What is OutreachCRM?
What do you like best about Outreach?
I love the simplicity of use and the training academy. The fact that I can combine all of my work flows in one place for LinkedIn, email and phone, just in one interface makes my life so much easier. And it’s so easy to use. But the training academy levels you up even more so you can get yourself up and running in as little as 20 minutes.
I like being able to sequence prospects the best. Having all of the contacts I am reaching out to in one place and being able to put them into a preset number of calls, automated email, and manual email saves heaps of time. It also allows for a repeatable, proven process. With these insights, you can hone what is working and scrap what is not. For example, you can see how many times a prospect interacts with an email you’ve sent, if someone “opts out” of communication, response rates at different stages, and more. This is huge, especially for teams that are dealing with high volume. Having Outreach sync with Salesforce and Gmail makes the process fluid and trackable as well.
A sales enablement platform like Outreach is a necessary product for any growing sales team once you reach 10+ BDRs/SDRs/AEs. So Outreach has allowed us to become more sophisticated and intentional with how we handle outbound sales, working opportunities (mostly trial signups and demo requests), and onboarding new customers. I like using tasks to stay organized and using tasks vs email reminders helps keep my personal email address clean. The google chrome extension is also a helpful way to quickly access details when responding to an email. Adding templates when responding to an email is also simple and effective. I’ve had no problems adding new templates or creating new sequences.
Outreach allows me to create a multi-pronged approach to prospecting and follow up that is personalized and scalable. I use it to create targeted messages to high value prospects and to nurture deals at each stage in my funnel. I have been able to achieve my annual quota in the first 4 months of the year because I can work twice as many deals at a time.
I really like the ability to help potential clients schedule meeting times as well as easily complete my cold calls and outreach emails.
What do you dislike about Outreach?
The calendar feature is a bit wonky. It doesn’t play as well with Hubspot as I’d like. The Outlook plugin is also a bit behind.
Overall, I’ve been disappointed with the level of support we have received and the general intuitiveness of the product. The chrome extension sidebar app has also significantly impacted the speed of my computer and it is very buggy with auto-updating. While the look and feel of outreach comes across as something modern and design-focused (vs when you look at salesforce you can tell this was created a decade ago), the product is definitely focused on “delivering every possible feature” vs “let’s take some time to build this feature in the right way”.
We have 13 users on the platform and while we did receive a nice “Welcome to Outreach” 30-minute chat after purchasing, the amount of care that has been shown to our account since has been lacking. For example, I’ve submitted a few support requests, and the responses were generic and suggest I take actions I did not have permission to take. Response time has been fine (a few hours to a couple of days) but I feel like the size of our account limits how much they care about our account. Maybe the level of support would be different if we had 50 users and paid more but I generally don’t feel like optimizing our account is a focus for Outreach.
More info:
Prior to Outreach, we used Mixmax for our sales automation (this product worked well and we were happy with it for 5+ years we used Mixmax – we just ended up outgrowing it and needing a bit more sophistication on how we ran our sales operations)
We use HubSpot for marketing automation
We use Salesforce as our sales CRM
We also looked at Salesloft when searching for a sales enablement platform.
What problems is Outreach solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use outreach for our automated email sequences and various types of tasks for both inbound and outbound sales activities.
Outreach is solving the problem of manually tracking your touches to prospects/clients. Without Outreach, I would have to keep a spreadsheet or document per client of where they are at in the sales cycle, what engagement we’ve previously had, and I would have to manually create my workflows.
It solves the biggest problem I have as a salesperson, and that’s time and efficiency. I worked out that outreach gives me back 2 hours 30 every week just from being more efficient. It means I can use that time to make more calls and do more activity. Imagine being able to send 50 more emails and make 50 more calls a week. It’s raised my performance no end.
We needed to solve a volume problem so that we could focus on quality issues. Outreach solved that problem for us overnight. We are running at a fast clip now and can do A/B testing, open/click tracking and not worry about losing things through the cracks.
The other challenge we had was nurturing deals through the funnel with valuable, personalized content. We have a lot of content and have been able to create a large library of templates that can be deployed easily. We lose fewer deals because we are able to be consistent with follow-up
Features
Pricing
$50.00 /month
No free trial
No free version