Outreach Sales Engagement Platform – Is It For You?

First off, I want to start by saying that we love the Outreach SaaS platform at Interrupt Media and we recommend it for every client that asks us for sales enablement support.

It helps sales reps and account executives to be more productive and consistent in their follow-up by creating automated sales outreach responses and multi-channel touchpoints including phone calls, emails, and LinkedIn social media messaging.

But before we get too ahead of ourselves. Let’s talk more about why you need a sales engagement platform.

Why Sales Teams Need Business Development Tools Like Outreach

Instead of going back and forth between several different tools with piecemeal information, Outreach integrates all the tools necessary to equip sales reps in one easy-to-use interface.

Its automation tools streamline sales processes, store lead insights in one place, and enables the sharing of valuable content used to nurture leads. Finally, it delivers actionable insights that guide the sales process to increase efficiency.

Before sales engagement platforms, reps had to meet quotas while handling a ton of moving pieces during the prospecting process.

Information was stored in various places, spreadsheets, not to mention bouncing from one open tool to another in a sort of juggling experiment. It certainly didn’t help make them any better at their chief function, nor did it give them much time to actually perform it. Not exactly the makings of a super-effective SDR playbook.

The sales engagement platform was built to enable you to get back to their most important task at hand: the sales conversation.

Why are sales engagement platforms important?

Sales engagement tools are a necessary addition to any team that hopes to maintain a competitive advantage and operate efficiently in the age of spam blockers, no-call lists, and the ever impatient, over-pitched prospect.

This is especially helpful for startups and small businesses with limited resources who need to maximize their efforts, skip the information scavenger hunt, and dive straight into revenue-generating activities.

Integration

Sales is a numbers game. With a sales development tool, you can work more efficiently and streamline the incorporation of your other tools like your CRM, content management system, email, and phone or voice tool. With an effective system, you can work faster, communicate better, and hit your numbers with greater ease.

Automation

With email campaigns and email tracking in one place, a good sales engagement platform will then be able to automate as much of the sales process as possible. You can skip the legwork, see exactly where your action is needed, and confidently put all of your effort where it will be most effective: the sales conversation! Plus, you can set automated touchpoints in the prospect’s timezone!

Sales Intelligence

In addition, your tool’s ability to track everything you do, every communication you make, and every detail you collect will enable you to be prepared for every potential scenario within your communications.

With this insight, sales managers are able to effectively answer questions and rebut objections while also simultaneously understanding extenuating factors such as industry, buyer persona, and sales stage.

Analytics

To be a winning sales organization, you need to be continually optimizing your processes. So an essential capability of a sales engagement platform is to track your results and calculate your performance analytics so that you can see what’s working and what’s not.

When you calculate all the benefits of using a sales engagement platform, you end up with more meetings booked, shorter sales cycles, and quotas that are being met and exceeded by your sales reps.

So, now that you know what a sales engagement platform is and why it’s important, we’re going to introduce you to our favorite one: Outreach.

The Best Features of Outreach Sales Engagement Platform

Of all the sales engagement platforms on the market, we really love Outreach. Its functionality and usability are far superior to similar tools like SalesLoft, and in terms of price, it is extremely competitive with other similar tools.

Here are some of our favorite things about using Outreach.

Voice Functionality

Outreach has a robust call solution with it’s Voice Suite application. In Voice Suite, you can gain a local presence with an in-area phone number as well as the ability to text, use voice mail, bridges, and call forwarding.

We’d go so far as to say that if you’re currently using any additional software like Dialpad, RingCentral, or any other similar service, you can discontinue it and just use Outreach.

Use Voice Suite is easy. It includes a simple click-to-dial function that will auto-dial your contact and if/when they answer, bridges the call to your phone. You can direct the calls to your desk phone or a cellular phone.

And, it’s value doesn’t end there. It also includes native call recording and dispositioning for training, shadowing, and audit trails so you can pinpoint where a deal was missed and identify procedural errors.

Salesforce Integration

The Outreach sales engagement platform also offers an extensive integration capability with Salesforce. You can get advanced activity mappings as well as make customizations for your activities. You can also track call dispositions, sequence steps, reporting, and gain insight into your engagement with contacts.

We highly recommend Outreach software if you have any degree of complexity in Salesforce because their integration with Salesforce was built by someone who truly understands how Salesforce works. Instead of acting as a separate program from Salesforce, Outreach becomes more of an additional layer for Salesforce and works as an extension of it.

In addition, Outreach has excellent sales enablement and governance features within Salesforce. With this integration, it’s easy to create and manage content for teams and give reps permissions to create and manage sequences based on their roles in Salesforce.

Time to integrate can take anywhere from 1-6 weeks depending on any custom work required in Salesforce, the complexity of sequencing, and the number of contacts and accounts that require data mapping.

If you already have good data hygiene and enrichment, definitions and workflows in place, and existing sequences, then you can get going very quickly.

Usability

Usability and navigation on a day to day basis is super cohesive in Outreach. Even if your team is just starting out, it’s very easy to use and doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge.

In fact, for reps that use Salesforce or Gmail, they never even need to login to Outreach. If you’re logged in to Salesforce and you have the Outreach extension installed, the Outreach software window pops up on top of Salesforce and you can do everything directly from Salesforce or other CRM (customer relationship management) tool.

Full List of Outreach Sales Engagement Features 

Final Thoughts on Maximizing the Value of Outreach

If you have salespeople that are relatively new or inexperienced, and you’re concerned about their ability to maximize the value of the Outreach sales engagement platform, we have some thoughts for you.

Outreach will assist you with onboarding and getting you up and running, to begin with. From there, to truly unlock the value and potential of Outreach, we recommend consulting with a sales enablement expert to help you maximize your capabilities, develop impactful sequences, and create the necessary fields and rules to optimize each sequence.

This is something that we, at Interrupt Media, would love to help you with!

We can help you get the most value out of each new lead by creating sequences for each channel or persona that you’re going to target.

Then, we can identify the drop off points in your sales cycle and create sequences for them as well. For instance, if someone doesn’t show up to a scheduled demo, you have a sequence in place to immediately drop them into to try to reschedule them.

Then, we’ll continue to further develop the personalization for those sequences based on the type of person that you’re talking to so an opportunity is never missed and no balls are dropped.

To learn more about Outreach, pricing, and set your reps up for success, reach out, and let’s schedule a chat.

Topics: Marketing Tools, Sales Enablement