Outreach

Sequences is what makes Outreach so powerful. The fact that you can time, automate, and blast various emails to prospects using custom variables for a personalized feel is what makes Outreach so powerful. My role requires me to send mass volumes of emails to specific personas at various B2B companies. Most people don't respond after just 1 email. By loading multiple folks into a sequence and blasting that sequence has saved me significant time.

Outreach also acts a CRM that keeps track of all communications. You can use filters to find specific prospects who have been sequenced or if they've been opted out or if they're in a specific stage in a sequence. These custom filters enable for specific targeting and tailoring.

Outreach does require level of training to some extent that isn't straightforward. For example, knowing how to load sequences, or create triggers, or how to automate certain tasks does require some playing around that is not intuitive unless you have some training. Our organization needed some 3rd party training for us to actually grasp the various aspects and nuances of Outreach. Without that 3rd party training, we would've made numerous mistakes and probably wouldn't have utilized the tool to the maximum efficiency.

At first, Outreach can look a bit overwhelming, but once you get through some early training, it will become second nature and best friend for prospecting. We also use Outreach as our dialer. What I love most is the ability to make quality drip campaigns, email sequencing that can be combined with phone and LinkedIn messaging, along with integrating with SFDC. I'm also a big fan of using Snippets which is a great way to create short sentences or data that you want to include in emails, while not going overboard on boring templates.

Not much, other than there's a lot going on. There are account and prospect views that you can build reports on top of that I really never use, but I'm sure could be useful. If you can focus on core functionality, then it's really quite easy to use.

We moved across from Groove to Outreach and this was one of the best decisions we made. Outreach connects much better to other tools in our stack and the functionality is on another level. Outreach has enabled our SDRs to stop wasting time context switching between loads of tabs and focus on prospecting, maximizing their time prospecting. I am a big fan of Outreach!

It would be great if it were simple to include a profile picture without the weird needing to have an avatar process on another platform.

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.

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.

Outreach is a fantastic tool that enables me and my colleagues to be much more productive in our sales outreach. It's great to be able to schedule emails in advance and even put prospects into sequences for more extended outreach efforts (no pun intended) without the need to actively manage and pay attention to them.

It's also great at helping keep me organized in terms of tasks I need to follow up on like calls.

They're ability to track email opens and clicks is also extremely valuable in identifying which prospects are engaging most with the material I send over.

Outreach also has some other analytics that seem somewhat helpful as well, though haven't dug too much into these or really leveraged them to great extent for our team.

There are some features that leave me wanting though. There are instances where I'd like to add just a slight bit of personalization for a very select few members of a sequenced group but in order to do that, I either need to have a reminder to catch that scheduled email right before it sends out (which defeats the purpose of the automation) or create an entirely new sequence just for 1 or 2 people which can really bog up my sequence view.

Cheaper solutions like Yesware are able to allow for automated one-off sequences or email chains with a log built in to stop following emails if there's a response. Seems like it should be a fairly straight forward functionality but it's noticeably lacking in this platform.