HCL Sametime (formerly IBM Lotus Sametime, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in 2018) is an enterprise-level unified communications and VoIP platform. It includes features such as instant messaging, web conferencing, voice and video integration, telephony capabilities, and presence information.
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Outreach
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Outreach is offered as a revenue workflow platform for all revenue teams. Outreach infuses predictive, assistive, conversational, and agentic AI to power use cases across revenue motions. From new logo prospecting to expansions, deal acceleration, driving retention, and forecasting, Outreach AI automates workflows and frees sellers to focus on more strategic conversations and actions. Revenue leaders receive connected account visibility, performance insights, and higher…
Sametime is well suited for very quick conversations, where you know the person is an active Sametime user. It also serves as an easy way to reach out to someone you may not know when looking for an answer to a quick question, as they are likely to be a Sametime user. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use Sametime for Audio or Video chat. The quality and reliability are horrendous.
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.
Sametime's web-based interfaces are "zero load", requiring no plug-ins to be installed to join a meeting, launch a meeting, or use chat in a browser. A plugin is required only if you want to share your screen.
Integration with IBM Notes is very tight. Sametime's chat status can change according to your Notes calendar. You can easily see if someone who just emailed you is available to chat. Your chat History is right inside Notes as well.
IBM's mobile apps are top notch. We automated the apps for our users thanks to IBM's work with third party MDMs. This made it very simple for us to deploy the Sametime mobile apps -- Chat and Meetings -- and get new capabilities such as Audio & Video mobilized quickly.
No down time, ever. The rock solid WebSphere back-end of Sametime means the environment is always up. Period.
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.
Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.
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.
Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.
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.
Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.
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.
Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish
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.
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.
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.
We use Jabber globally in our company and Symphony (no relevant app in able list) in some of the teams as well. All these are instant messenger tools, but Sametime is the easiest one to be used and its chat history is easy to be searched. Sametime can be used to contact almost all internal staff as it’s included in default computer package. Symphony is used to chat with front end business while Jabber is used for call.
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.
Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.
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.
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.
