It’s November and Dreamforce is upon us — pumpkin spice lattes, crazy traffic everywhere in San Francisco, keynotes with Marc Benioff & friends, and another major release from ClearSlide. I’m really pleased to announce that our Vega release is now available to all customers. 2017 has been quite a year for us, and before I jump into Vega, here’s a quick recap of our major releases:

• March – The Polaris Release brought ClearSlide and Salesforce more closely together, with recommended content and next actions directly inside your CRM.
• August – A major update to ClearSlide for Outlook extended ClearSlide into Office 365 and Outlook for Mac (complementing our existing plugin for Windows).
• September – The Orion Release transformed how content is created, managed, organized, and assembled in ClearSlide — enabling hyper-personalized experiences for your customers and prospects.

We started planning our Vega Release in January, and our goal was to completely reimagine the meeting and content sharing experiences that have been the foundation of ClearSlide from the very beginning. How can we take what has always been the gold standard for instant meetings for sales professionals and turn it into a true cockpit for the rep — with all the instrumentation, controls and auto-pilot capabilities expected in a completely modern meeting experience, designed for sellers from the ground up. Mike, who was the product manager for this release wrote a great blog post with all the details about our Vega Release. Here are a few capabilities I’m particularly excited about.

Guided selling in meetings
Generic web conferencing tools have never delivered what reps really need: a meeting experience designed to make them successful. One-click access to an entire sales content library full of visual, impactful content; talking points that make it easy to stay on message; and content that finds you based on the Lead, Account or Opportunity you’re working. At the end of the day, reps need a meeting experience that is instantaneous (yep, still no downloads or plug-ins) and simply stays out of the way so you and your story are center stage. We’ve brought all of that into our next-gen meeting experience: CRM-based content recommendations, slide-level speaker notes, and even a meeting notepad so you can capture important comments and follow up items that log directly to ClearSlide and your CRM. All of this helps sales leaders reinforce sales best practices and helps reps find, use, and deliver the perfect content to prospects.

More dynamic content engagement
We’ve always prided ourselves on having the best engagement data that signals whether your prospects are truly engaging with your reps and the content they receive. With Vega,we’re introducing a 3rd dimension of content engagement (beyond what content was viewed and time spent on each slide) — conversations. When prospects receive a ClearSlide content link, they can now initiate conversations directly in content — annotate a specific part of a slide with a pin, ask a question, make a comment — and you get an instant notification that the buyer wants to know more. The value to the sales rep is clear: immediate insight into what their buyer is thinking and curious about. But the value to enablement and marketing stakeholders is even bigger. By aggregating all of that direct content engagement, interaction by interaction, asset by asset, they can guide a continuous improvement strategy based on real customer feedback and interactions.

A branded, more personal experience
ClearSlide exists so your customer-facing teams can deliver amazing experiences to your customers. It’s your content, your brand, your messaging. With the Vega Release, you can now customize the ClearSlide experience with your company logo and colors. Whether your customers are in a ClearSlide meeting or on a content link, your brand is front and center. And your reps can further personalize outreach by uploading their photo or an avatar along with their contact information — so every interaction is personalized with their face, contact info, and your brand.

These are just a few of my favorites, but there’s so much more. Again, check out Mike’s blog post for all the details — you’ll be glad you did.

Thanks to our customers for a great year
As 2017 winds down, I wanted to share a note of thanks to our customers. I’m personally excited about how much our product has evolved and improved this year. And it’s your input, ideas, use cases, and success stories that inspired us. And that inspiration continues into 2018. I’m excited about our roadmap and what we will be bringing to you next year — so you can continue to deliver amazing, impactful, business-changing experiences to your customers.