ClearSlide’s Orion Release Enables Marketers to Recommend Connected, Hyper-Personalized Sales Content

ClearSlide, the Sales Engagement Platform leader, announced Orion, a major upgrade to its engagement and enablement services. Orion’s functionality guides sellers to the perfect content to move forward their sales efforts within ClearSlide, Outlook, Gmail, and Salesforce. It also equips sellers to quickly assemble and personalize customer content to better engage contacts. Orion gives sales leaders leverage to better govern their sales processes and marketers strong oversight on the content sales reps use, with real-time insight into how customers respond throughout the buyer journey.

ClearSlide’s Orion release includes a new Content Hub that helps marketing and sales enablement teams better organize and recommend content collections mapped to how their organizations sell – by sales stage or sales playbook, by segment, geography, industry, product line, competitor, etc. ClearSlide dynamic filtering and intelligence recommends the best content, and drag-and-drop content assembly helps deliver tailored and tracked content to customers online, in person, and in email. Orion’s Connected Content Engine ensures all content used with customers is connected to original source materials for updates and usage reporting. With ClearSlide Orion, sellers can be confident they are always using the best, most up-to-date content, and ensures marketers can better control individual assets – with instant updates, and real-time insights into what content works most effectively with customers.

“With average B2B sales quota attainment at historically low levels, sales and marketing leaders must ensure prospects and customers deliver strong value propositions utilizing integrated systems of engagement, like ClearSlide, to delight customers and earn their business. Orion brings critical new functionality to embed ClearSlide content recommendations and actionable insight into every customer conversation, so customers have amazing experiences with sales and services professionals,” said Dustin Grosse, ClearSlide CEO.

Read More: SBS Group to Launch SalesConnect 365, a New Solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales

Utilizing the best sales content and measuring content impact is a huge business challenge. Recent studies show that sales reps spend more than 440 hours per year searching for sales content, but find most content is irrelevant or outdated. Analysts also report that 65% of sales content created by marketing is never even presented to customers and 93% of companies do not effectively track sales content performance today.

Aragon Research estimates the market for Sales Engagement Platforms will grow from over $800 million today to more than $5 billion by 2021. “Single-point enablement tools and CRM systems do not naturally help sellers identify and anticipate buyer needs. Sales Engagement Platforms that include guided content and selling capabilities help sales teams hyper-personalize content based on customer engagement. ClearSlide continues to lead and innovate with its Orion Release, and was one the first to offer a complete Sales Engagement Platform,” said Jim Lundy, CEO and Lead Analyst, Aragon Research.

For marketing and sales enablement, Orion’s new Content Hub organizes and guides sellers to the best content within an organization’s approved sales process:

• New Team Collections powerfully map content to the way organizations sell. Presentations, PDFs, videos, email templates and other rich media assets are organized by selling stage, sales playbooks, product lines, geographies, industries, and more. Team Collections are published and recommended across teams, with robust group-based permissions controlling who can access and/or edit content.
• New Search and Dynamic Content Filtering lets content owners tag recommended assets and presentations so sellers can quickly search and navigate to the right content. Sellers can select multiple filters for further refinement to find content that best fits their sales circumstance.
• ClearSlide’s new Connected Content Engine ensures that recommended content is the single-source of truth, so sellers always have the most up-to-date customer-facing collateral, videos and internal training materials – even if content is used in multiple presentations. Locked permissions give more control by team to restrict usage and maintain message consistency. When recommended content is changed, content owners can push out changes and notify sellers about key updates.
• Enhanced Rules-Based Content Recommendations allows sales enablement to create robust rules that maps recommended content and rich media to Salesforce account, opportunity, lead and contact records. Reps find the best content in the context of their work within ClearSlide and Salesforce. Rules leverage fields like sales stage, industry, buyer role, competitor, including any custom fields – with automated alerts for content updates, and content expiration on specific dates.
• Updates to Content Engagement Dashboards provide detailed slide-by-slide analytics when content is used in person, in online meetings, and in email. Drill into specific presentations, view direct customer comments and feedback, and listen to recordings of full meetings – or specific slides from multiple meetings – to more deeply understand customer reactions and objections.
• ClearSlide Replay, now with premium audio, helps sales managers and marketers 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 and certification.

