The dramatic increase in digital interactions for B2B sales has given organizations an opportunity to rethink their GTM models and considerably improve sales effectiveness.
However, it’s also heightened the difficult tradeoffs many organizations are forced to make between driving innovation and addressing IT priorities. According to a recent report, 76% of CIOs stated challenges with striking the right balance between business innovation and operational excellence.
System (IT) and application administrators (admins) are often forced to juggle multiple priorities, such as defining requirements with their stakeholders, managing workflows to enhance rep productivity, and also protecting their organization’s digital infrastructure.
At Outreach, we are investing in admin capabilities to help organizations close the Sales Execution Gap — the gap between an organization’s potential and actual revenue — without compromising IT and business requirements at scale. To support this, we are releasing several new features and enhancements for Outreach Engage, including:
- Trigger Enhancements
- New Outlook-Add In
- Microsoft Graph Integration
- Data Retention in Outreach Voice Recordings
- EU Datacenter for Outreach Engage
1. Maximize rep productivity with enhanced trigger creation, management, and discovery
Triggers in Outreach help automate seller workflows so reps focus less on manual tasks and more on high impact actions that generate value for their organization. This makes triggers one of the most powerful tools in the platform, and Outreach admins play a critical role in creating and managing trigger automations.
To further enable admins to maximize rep productivity, Outreach is refreshing the trigger builder to improve creation, management, and discovery of triggers.
This includes a more simplified and streamlined trigger builder that’s been redesigned to align with more traditional CRM language, along with the ability to use multiple values per condition, re-order actions through drag and drop functionality, and more easily create condition groups.
Additionally, to support Outreach admins that need to manage hundreds of triggers at scale, we are enhancing trigger management and discovery — starting with the ability to sort by common filters such as last updated, name, and date created.
Both these trigger enhancements are now available in public beta, and we recommend admins managing triggers learn more here.
2. Streamline rep workflows and meet data privacy requirements with the Outreach Outlook Add-In
Another key capability that enhances rep productivity is the Outreach Outlook Add-In. The new Outreach Outlook Add-In provides a more robust, native integration that streamlines reps workflow straight from their inbox. That means reps can now use the Outlook ‘Send’ button to efficiently send and sync those relevant emails to Outreach, as well as insert their available times or add a link to their calendar.
On top of this, the new Outreach Outlook Add-In was designed with privacy and user consent in mind. If a prospect opted out of a communication, the add-in will surface this information for your reps before sending. Additionally, sent emails will not be synced to Outreach, and reps will also not be able to add opted-out prospects to the sequence.
Admins can also control and enable automatic prospect creation. When it’s enabled, the prospects your reps are working with are automatically added to Outreach. Or, when it’s disabled, emails to non-prospects are never synced.
These are just a few new enhancements to the new Outlook Add-In, and we encourage customers using Outlook to try and enable this for your reps today. Visit Outreach Support to learn how to use the new Outlook Add-In.
3. Connect Outreach to your Microsoft/Office 365 mailbox with the Microsoft Graph integration
To further support our customers using Microsoft/Office 365, Outreach is releasing the Microsoft Graph integration for email to provide a more modern and compliant way to connect to your Microsoft 365/Office 365 data.
With the Microsoft Graph integration, Outreach can scope access to relevant permission sets, and request only the specific permissions that are needed to perform Outreach services. This is different from the legacy Exchange Web Services (EWS) API, which provides broad access to mailboxes.
Additionally, when users connect via Microsoft Graph and OAuth, this enhances the organization’s security posture through more modern APIs and authentication methods.
The Microsoft Graph integration is rolling to customers today. Visit Outreach Support to learn how to connect Microsoft/Office 365 mailbox to Outreach using Microsoft Graph.
4. Meet data privacy requirements for disposing data with Data Retention for Outreach Voice Recordings
Another area Outreach is investing in is helping admins meet their data privacy obligations at scale. Organizations are increasingly faced with data privacy obligations that impose strict requirements on how long they should keep and dispose of their data.
To help admins meet these requirements, Outreach now supports data retention policies for Outreach Voice Recordings. This means admins can now easily access a self-service portal to configure data retention policies such as delete data as a one-time event or set up regular data deletion.
Admins can also enforce company policies for retention of Outreach Voice recordings with flexible configurations based on the length of times recordings should be stored prior to deletion.
Data retention for Outreach Voice recordings is available today. To learn more, visit: Outreach User Admin Settings: Org Voice Overview.
5. Meet data residency requirements with EU Datacenter for Outreach Engage
Outreach is also introducing the EU Datacenter for customers that need to go beyond their GDPR obligations or require data residency as part of the security and privacy policies.
The EU Datacenter for Outreach Engage allows an organization’s data to be stored in a specific geographic location. This means customer-owned data associated with those Outreach instances including prospects, accounts, organizations, and workflow data such as sequences and meetings will be stored and contained within the EU infrastructure.
Customers interested in the EU Datacenter should contact their Outreach rep to learn more.
Start improving rep productivity and enhancing security and data privacy
We look forward to hearing customer feedback on our new capabilities as we continue to deliver more features that enable admins to optimize rep productivity while also meeting their organizational requirements at scale.
To learn more about all of our latest product innovations, check out the full list on our Outreach Explore event page.
