Outreach Explore: Winter 2020

Customers buy on emotion and justify their decisions with logic. According to a Harvard study, 95 percent of purchasing decisions are subconscious. So, why rely solely on “vanity metrics” — like click, open, and reply rates — to tell us whether our selling efforts work for buyers?

To solve this challenge, Outreach is excited to introduce Outreach Insights featuring Buyer Sentiment Analysis, a first-of-its-kind machine learning technology that classifies buyer emotions and signals to accurately measure sales engagement. We’re rolling out two new reports featuring buyer sentiment, of many to come, to enable customers with actionable insights into their sequence and team performance.

Sequence Performance Report

Measure and analyze true engagement with Buyer Sentiment Analysis to optimize sequence and content performance. This report helps content managers understand how sales engagement sequences resonate with buyers and track trends in sequence performance and attribution to booked meetings.

Team Performance Report

Track teams and reps against metrics like booked meetings, engagement frequency, and prospects sequenced. Sales managers now have a daily dashboard to see how their reps are performing against key performance KPIs.

“When leadership asks how sequences perform, I want to answer with what activities are really driving the right outcomes — positive interactions, meetings, pipeline!” says Kari Schneider, Director, Velocity Sales & Sales Development at Zendesk.

It’s time to reinvent how you measure your sales efforts so you can focus on what really matters — your buyers. Sign up now for our public beta, available in January 2021!

Outreach has built a powerful platform for helping sellers engage with their customers using Outreach’s core application. We recognized that we all work differently, yet one common fact is that we’re all constantly in our email. To make scheduling meetings easier and ensure deals don’t slip, we’re bringing the best of Outreach right into your inbox, all while syncing every email and meeting to CRM, automatically.

Clear, Fast Scheduling

It’s a known fact that the faster you book next steps for a meeting, the quicker the deal moves forward. Outreach makes scheduling meetings with the right internal attendees quick and efficient by highlighting availability that respects colleague working hours, provides meeting buffers, and displays multiple time zones at once. New proposed meeting time icons create a simpler, clearer experience for your buyers to book meetings directly within your email.

Automatic Reminders

Outreach already gives you the option to add sequences or reminders to each of your emails. With new Automatic Reminders, Outreach does the remembering for you by default to reduce time between follow-ups so prospects don’t go dark and deals slip. Now every message needing action will be automatically bumped back up to the top of your inbox according to the schedule you determine. When a bump is created, you can add optional notes to add context to your upcoming reminder.

“The new calendar upgrade pulls prospects in from the CC field!” says an Enterprise Account Executive at a Forbes Cloud 100 customer. “That combined with the meeting buffers, new icons, and automatic reminders for all emails will make sure I never miss a thing!”

Sign up for our Enhanced Gmail Inbox Experience beta starting January 2021 to close more deals faster.

For years, “sales and marketing alignment” has been one of the most pressing topics in whitepapers, events, webinars, and any other discussion forum. Common friction areas including marketing asking sellers to inform their customers of events, new product releases, upcoming webinars, and more. Outreach helps marketers to close this gap by allowing them to create customized email content for sellers to use in Outreach.

With HTML Support for Outreach Templates and Snippets, Outreach empowers marketing, analytics, and even product and engineering teams to build more professional and elegant-looking content. Content can be further personalized, contain CTA buttons, insert tracking or customized URLs, or add sophisticated image layouts, giving brand marketing teams the flexibility they need to wow their customers.

"It’s a game changer,” says the Sales Director at one of the largest Washington DC lobbying groups. “It’s an extension of Outreach that lets us reach our customers in a way that stands out. We’re now able to send sophisticated marketing invitations at scale."

Experiment with customized content at scale by joining the beta for HTML Support starting February 2021.

To be an effective sales manager, you must be able to predict your team’s numbers. This requires confidence in each team member’s ability to move their deals forward. Ultimate confidence in a deal comes from digging into the weeds to make sure all the right things are happening. Is there a next step? Are multiple people engaged and championing your solution? Is there a recognized pain you can solve?

