How an Account Executive uses Outreach

How's it going everybody? Marshall Perez here at Outreach. I'm a commercial account executive here at the local Seattle Hub. Today, I'm going to show you how I use Outreach on a daily basis. For most account executives, we always like to look at our pipeline, of course. I like to start up my day opening up Outreach. First thing I get a quick view into is actually what's going to be upcoming or so my to-dos, my tasks. But again, we want to see what's going on with our pipeline. So what I'm going to do is take a look at just that. Now, we of course are going to have lots of deals working, multiple stages. How do we organize this? What are we looking at first? What are my priorities? Well, I think we can probably all agree that we're going to be most interested in our biggest bets. So I'd like to sort my opportunities first and foremost by dollar amount. Now, on the opportunity views, I do have all kinds of different ways and flavors. So for example, I can look at my opportunities by close date, potentially if we're looking at a monthly pacing versus quarterly pacing. Maybe I want to look into quarter and see what deals are going to be closing at a little bit of a quicker clip. But for today, I'm going to be focusing on my biggest deal that's going to be coming into the pipe, which, as you can see up here at the top, is the AKG Consulting Group. Now, Outreach is going to be feeding me a lot of insights as far as what's happening on my deals, which is really nice because it helps free up my mental capital, if you will. We only have so much bank for memory nowadays. So you'll see a couple of things happening right now. This little almost looks kind of like a traffic light under the deal health column. Now, what this is telling me is exactly how my deals are progressing, the health of them. So as you can see, I have different categories, the things that are positive and also things on the deal, particularly that are going to need my attention. I'm able to scroll through here. And the thing that I really want to try to avoid in my day to day life is moving back and forth between multiple systems. I don't want to click here, click there, look at this, look at Salesforce. I just want to streamline my day. So if I'm looking at my opportunities and I realize maybe my stage is outdated, for example, and I want to go ahead and change this over to proposal or potentially even move it back, maybe we just had some new people come into the fold or we have some new variables. So now the deal is going to slow down back to discovery. I can go ahead and click and edit this. But the nice thing is that for me, I don't have to go back to CRM and make that update, Outreach just went ahead and made that for me. Oftentimes we can probably all relate here. We're meeting with our sales leaders. They're wanting to know what's going on with our deals. They have the visibility to go ahead and check and see all these updates that we're making as well. So it saves them time. It saves us time on the meetings. We can also focus here on really what's most important, right? Which is where is this deal headed? What is my next step? Do I have a next step? Now I'm able to just go in here and make these edits on the fly. Best practice here is just to go ahead and add a date. So if maybe tomorrow I'm meeting with procurement, I can go ahead and just drop down a nice little note. We'll save this. And again, not only is this going to be visible to me, it's also going to be visible in CRM. So let's go ahead and take a look into what's happening here with my big bet, my AKG consulting group opportunity. I'm going to be fed quite a few pieces of information that are going to be really most relevant to me as an account executive for what's going on with the deal that I want to know about. Of course, how am I pacing? So I'm forecasting that this deal is going to close first thing in the new year. So great way to ring in 2024 as long as I can keep this thing on pace. I'm alerted to when my next meeting is. I can also see exactly what's been happening with my conversations with all the buyers that are involved. So before I'm going to go ahead and reach out to my team to update them on the latest stats and what's happening on the deal. It's been a few days. I want to give myself a quick refresher of the last meeting that I had with Jeremy. So I'm able to pop in here and see, OK, we had this virtual meeting with Jeremy. Obviously, we talked about quite a bit over the course of 14 minutes. So rather than watching this virtual meeting, tabbing through, trying to find the most important parts, KAIA, which is the conversational intelligence piece of this platform that was riding alongside during this meeting, has went ahead and summarized the meeting for me. So I can look through here and find the important bullet points. For example, if we were talking about a competitor, how they were using the competitor, maybe there was a contract date that was expressed that I need to remind myself to to to align to. But at the same time, while I was going through this meeting live with Jeremy, I was jotting down some notes. And so I'm able to scroll through and take a quick look at all the little key things that Jeremy had said that really grabbed my attention and just go straight to these points in the conversation. I'm also able to take a quick look back in here and if maybe there's just one simple thing I want to know, which, again, hey, what were the next steps? I can ask KAIA to find those for me in the conversation. Now, when we have a longer meeting, maybe an hour long or a big 45 minute sync with multiple people, multiple decision makers, this can be extremely helpful for me to not have to go through and watch a really long recording. So KAIA is going to go ahead and search the recording for me and go ahead and populate the most logical next steps that we discussed in that meeting. So this is just a quick one minute that it takes me to get completely up to speed on my most important deal on the latest conversation that happened. Now we have multiple decision makers, as you can see, this is a large strategic deal that has had multiple steps. I get a lot of stakeholders involved. It's really important and extremely difficult as an account executive to keep everybody aligned, keep everybody on the same page, communicate, know what the next steps are. Most importantly, hold people accountable for their action items to get to those next steps. So we're probably all doing this today in various ways, ships and forms. We create a mutual success plan, an action plan, something of the sort. We may share a Google Doc or something in SharePoint that lists out a plan of all the steps and all the things that we need from different stakeholders in the