Outreach

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.

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

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!

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.