to automate majority of our campaigns which increased productivity for marketing & sales.