deal. Well, why would we want to move away from the tool that we're actually doing all of our communication in? Let's just have it all in one window. So we built in a success plan that I'm able to build, collaborate, communicate with all of my stakeholders in this AKG consulting group opportunity right here in Outreach. So it helps me. And most importantly, it's really going to help them stay on track. So what does this look like? Well, the nice thing is that you can build this in one of two different ways. We have templates that are can be consistent with your sales methodology, whether it's something like Medpicc that a lot of us are using today, or maybe it's something that's a little bit more specific to a big enterprise deal that you're doing. Whatever the case may be, you build your success plan, you align your steps with what you've spoken to and what's been communicated from your customers. So as you can see here, I'm moving down through my timeline and my different steps. Again, this is a late stage deal. So we've completed a lot of the grunt work. Our security view is done. Your procurement is done. And now we're here at the very final stages. One thing that just happened is an email was received on this deal that my champion had actually just moved on and accepted a new opportunity. Don't we all love when that happens? So now we have a new person that's coming into the fold. And the new person is needing to get caught up on where the deal is at, what's happened in the past, most importantly, what the next steps are. So what we're going to need to do is communicate that out, not only to our new team member at the client, but also with all the existing people that we have that are working on this deal. Everybody that's involved in this mutual action plan and success plan. So what I'm doing is I'm taking a look into my action item here for the next step, which is, again, a signature date by December 20th. Fun fact, that happens to be my birthday. Has no alignment there whatsoever. So in looking at this particular step here, what I'm going to want to do is go ahead and make sure that, all right, we're going to go ahead and send a note out to the team. We are. Introduce our new champion, right? agent from procurement And today it's going to be me. Now you can see here, I do have the option, and this can really help out as everybody watching this video can probably relate. There's communications that need to be strictly internal within our team here at Outreach or your team, wherever you are selling today. And also communications, of course, that want to go out to the entire team. So if this was an internal communication, I can go ahead and make that designation. But today we're going to go ahead and send that out to the entire team and let them know that we're welcoming in Marshall to the deal space, who's going to help out with the final contract review. So now that I've sent that note out, what just happened? An email goes out to all of the members that are involved here. And what this looks like from the customer's end, it's really clean. It's very simple. It's intuitive. It's easy to use. So they're going to get a notification like this, and the new champion is going to get one of these as well. And now this is going to enable them to log in to the success plan. Nice thing is that it doesn't require any real strict credentials. The fact that it went to their email address is validating that it's already them. And when they're opening up the success plan, it's going to take them into a version that looks just like the one that we're looking at today in my dashboard. They're going to be able to see the comments that are happening not only across the entire success plan, but if they're specific and relative to a particular point in the deal. Last thing that we want to do is message somebody in procurement about something that needs to only happen in IT sec, for example. That's not their world. We don't want to bother them with that. So I've sent my note out. The team's been notified. Marshall's been notified. So not only do I want to keep some accountability going on that part, but I also want to keep myself accountable for my own particular timeline here. So one thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and schedule a meeting, and I'm going to add my contact directly to the meeting. And again, key thing to think about is that we're not going out of the platform. Typically, I'd have to move in a Gmail at this point or move into Outlook. All of my contacts are already loaded up here. So I can just simply select the one that I want, select the meeting type. It could just be a quick sync. Could be something more involved. My agenda can already be preloaded for me relative to the specific meeting type. I look exactly at what's available on my calendar. Yes, we want to stay consistent with our gym routine, everybody. We'll pick a time. We'll go ahead and send the meeting invite, and off it goes. Now, I'll move in here, and I'll go ahead and just add a little task for myself. Again, this is just keeping me accountable because we all know squirrel syndrome is a real thing for us account executives. Ensure meeting booked. Now, one variable that this is going to add is we're bringing in a new champion. Again, there's a lot of moving parts in this deal. We need to catch them up to speed, and we might also need to catch a couple other people up to speed. We're going to have to think about where we're looking at as far as our timeframe. Again, we have this scheduled out to be on December 20th. Now, my sales leader, my sales leader, sales leader are going to be asking about this deal on a routine basis. Their forecastability is going to be coming down exactly on this. I might want to go ahead and give myself a little bit more breathing room here knowing that this has just added another variable to my deal. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and give myself a week. I'm going to move out my timeframe to December 27th. This way, not only again my sales leader, but my sales leader, sales leader, who's looking at the success plan knows that there's been a little bit of extra time. We're still on pace to close it by January 1, but again, we want to be realistic in our forecasting. Like we always say over here at Outreach, protect the forecast. That's how I'm using Outreach every day, protecting my forecast, ensuring that my opportunities are going to close by the dates that I'm forecasting them. AI is going to be helping me along the way with telling me where my deals are at, what needs my attention, what doesn't. Most importantly, we're collaborating with our clients, so we're sharing that mutual experience, and everybody is abreast, and we're making sure that we win these deals on time. Thank you.