For sales managers and operations leaders, Orion provides new engagement dashboards and insights to manage team, individual seller, and opportunity performance:

• New Leader Insights Dashboard gives at-a-glance visibility into sales activity and customer engagement data to help leaders prioritize where to spend their time and benchmark performance. Powerful time period and sales team filters help managers quickly identify top prospects, meetings, the number of customers reached, the opportunities with the most cross-channel engagement, and sellers with the highest levels of ClearSlide engagement – with period-over-period ranking indicators.
• Updates to Customer Insights Dashboard allow managers to easily view and drill into all the in-person and online meetings, emails and links for every customer and seller for selected time periods – giving visibility into historical account-based activity and meeting engagement levels that can be leveraged in team meetings and 1:1 coaching conversations. Managers can create and save reports, as well as export ClearSlide data to use in various business intelligence tools.
• ClearSlide for Salesforce connector, updated for Orion, is easier to install, test and deploy. ClearSlide custom fields provide better data accuracy and quality. Recommended content is mapped to pre-defined rules and available on all account, opportunity, contact and lead records – and users have access to their entire ClearSlide Content Hub. Engagement Quadrant dashboards help leaders quickly visualize and identify at-risk opportunities based on real-time engagement data.
• New ClearSlide for Wave connector provides real-time, actionable insights within Salesforce Wave analytics to help managers forecast more accurately, better manage performance, and onboard new reps faster. Pre-defined dashboards make it easy to map ClearSlide real-time engagement data to stage-based opportunities and create custom views.

For sales and service reps, the Orion Release makes it easy to find, assemble and share recommended content in context to drive more personalized account-based engagement:

• New Content Assembly tools help sellers quickly assemble multiple assets into new presentations. These tailored presentations then can be saved, shared via a link or email, and presented in online or in-person meetings. Because content is connected to source files, any revisions automatically trigger alerts and updates to content in-use, so sellers always have the most up-to-date versions.
• New Personal Collection allows sellers to identify and pull together the recommended content and assets they use most into their own collections, and combine with other content they own – making it easy to personalize and scale interactions with customers.
• New CRM-Based Content Recommendations help sellers receive content recommendations based on the context of an Account, Opportunity or Lead from Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. When content is used, ClearSlide engagement data is auto-logged to the right CRM object or opportunity.
• Updates to Outlook and Gmail plugins utilize 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. ClearSlide for Outlookis now available for Office 365 and Office for Mac 2016.

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

• New REST API Developer Kit extends ClearSlide content, engagement actions, activity, notifications, and real-time engagement data into existing business and reporting systems.
• Improved, enterprise-class Audio Conferencing provides new call controls, local and toll-free numbers to more than 70+ countries, integrated directly into the ClearSlide user experience to power ClearSlide Replay.
• Updated Disaster Recovery Capabilities ensure that ClearSlide exceeds enterprise requirements and standards for mission-critical applications.
• SOC 2 Type II Audit Certification offers additional validation of ClearSlide’s strict security compliance policies and procedures to complement existing TRUSTe and EU-US Privacy Shield certifications.

“Based on early customer feedback, we’ve already seen the Orion Release be a customer game-changer. Our new Content Hub and Connected Content technology ensure sales reps use perfect, always up-to-date content aligned with their sales process. We also help reps work where they want – in ClearSlide, Outlook, Gmail, Salesforce, or mobile apps – to engage with customers more successfully across channels. The outcome for marketers is better insights and content ROI,” said Raj Gossain, VP product and design for ClearSlide.

Read More: Onvia Agrees To Be Acquired By Deltek