Why customer insights are key to supercharging the full sales cycle

The art of sales has become a science. The more intel you can get — on the opportunity, on the messages that resonate, on the motions and processes that work, on the risks to a deal — the more likely you will be to close deals and hit your revenue targets. That's why Outreach looked beyond one stage in the sales process and built a comprehensive platform to support the full deal cycle. The actions, sentiments, movements, and other data from each stage combine with the power of Outreach's proprietary AI to surface actionable insights, anticipate what's coming next, and suggest a course of action. 

With the right insights and respective strategies, reps have more confidence and more momentum in moving deals forward. Managers have real, accurate information on best practices to be better, more targeted coaches. Revenue leaders have higher fidelity forecasts rooted in the reality of their sales teams and markets, and can take the right steps to ensure their teams hit their goals.

Here are just a few ways the Outreach platform makes all this possible:

Actionable insights

Data is only as powerful as what you can do with it. As a deal progresses, Outreach uses the signals from previous stages to highlight risks, inform and refine recommended next steps, foster collaboration, and uncover areas for improvement in the selling process. 

Outreach makes this possible via Deal Health Scores. By analyzing the actions taken throughout an opportunity, prospect sentiments from calls, emails, and other interactions, deal progression, historical trends, and more, Outreach assigns a Deal Health score, which shows you how your opportunities are tracking and the likelihood to close. Deal Health insights give you tips on what's going well and where to focus to improve the health of the deal and the probability of winning it. 

Risk mitigation

Objections aren’t the end of the conversation, they’re an opportunity for progression. According to a study by Forrester, 62% of prospects prefer when account execs are able to field these objections live on a call as “it shortens sales cycles”.¹ What's more, prospects are more confident in these AEs (53%).  

Outreach's conversational intelligence (CI) capabilities, powered by AI-virtual assistant Kaia™, assists reps in real-time, during conversations with prospects, with in-the-moment content, including how to immediately navigate competitive objections, pricing or product questions, and more. No need to waste hours or even days of information gathering before circling back with an email to answer these questions, just a natural flow of conversation with all the information sellers need to keep doing what they do best.

And after the call, Kaia assists with an automated capture of all meeting details and action items to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. 

Revenue outcomes

Conversational intelligence is a key part of the puzzle, leveraging insights to help reps more effectively sell, but it's most impactful as a part of the whole. On its own, CI can really only serve as a tool to record and analyze calls after they are complete. As a part of the Outreach platform, these conversations can generate insights to better understand the health and risks to each deal, and the broader forecast. 

For sales managers and leaders, Outreach's projected sales forecasts leverage historical trends and insights throughout each deal's cycle, accurately calculating and predicting expected quarter- and year-end results for each rep, territory, segment, or business. Leaders can see where there might be process bottlenecks, gaps in pipeline coverage, and other risks to hitting revenue targets and understand the actions that need to be taken to get back on track.

“With Outreach, we have insight into what’s working and what’s not working across multiple channels. We also have more insight into which deals we are most likely to win based on our activity data. This is ultimately going to drive better pipeline, which will drive the revenue generation we’re looking for, ” explained Salvatore Cirillo, Chief of Staff to the Chief Revenue Officer at Renaissance Learning.

What’s next?

The Outreach vision, and the power in having a platform that serves and connects all the stages of a deal, is that each deal stage and each action taken creates more insight for the next. This platform is available, and sales teams can start supercharging deal cycles now. But that's just the start of the innovation. We recently announced 9 top innovations we are bringing to our platform in the coming months. If you missed Unleash, you can read more and get a sneak peak in our Smart AI Assist blog announcement.

The future of sales isn’t just in data, but using that data to derive actionable insights. It’s in informing those insights with as much context and relevance as possible; and it’s in connecting those insights and serving them up at the right times through the sales cycle so that revenue teams can be smarter about the steps they take to drive customers to close and beyond. 

¹ Generational Shifts Fundamentally Change B2B Buyer and Seller Dynamics, A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership paper commissioned by Outreach, June 2022