Outreach makes it easy to quickly determine the health of an opportunity with our Centralized Opportunity Management View. Key deal metrics around who is tied to the deal, when they were last contacted, and if there are next steps or an upcoming meeting are all accessible from a single page for your entire team’s book of business. Outreach gives you the ability to both dig into specific deal activities and coach your sellers in real-time towards the actions that move opportunities forward.

“Our SMB AE team works a TON of opportunities. Being able to quickly view our full pipeline and filter by opportunity attributes is huge for us,” says the Sales Leader at a top five social media giant. “We need this in Outreach so we can immediately engage our deals through tasks and sequences.”

Join our beta starting January 2021 to inspect deals at a glance for confidence in your forecast!

With so many sales tools available today, ensuring your sellers have the right access to the right applications in your tech stack can be laborious, time-consuming, and may pose security risks if done incorrectly. Compound this by hundreds or thousands of users...you get the idea.

Identity management systems such as Okta and Azure Active Directory help to centralize administration of user access to the appropriate applications resulting in increased efficiency and reduced security risks.

With the SCIM API, admins can automatically provision and deprovision users in Outreach by connecting Outreach to your identity management system. This keeps Outreach user accounts and permissions in sync with your internal onboarding and offboarding processes with zero extra effort!

“Onboarding our entire salesforce while managing natural employee turnover is not scalable with manual user licensing,” says Project Lead at a Forbes Top 25 World's Most Valuable Brands company. “Outreach’s SCIM API is necessary for us to automate provisioning for our global sales org of thousands of users.”

Join our beta starting January 2021 to ensure your sellers have access to Outreach their first day on the job, automatically!

As business needs change, revenue operations and IT teams are constantly updating CRM configurations to support new processes. Each update has a cascading effect as many systems look to CRM as the source of truth. In line with change management best practices, we know administrators want to trial configuration updates outside of their production Outreach system to avoid any unforeseen impact to sellers.

With Plugin Configuration Manager, Outreach admins can export, migrate, and restore a snapshot of their CRM<>Outreach plugin configuration. Admins can easily test then promote sandbox changes to production in minutes, saving admins up to twenty hours each time plugin changes are necessary. Testing, copying, and moving configurations between environments is now as easy as exporting, then importing a file!

“This is exactly what we need”, says IT Lead at a Fortune 100 Outreach customer. “With this new capability, our team will save 2-3 days of manual effort [updating Salesforce plugin due to CRM changes].”

To request to join our private beta starting February 2021 to simplify sandbox testing and promotion, please email your Customer Success Manager.

When purchasing a new technology, a primary concern should be ease of adoption and administration. To ensure your organization can maximize ROI on Outreach usage across your revenue teams, we have invested heavily in building a comprehensive self-service training portal, the industry-leading professional services offering and the largest service partner ecosystem in Sales Engagement.

To go one step further, the Outreach Certification program will be available in January 2021 to certify Outreach experts in your own organization. This is a one-of-a-kind, scientifically tested program with a 2-hour proctored exam that enables expert Outreach admins to validate their Outreach mastery. Anyone certified should proudly display this achievement on their LinkedIn and resume. Revenue leaders can be confident Certified Outreach administrators are best-in-class, with the unique skillset to unlock the next level of sales engagement for your organizations.

The exam covers:

• Content Creation
• System Configuration (Governance)
• Data and User Management
• Integrations
• Triggers
• Platform Functionality, Navigation, and Reporting
• Voice
• Troubleshooting

“I have been around Outreach since its conception and have watched functionality grow immensely,” says Jordan Greaser, CEO of Greaser Consulting. “This certification captures the core components of Outreach administration and the key strategies that drive success. Becoming Outreach certified is a must to prove you have the skills and knowledge to administer Outreach effectively in any organization.”

Register today to officially certify your Outreach mastery!