Outreach

Pros

I love that this software is so heavily focused on outbound sales. This isn't marketing software that you can adapt to sales, this is software created and built for sales organizations. That fact is very obvious in the way they implement their features.

Outreach always leads the way in terms of feature innovation, and they continue to offer the best outbound email settings to truly automate your process. You can drop 1000 prospects into a sequence, throttle it to send 100 per day, set it to resume OOO replies after a few days, and set it and forget it. Just set up a schedule, make sure you exclude national holidays, and you don't have to touch it ever again.

Something they also do better than anyone is their task management. I frequently have a task as a step in a sequence (I.e. Connect with the person on LinkedIn), and when a prospect hits that stage it creates a task in the system. This happens hundreds of prospects at a time, but when you start your tasks it takes you into this workflow that lets you call/email/take notes on the action and just click next to take you to the next one. Really lets you get in the flow, and is an amazing tool for inserting a manual task into a sequence that you can still get through quickly.

Some examples of awesome features include:

1) Auto resume OOO
2) Fallback text in the templates
3) Automatically skip holidays
4) Phone call integration so you don't have to leave the app

Cons

I don't know that there are any cons. The only one that I can imagine is that when you start fresh on the system, the interface can be a little bit daunting. There are actually a lot of settings, and if you don't understand the hierarchy or what you use for what, it can get very complicated.

Thankfully they have good customer support and a LOT of good documentation, so it's not that bad if you spend some time learning it.

Pros

I love the ease of use. I work with many people new to sales, new to our industry and they fall in love with outreach. It automates our sales strategy. It helps us follow a cadence or campaign on emailing, calling, sending a LinkedIn message, etc. Without it, we would struggle to follow up with our clients.

Cons

There are some small things that I don't like with Outreach. Things get stuck in failed & pending states and you are not notified... These are usually found too late as well. Wish there was more of an aggressive notification when things happen that we should be aware of. Also - I would love for them to build out their interface better for closing roles and marketing roles. We have it for our SDRs but would struggle to have marketing and account executives use the tool at the same time.

Pros

Handling your outbound and inbound efforts via Outreach has made things much easier. Before we were using Yesware and although it was affordable the user design and analytics left a lot to be desired. With outreach we can see what sequences are performing the best, which email templates get the highest response, and even when the best time to send emails are. We are also easily able to A/B test within sequences or copy sequences that are working well for other Reps and duplicate. It has made it easy for me to increase how much outbound I am able to do and made it so I can target specific personas easily. I tend to work out of Outreach way more than I work out of Salesforce as an SDR.

Cons

I feel that there are still features I do not understand within Outreach that I might be able to use more effectively. If they could guide the user more to make sure we are leveraging more of the software I think that would add to it. One of the cons is that you are unable to make dials from your laptop via Outreach, it must come through your cell and I much prefer to make calls via my laptop.

Pros

It's pretty easy to use and figure out. Not much help is needed to make it work.

Cons

Quality and support! Outreach experiences issues regularly. There's always something wrong with it. What's worse is when you put in a support ticket, they always give you some generic issue that its on the customer's side. That's not the case! You then later find out that they lied and are exeriencing an outage. Then you ask repeatedly for a call back because your manager is upset with them and they can't bother to do that! They won't even acknowledge your request!

Pros

It allows you to ensure that every response that is interviewed face to face with the customer is highly productive. One platform to increase efficiency and effectiveness for Marketing, Sales Development, Closing and Success teams. Outreach provides fully customizable profiles and roles, and I love that it allows managers to lead their teams to success. In addition, ease of use is one of the most important things to understand the language of a program and I love the ease of use in Outreach.

Cons

Frankly, I haven't come across anything that I don't like. Very useful software. It gives you the chance to optimize the customer lifecycle for greater revenue and securely collaborate on a large scale. An excellent software that I find quite useful has nothing that I don't really like.