ClearSlide raises $50M for 'sales enablement'

Social+Capital Partnership leads round, joins Bessemer, Greylock and Felicis

Just about five years after founding ClearSlide, Al Lieb, is now sitting on nearly $100 million in capital raised for his sales-enablement software startup.

ClearSlide, which was founded by Lieb and Jim Benton (both of whom founded Evite togetther), just raised $50 million in Series C round of funding, led by Social+Capital Partnership, with existing investors joining the round as well, including Greylock Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures. Mamoom Hamid, Generao Partner at The Social+Capital Partnership is joining ClearSlide's board. This brings the total amount raised to $90 million, which includes a Series B round ofr $28 million, led by Bessemer, and Series A round of $11 million, led by Greylock. In 2010, Felicis Ventures invested the majority of the $650,000 raised in a seed round.

ClearSlide is a platform used by sales teams at large corporations, such as LinkedIn, Comcast and Rackspace. "Our market is sales enablement," said Lieb, in an interview with me. "Our value is sales productivity." Basically, sales people use the ClearSlide platform to share PPTs and marketing decks with prospective clients. ClearSlide also has screen sharing services similar to GoToMeeting and Join.me. But it's the analytics that a lot of their clients find useful, said Lieb. For instance, the analytics can tell a client how engaged a prospective client is. Since ClearSlide hosts the marketing materials for companies, any interaction with those materials can be tracked.

By tracking the communications that sales teams have with customers, ClearSlide can point out what's working and what's not. It can point out how quickly deals are closing and the likelihood of a deal to close, based on a client's interaction with the materials. 

For its service, clients pay some $69 per seat, per month. Today, ClearSlide works with 2000 brand clients, such as LinkedIn, which has licensed around 1200 seats from ClearSlide.

Lieb doesn't believe ClearSlide is competitive to Salesforce, which focuses on customer relationship management, but rather ClearSlide is creating a new market that's focused on the front-end of they cycle, which includes closing the sales. 

"We think there's eight million sales professionals in the US, and roughly three to four million of them are potential sales customers," said Lieb, who estimates that the market for his software is around $5 billion to $10 billion.