Leading with precision: How sales leaders use data to stay on target

Sales leaders need clear, actionable insights to coach effectively and drive results—and that starts with data. In this Outreach on Outreach session, Senior Director of Enterprise Sales Greg Baumann walks through how he uses Outreach reporting to understand team performance, identify trends, and stay ahead of the curve. Whether you're tracking pipeline creation, meeting hold rates, or persona engagement, learn how to make the most of Outreach’s reporting tools to lead with confidence. 

Hey, everybody. My name is Greg Baumann. I'm one of our senior sales leaders here at Outreach for our enterprise, and, I am here to walk you through an outreach on outreach for sales leadership. 

Today, we're going to be talking about leading with data and understanding the number one question that I'm asked all the time. What is my team doing, and how can I help them? So here, we're going to navigate over in the left panel to our reports section. So you probably know Outreach has robust reporting. 

And if you do not know that Outreach has robust reporting, please open up your Outreach and follow along with me because it's a really special section for you. First, we're going to go over to the sales execution report. Right? This is something that I am looking at on a monthly basis. 

This is giving me a full, like, analyst level read of what's happening across my team from the very first interaction that my team is having out into their territory to the amount of revenue that we are able to attribute to those activities. 

So I'm going to show you how to set up yours so that you can be just as effective in managing and understanding your business month over month. 

Now, there's a couple of things here that we do from a comparison perspective. I can look time frame to time frame. I can look team to team. I can compare specific users against each other, groups of users against each other, or I can do no comparison. 

As a sales leader, nothing is no comparison, as you guys know that. Everything is very competitive. Everything is very compared. So we're going to look at time frames. I care a lot about making sure that my team is improving month over month. So we're going to look at how we did in April versus how we did in May. 

Just like everything else in outreach, you can do your filtration you you're filtering here, your filtration. You can do your filtering over here on the right. You can filter against users, against teams, and you can set your currency as well if you have an international group. 

So here, we're going to start at the very top. Over here, I can expand this. I'm going to go ahead and expand it. 

Digging Into Activity and Engagement Metrics

So this is going to show me at the very top what are those activities that my team is doing to generate pipeline within their within their, book of business? So I'm able to see things like, what are the number of prospects contacted across my team? And everything on this page, if I hover over on it, it is going to give you the dictionary definition of what that means. Right? We know that prospects can mean one thing from one department to another within your organization. We know that contact can mean different things to different people. And so we're going to define those specifically so that as you're reviewing these metrics for yourself, you know exactly what they mean. 

So here, I'm able to see what the month over month or period over period changes. Right? So to my team, if you're watching this, we decreased from May to April. We need to get back to our April energy. Right? We're down thirteen percent in the month over month comparison. 

I'm able to see too the change in percentage through sequences. Right? 

We I'm asked this a lot because outreach is sort of the granddaddy of sequencing. 

This is an amoral comparison. Right? If your team is only using forty seven percent of their outreach through sequence, that's just fine. This is creating opportunity for your team to be most effective in those one on one communications. 

And so if that's happening almost half the time for that compare for the sequences, that's actually a really good mix. Other teams within outreach will have, like, a nineties percentile. Others will have maybe twenty five percent, and that's just fine too. But being able to understand how much and which sequences your team is using is a really good thing to be able to look at in a single click. 

We're able to walk through things too here, like email delivery, call, tasks executed, LinkedIn, and others. Right? So it's going to show me all of those different activity channels and how that bleeds through my, funnel. 

Now we have some really interesting things here in terms of we've made the activity, how is the customer interacting with it? 

So we're able to see things like prospect response, what percent have responded through sequences, what our email reply rate is looking for, and some things that are really unique to Outreach, and that is sentiment. What sort of positive sentiment trends are we seeing? What sort of objection, trends are we seeing? And then what sort of call answer rates are we seeing too? So fantastic, in May to see an increase in our email positive, sentiment, and then actually a significant decrease in our objection rate. So really good stuff to see as we're matriculating through our funnel. 

