Outreach, the company revolutionizing the way sales teams communicate, today announced that is has completed a $9.2 million Series A round of funding that it will use to expand upon its enterprise-grade sales communication platform. The new funding comes after record growth over the previous three quarters: the company now serves more than 1,000 businesses and optimizes more than one million sales emails per week. The company also today unveiled two new products, Outreach 360 and Outreach Everywhere, which expand its platform with engagement monitoring and optimized communication. "Our vision is to completely transform the way sales professionals communicate by streamlining traditionally manual processes and using data to optimize the effectiveness of every sales activity," said Manuel Medina, CEO of Outreach. "This new investment gives us resources to further develop and deliver our data-driven sales communication platform and help provide a scalable way for businesses to achieve success. We're excited to partner with our new and existing investors and execute on our mission to build a platform that empowers sales teams to conduct business faster and more efficiently than ever before." The new investment was led by Mayfield (an early investor in Marketo), with participation from existing investors MHS Capital and Floodgate. Outreach had previously received $2.4 million in seed and angel funding, bringing the total raised to date to $11.6 million. The new capital will help expedite development of its sales communication platform and expand engineering, sales, marketing, and business development. Rajeev Batra, partner at Mayfield, will join the board. Just as martech (marketing technology) platforms have transformed marketing by empowering marketers, there is a flurry of innovation in salestech focused on the salesperson. The paradigm has shifted from decades-old SFA and CRM solutions designed for sales managers to solutions focused on helping salespeople do their day-to-day job more effectively. Successful sales today is centered around intelligent communication and the use of relevant content to connect with prospects and customers in an efficient and personalized way. "Outreach's intuitive communication platform is filling the workflow void left by Salesforce and other CRM tools and now serves as the 'main screen' for sales development and inside sales reps, enabling them to interact and do their day-to-day work in one place," said Rajeev Batra, partner at Mayfield. "Manuel and his team have taken a very innovative approach to the product and delighting the customer. We believe Outreach is defining a new era of sales technology, by focusing on the unsung heroes of B2B companies, the sales rep, similar to the way in which Marketo elevated the role of the marketer." Revolutionizing the business-to-business sales workflow A 2014 study conducted by Accenture, a global management consulting and technology services firm, in collaboration with CSO Insights, a leading research and benchmarking organization, called Powering Profitable Sales Growth, found that sales inefficiencies cost companies more than 3.2 percent in possible revenue and that recapturing this potential revenue requires a combination of training, technology-enabled sales tools, and better use of data and analytics. Key findings include:
  • 59 percent of sales representatives are expected to achieve his/her quota, down from 67 percent in 2013
  • Only 51 percent of sales organizations use a formal step-by-step selling process and only eight percent have a formal sales methodology implemented
  • Sales teams spend less than 40 percent of their time selling
  • Fewer than 20 percent use analytics to spot cross-sell opportunities
"Our latest research of high-growth business-to-business organizations showed that 72.4 percent plan to buy sales development technology in the next year. The sales development automation movement is driven by a number of key factors including the increasing importance of sales development, the trend toward targeted outbound prospecting, and the emergence of predictive technology that helps companies to hone in on their ideal customer profile," said Craig Rosenberg, head analyst at TOPO, a leading industry research firm. "The big buying trends in sales development over the next year are predictive platforms to manage and optimize all of their sales communications. Outreach's current product focus represents where the broader market for sales development and sales enablement is going." The Outreach enterprise sales communication solution With a range of sales acceleration tools suited for business and enterprise use, Outreach is the first technology platform that optimizes the entire communication process by combining workflow intelligence to make every sales activity faster and more effective. Outreach enables sales teams to:
  • Effortlessly streamline email and call campaigns with personalized and automated touchpoint sequences that include an optimized mix of phone calls, emails, LinkedIn messages, and more, depending on the unique way in which each prospect wants to be communicated.
  • Ensure that no opportunity is ever missed by leveraging Outreach's response detection engine that automatically tracks and creates unique tasks.
  • Gain valuable 360-degree visibility into sales operations and use real-time data to optimize for success.
  • Automatically keep sales records updated, eliminating time-consuming manual data entry with the industry's best tool for bidirectional data sync.
  • Avoid costly communication mistakes that frustrate or confuse prospects with advanced testing and error detection tools.
By enabling salespeople to streamline or automate their sequence of unique communication touches -- such as custom calls and emails -- sales communications can be rapidly and effortlessly scaled across the entire organization without losing the personal touch. As a result, businesses are able to significantly reduce the length of sales cycles and increase lead-to-sale conversions. Outreach's focus on enabling repeatable and scalable sales processes empower sales teams to measure the effectiveness of sales activities and provides data-informed recommendations that help salespeople optimize their sales workflow for success.