ClearSide raises $11 Million to expand its Sales Communication Service

ClearSide, the San Francisco, Calif. – based startup which provides sales communication tools, has recently announced the end of its series A of funding which has brought the company the amount of $11 million. This funding round has been led by Greylock Partners, which has also just been the leader of the Tumblr’s massive $85 million funding round, and which has previously invested in companies such as Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn and Constant Contract. The current investor, Felicis Ventures, has also participated to this funding round.

The company provides solutions for salespeople so as for them to find it easily to share presentations and related content such as PDFs and videos with their clients in order to be more efficient and to create a stronger connection.

Al Lieb, the CEO and Evite co-founder of the company has stated the following: “We’re bringing new kinds of functionality to sales representatives. After talking with thousands of sales teams, we came up with better tools to help reps with pitching.”

The company specialises in providing sales professionals with a browser-based dashboard which allows them to upload all type of documents such as PowerPoint presentations, Word docs, and videos in all formats, PDFs, interactive web pages, Flash files and many more. The moment when the files are uploaded, the sales persons can decide to show them to clients or other persons they are working with via a branded URL which can be plugged into any browser and allow the user instant access to the information. Moreover, in order to be more efficient in their work, ClearSide has also developed an analytics system which allows them to track down the ways in which customers have interacted with one or another shared document.

Lieb has also declared the following: “Salespeople want to be able to give a less-than-a-minute presentation if need be. Our service makes giving a presentation faster and easier than it is through something like WebEx or GoToMeeting.”

At the moment, ClearSide already has “hundreds” of customers who are benefiting from the advantages put to their disposal by the company, among which there are also notable companies such as Rackspace, Expedia and Dow Jones which are using it for their sales department.

John Lilly, from Greylock Partners, has stated the following: “ClearSlide replaces the awful, cumbersome tools with something that’s radically simpler, and they’ve built an incredibly rapidly growing customer base.”

The money raised in this funding round is intended to be used for the expansion of the company, as the founders are considering doubling the size of the company’s team. At the moment, ClearSide gas 30 employees, but Lieb declared that the firm is “expanding across the board” and is planning to have 70 employees by the end of the year.

There are already some other important names which activate in the same field, such as WebEx and GoToMeeting, which provide sales teams numerous communication tools.