Conversica provides lead management software for marketing, inside sales and sales groups.
$1,499
per installation
Outreach
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Outreach is a sales execution platform that helps market-facing teams create and predictably close more pipeline. From prospecting to deal management to forecasting, Outreach leverages automation and artificial intelligence to help revenue leaders increase the efficiency and effectiveness of go-to-market activities and personnel across the revenue cycle. Outreach offers sales engagement, revenue intelligence, and revenue operations functionalities in a unified platform. The software…
N/A
Pricing
Conversica
Outreach
Editions & Modules
Starter Edition
$1,499
per installation
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Conversica
Outreach
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
A Conversica subscription includes an unlimited number of seats for marketers, sales reps and managers. Different editions include different levels of functionality to match your needs. The service is a monthly subscription with an annual commitment.
Conversica and Outreach both provide businesses with marketing and lead generation tools to ensure that potential leads are captured instead of slipping through the cracks. Conversica is marketed as an AI virtual sales assistant, meaning that it provides businesses with a chatbot to capture data on website users and direct them to business users. Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps businesses optimize their interactions with potential buyers by automating email campaigns and integrating with CRM platforms. Both tools are popular with mid-sized businesses.
Features
Conversica and Outreach both provide some sales engagement features, such as email automation, but they both have some features that set them apart from each other.
Conversica offers some marketing features, but its primary focus is on its chatbot automation. Businesses can set up Conversica chatbots to answer simple questions for users or direct them to sales material. Outside of chatbot features, Conversica can automatically reach out to potential leads that don’t meet a business’s metrics for them to be reached out to by your sales team. In this way, businesses use Conversica to reach out to leads that are unlikely to convert in large numbers to ensure no buyers are missed.
Outreach is focused on automating sales processes such as automatic phone and email campaigns. Business can connect Outreach to CRM software to send personalized emails to specific users, while also providing analytics on the email campaign while it is ongoing. Outreach allows businesses to send out mass amounts of sales content quickly and without taking time out of the sales team’s day.
Limitations
Though Conversica and Outreach both include robust sales automation features, they each have some limitations that are important to consider.
Conversica offers chatbot and email automation features, but outside of the chatbot, its sales automation features aren’t as robust as those offered by sales engagement platforms. Businesses can’t use Conversica for dialing campaigns, and though it can send automated emails, it doesn’t provide detailed analytics for mass email campaigns. Businesses looking for a software to handle email and calling campaigns may prefer other options to Conversica.
Outreach provides detailed analytics features for email and call marketing campaigns, but it doesn’t provide a chatbot out of the box. Businesses can take advantage of Outreach’s integrations with popular chatbot options, such as Drift, but it can’t manage chatbot features on its own.
Pricing
Conversica and Outreach are both priced depending on what features are needed by the buyer. Businesses interested in either one can get a quote for whatever set of features they need.
Conversica is an excellent tool if you have a large database of potential students, sales leads, or other forms of potential customers/users. It does not replace human interaction, but instead supplements it - allowing your admissions/sales/retention team to spend their time with those individuals that are in most need of assistance - whether that be because they are "hot leads" for a sale, students with a sincere interest, or customers needing assistance beyond the capabilities of an automatic system.
Outreach is outstanding for volume outreach, as it allows you to touch many prospects and accounts with limited time, while also storing data on historical interactions with prospects. It can be useful for SDR/BDR roles, as well as SMB and MM volume of sales pipe, but I don't think it would be nearly as useful for enterprise sales where more strategic and lower volume outreach is needed. I believe that incorporating more AI assistance with writing would make it a more useful tool for strategic sales.
Conversica is great at working low level leads and surfacing those that are in fact interested in your product or service.
Conversica is also useful in weeding out leads that are not strong.
Since Conversica is sending emails to various prospects, customers and opportunities, it allows sales, account managers, service etc, to focus on other activities, thereby saving time and freeing up resources.
The method of standing up campaigns can be a little tedious for administrators because it uses copy/paste of Salesforce Campaign ID instead of just searching for active Salesforce campaigns.
Understanding the conversation path options that the AI could take is improving greatly, but can still use some improvements for admin awareness when standing up a new conversation.
Understanding what conversation types exist and how they differ from one another is sometimes difficult to self-serv, but the Conversica team is always very good about helping out explaining these.
