Hoover. Band-aid. Q-tip. 

When your brand name becomes the standard terminology for a product, you know you’re onto something. 

So you can imagine that we were pretty happy when we heard our customers telling each other they were going to “send someone a Brainshark” or to “Brainshark it.”  And we can’t get them to stop (even though the Brainshark platform has become part of Bigtincan Readiness).

On the other hand, we have to admit that not absolutely everyone in the world has heard of us… yet. So, we thought it might be helpful to explain what Brainsharks are, what they aren’t, how to use them, and why our customers are so obsessed with them.

What is a Brainshark?

To be fair, while we think Brainshark is an awesome name, it doesn’t necessarily tell you much about what they are.

brainshark for narrated presentations and training videos

Definitely not a Brainshark. Also one of the more harrowing images we’ve seen in a while. 

Essentially, Brainsharks are narrated, interactive, multimedia presentations that are part video, part slide, part possibility. They’re really what you make of them — they just afford you the tools and the potential. They tend to be most useful for: 

  • Employee training
  • Sales training 
  • Customer and partner education
  • Internal peer communication and learning 

They’re used most often by: 

Watch a Brainshark right here. This one’s about our Translation capability for AuthoringAI (another tool you can use when creating Brainsharks). 

What a Brainshark is NOT

Since Brainsharks are often simplified down to “training videos” or “narrated presentations” (to our Director of Product Management’s chagrin) in order to minimize word count or introduce them in conversation to people who have never heard of them, it might be more important to explain what they are not.

  • A Brainshark is not just a PowerPoint presentation. While you can upload PowerPoint or Google Slides to a Brainshark, Brainshark itself is much more complete than that. Brainshark lets you then narrate those slides — either yourself, or via an AI narrator (more on that later) — so it’s like you’re actually giving the presentation while someone looks at your slides.
  • A Brainshark is not just a video recording. You might use Brainshark the same way you’d use, say, Loom — and even include videos or clips as parts of the final output — but it isn’t just a screen recording or video recording tool. When you’re building a Brainshark, you pull together well-designed slides and other interactive elements like html5 elements, web pages, quizzes, or polls to check understanding. 
  • A Brainshark is not just a Zoom call. Brainsharks are presentations for when you’re not going to be physically present. For instance, instead of an onboarding presentation to a cohort of new hires via Zoom, you could create a Brainshark to walk your new employees through the onboarding process and share it with them. They can follow along at their own pace and rewatch particular slides, and you don’t need to find the time to actually host the presentation. You can even include clips from an onboarding Zoom call to preserve that information for posterity.

What can you include in a Brainshark? 

This is the good part of Brainsharks — you can combine a lot of different media, narrate over it, and put together a very interactive user experience. Brainshark presentations accept: 

  • PowerPoint files with animations
  • Google Slides with animations 
  • Doc files (both Google and Microsoft)
  • HTML5 
  • Videos 
  • Audio recordings 
  • Interactive questions in quiz, poll, and survey formats
  • PDFs and other attachments 

You can upload your slides in a bunch of different file types, record videos using your webcam or screen, create photo albums, attach PDFs and other files to your presentations so attendees can download them, and even record audio podcasts. 

How people use Brainsharks 

Brainsharks are a pretty flexible approach to presenting information, so they have a lot of potential use cases. Primarily, we see people using Brainsharks to:  

  • Create more compelling content 

Brainsharks were designed with training and enablement in mind, so it’s a great tool for creating targeted and interactive onboarding materials that embed quizzes inside presentations for increased knowledge retention, sharing product updates across departments, making organizational resources and announcements readily available, and more — all while making your content compelling enough to avoid the “TV watching” or “3-hour training video” zone out effect.

  • Get insights into how training materials are being used 

Brainsharks give you analytics to see how many views they’ve had, who exactly from your team has (or hasn’t) watched yet, at which point viewers dropped off, and more, which allows you to make sure the right people are reviewing the content by given deadlines and insights into how and where you might improve the output so people stay until the end.

  • Design more flexible learning content 

Brainsharks support various learning formats so you can cater to different learning styles and schedules. You can include them as part of a full course or curriculum or create a standalone Brainshark as a just-in-time microlearning asset. You can even SCORM them up and include them in your learning management system.

  • Promote peer learning and collaboration 

You can use Brainshark presentations to educate employees or customers. But you can also use them to share ideas with your peers. For instance, by capturing and sharing examples of your own sales successes, methods that worked, win/loss stories, and more.

How Brainsharks are helpful for sales enablement 

While you can see there are a lot of applications for Brainshark presentations, they have some extra features that are particularly helpful for sales enablement. 

For example, Brainsharks let you: 

  • Offer flexible learning options for busy sales teams 

With a focus on bite-sized e-learning, Brainsharks let you give your reps ongoing training that fits their busy schedules. That way, they need never miss out on necessary training, can build a habit of consistent skill-building, and sell better more quickly. 

  • Ramp up sales training content creation 

Because Brainshark lets you build and share interactive learning resources so quickly, it makes it easier to create and update your sales training materials, so your reps stay up to date with the latest info. 

  • Send short presentations to customers

Sellers can also take advantage of Brainsharks’ multimedia format to nurture customers relationships, answer questions, and speed up sales cycles. Instead of asking the customer to hop on yet another call, sellers can pull together some slides, clips of themselves speaking, screen recordings that serve as short product demos, links to case studies, and more into a Brainshark and share it with them, and even track whether, when, and how much they watched.

How to create your first Brainshark

To make a Brainshark presentation, you just upload your content (such as PowerPoint slides, images, or videos) to the platform. You can then add audio narration, notes, or interactive elements like quizzes and surveys. Once finalized, you can share the presentation via a link and track viewer engagement through Brainshark's analytics. 

Fore more information check out How to turn your trusty but dusty slide decks into interactive training videos in 15 minutes.

What’s new with Brainshark? 

Since Brainshark joined Bigtincan back in 2021, it’s become a much more complete toolkit. Brainsharks are now part of the Bigtincan Readiness platform, which comes with a whole host of tools for employee learning and sales enablement: 

  • Brainshark presentations, to turn slide decks into interactive learning resources and compelling sales collateral 
  • AI-powered text-to-video, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text capabilities, so you can auto-generate convincing AI voiceovers, automatically add captions, translate in an instant, add slide notes, even add digital avatars for making Brainsharks even more engaging
  • Coaching tools that help reps develop the vocal skills, confidence, and vibes they need to have more productive conversations, without using manager time
  • Conversation intelligence tools that give reps AI-driven feedback to evaluate their messaging and emotional impact
  • A sales simulator that gives sellers a safe space to practice, with an AI that takes on different buyer personalities and never repeats itself
  • Custom training programs with branded content, event management tools, and device-agnostic learning resources
  • Leaderboards, badges, achievements, and rewards, to make learning more fun and harness your reps’ competitive spirit  

See it all in action.