Tracking Meetings, Pipeline, and Revenue Impact 

Next year, we have art. Once we've made the connection, what happens when in terms of meetings? Right? Meetings tend to be a really critical point in any sales funnel. So being able to understand here how many prospects have been invited to meetings, what sort of meetings, what percentage of those meetings are being booked and scheduled and held, and things like our hold rate. So it's tremendous here to see that our team's meeting hold rate stays incredibly strong, and that's really important for me and my team that we're watching that. 

And then finally here, we're able to understand opportunity creation metrics. How many opportunities have been created? What percentage of that through sequence? What sort of revenue can we attribute to the work that we were doing that month? And what sort of closed one revenue can we see from that period too? So really, really awesome data here. If you're not making this part of your, like, last Friday of the month cycle, I would highly encourage you to do this, and you get a lot of the really good outcomes from that. 

Monitoring Daily Performance with Team Dashboards

Now some of the things that I'm looking at on a weekly, and if not daily basis, is is my team performance summary. So we're going to go back over to the menu here, and you'll see the team performance report on the dashboard. And so here, it's really awesome for me to be able to quickly look and find out what is my team doing. Are they hold are they upholding the KPIs that we've agreed upon and that they're, like, charging towards each month? 

Similarly, it's got all of the same filter requirements. 

There's some really awesome things here, like being able to filter against persona. This is really important. My team is having our most effective calls above the line with sales leaders and operations and marketing and enablement leaders. And so I can filter specifically against that to see how my team is doing. But for the purposes of this demo, we're just going to look at it more broadly. 

Outreach's AI and machine learning is able to help me say, you know, we're on the ninth day of June here. Based on how many meetings we've already created and booked for this month, how am I trending for the rest of the period? So it's saying that right now, we've booked nineteen meetings for the month so far, and we're on pace to do seventy five meetings across the team. That's outstanding. 

I'm able to understand some of those factors within that, like how many prospects have we added, how many prospects have been contacted, what our meeting conversion rate and contacts per prospect are. 

Even better, if I scroll down here, I can see from my team who is leading for these things. 

A number of these, data points are great because they're clickable. So I can really easily click in here and understand of those cumulative meetings booked, what sort of meeting types are they, when were they held, and who sort of attended those meetings. 

Similarly, I'm able to understand things like prospects contacted. For us, it's really important to understand the seniority level that my team is reaching out to. And so with Outreach's machine learning, I'm able to understand specifically what those people are. 

This is something that I'm capturing in my forecast call each week and saying, hey. These are specific personas and seniority levels that my team was able to set meetings with so that my leadership fully understands where we're having conversations and where we're not. Before Outreach, that was something that was constantly a struggle for sales teams to understand who are we speaking to, why are they or aren't they converting, and what is my team to driving doing to drive more of those conversations? Now I'm able to see all of this in a single place just automatically captured. 

We have some more, like, sort of smart things here too that, like, our BI and analytics team has been really helpful in in the past. Now they've helped create this in our platform. And so being able to understand things like meeting conversion rate, being able to understand things like, response time, and being able to understand things like meeting held rate are really important for me. And the fact that I don't have to go to a a new dashboard or a new sort of, like, back office tooling for that and and be able to see this in single split space is really awesome for me as a leader. 

Now it's awesome too for me to be able to look at this across, like, a team's view. So if you're managing multiple teams, you can understand the team level performance for these things. 

And then also being able to understand from an accounts perspective, what are the accounts that you're booking these meetings with? How many prospects are you speaking to? So for myself as an enterprise sales leader, I've led strategic teams here at Outreach. And for the leaders in the strategic and enterprise team that I speak within our customer base, this is really big to understand. 

Okay. We need to make big traction in company a and company b and company c. How can I keep myself and my team accountable to that? So, lots of goodness here. 

If you haven't had a chance to use more data in Outreach to coach and manage your teams, I highly recommend using our sales execution report on about a monthly basis, and I really recommend setting time daily and weekly to review the team performance dashboard. It's going to give you the specific coaching and actionable tips that you need to take to your sales team and to take to your leadership in terms of reporting what's happening within your business. Thanks so much for joining us on this Outreach and Outreach.