When sequencing, I need to mark multiple leads, and using the search bar, it will uncheck all the leads that were previously checked.
Calls drop constantly.
Syncing contacts and leads with SF is challenging. The buttons to synchronize with CRM are available when searching for a contact or lead, but you cannot sync it when viewing the lead or contact itself.
Tool is extremely powerful but comes with a heavy price tag. As long as we close more than 30 deals with year with Conversica's assistance it will be an easy choice to renew. If we don't we will have to figure out if these funds are best spent in other lead generation places.
It's a strong tool that helps our sales development team manage a large number of qualified leads. The sequence framework ensures that every lead receives enough contact attempts that we have confidence that we're not abandoning our prospecting too early without the overhead of managing those activities manually.
Overall, Outreach is usable and scalable across team sizes. The only reason I give a nine and not a 10 is that there are improvements that can be made within the reporting feature. It is usable, but not everyone can easily self-learn the best practices. At times, it may require building 2-3 reports and then using a VLOOKUP in Excel to achieve the desired outcome.
In our years as Outreach customers, I can count the number of outages we've experienced on one hand. Generally, outages have been very brief and have not completely frozen our access to the platform. Scheduled maintenance is always proactive communicated and the hours never interfere with standard business hours or scheduled sequences.
Outreach's performance overall is very high quality. Pages load right away. Occasionally it might take a minute to generate a report, but not any slower than in other platforms I've used. Outreach is integrated into many of our other tools and seems to be a very clean integration. Everything runs very quickly.
Our account manager and support rep have been extremely helpful in helping us get the system where we wanted it. Given our original use case as a lead qualifier, a lot of the conversations needed to be altered or exceptions created in order to provide the customization we needed. Our AM and support rep were able to accommodate most of our requests and were extremely helpful in working with us on a solution.
There is almost zero customer support. What they do offer is a live chat feature which is active during "normal" business hours which is nice for instant inquiries if someone is available. However, you do not have a dedicated representative to address questions or concerns and their billing process is confusing and messy without any support.
We were trained in person and it was very easy to understand. And if we missed any pointers there was more training given to us. So i always like this tool. The drafts were also prepared for us to sync outreach with our devices so it was straightforward. Highly recommend
Lots of attention from the Outreach training team, with a great willingness to customize to our needs. To be clear, you get out what you put in. If you don't work with them, you'll get cookie-cutter training. But we asked for a lot of customization, and they delivered what we asked for.
The implementation went smoothly. The only advice I would give for anybody looking to integrate Conversica with Salesforce is to ensure that either you or somebody within your organization has experience with process builder as you'll need to create some processes to force your leads into Salesforce campaigns for the Conversica system to pick them up.
I expected more assistance in connecting Outreach with Salesforce. We have a basic connection, but many fields were left without a sync. We can apparently sync data without adding the app into Salesforce, but believe we could get more functionality with a better integration. The basics of setting up our sequences and using Outreac to run them was was fine.
I haven't looked into many other conversational ai products - we received a solid recommendation about using this and have been happy with the process and experience. Price was also pretty good, so we didn't feel a need to shop around on that front. If things change I'll do that homework, but we're happy for now
Outreach is designed with a workflow-first approach, which helps ensure that reps adopt the process and allows AI and machine learning to understand the full funnel. On top of this, Outreach offers more robust functionality, reporting, and integrations than other competitors. Outreach also understands user workflows, which helps influence rep behavior and outcomes.
When I first joined the company we were a sales team of 10. Over the last 4 years we have grown to 30 and have used Outreach the entire time. Everyone uses Outreach and it works for virtually any size business. The seat model works perfectly for any size company plus Outreach can handle hundreds of thousands of emails being sent out. We never have to worry about throttling or any type of lag time based on usage. This is key when scaling.
We have found that each conversation type has a different ROI. Some are very hard to report off of, whereas others are easy. this is because some are more built around building awareness of what we offer where they may not purchase it for months down the line.
Has helped us to save on salaries. If staff were to try to do the same thing our AI Assistant does, it would take them many hours to be as successful.
It's helped me speed up my ability to reach out to customers. I like bulk composing but would be even better if Outreach was able to recommend (daily/weekly/etc.) who we should reach out to based on intent/other metrics.
I will say outreach has improved our ability to book more meetings simply because it enables volume activities.
