ClearSlide grabs $11M from Greylock to expand its “quick” sales communication service

Sales communication tools startup ClearSlide has raised $11 million in first-round funding, it announced today. The company helps salespeople quickly share presentations and related content like videos and PDFs with prospective clients.

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

ClearSlide offers sales professionals a browser-based dashboard from which they can upload PowerPoint presentations, Word docs, PDFs, videos in all formats, interactive web pages, Flash files and more. Once all those files are uploaded, the sales rep can show prospects that content via a branded URL that can be plugged into any browser. ClearSlide also offers analytics that track how customers interact with specific shared content.

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

ClearSlide already has “hundreds” of customers using its service, with notable companies like Rackspace, Expedia and Dow Jones using it for sales.

The funding round was led by Greylock Partners, which just led Tumblr’s massive $85M funding round and has invested in the likes of Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn and Constant Contact. Current investor Felicis Ventures also participated in the round.

“[ClearSlide] replaces the awful, cumbersome tools with something that’s radically simpler, and they’ve built an incredibly rapidly growing customer base,” said Greylock partner John Lilly in a statement.

San Francisco, Calif.-based ClearSlide will use the new funding to more than double the size of its team. The company currently has 30 employees, but Lieb said ClearSlide is “expanding across the board” and plans to have 70 employees by the end of 2011.

ClearSlide joins a growing list of startups that are challenging WebEx and GoToMeeting in the presentation space by giving sales teams more varied communication tools. Both MeetingBurner and Vidquik are presentation-focused startups I wrote about recently that offer somewhat unique capabilities, with MeetingBurner being great for colloboration and sales and Vidquik being good for 1-on-1 sales.

Do you think ClearSlide will be able to stand out in this increasingly competitive area?