Outreach vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Outreach is well suited for teams that need to do cold outbound to prospects. It's easy enough to create sequences that will use a variety of touchpoints (email, inMail, call, etc...). It's also easy to share sequences with team members to collaborate and the very best messaging. Outreach's integration over Salesforce and Gmail is also invaluable, without it each team member would probably spend hours per week clicking between tabs just to get to prospect information On the other hand, Outreach is not the best to help you create content, as of this writing there is no AI support. It is also worth noting that Outreach's permission structure can create a lot of confusion for team members and that untangling errors at times can become complex

Incentivized

Sales Cloud is very well suited for the daily leads and opportunity pipeline management as well as user management. Sales process automation are very helpful for repetitive tasks. It integrates well with other platforms. It's easy to customize and report on data. Sales Cloud can be pricey so is only open to larger org's that need complex CRM. User adoption is slow to any new users that have no prior experience.

Incentivized

• Organization - I know when to make calls/emails/LinkedIn connections without having to overthink anything.
• Alignment - the colleagues I work with on my accounts can keep tabs on my activity so there is no redundancy or overcommunication.
• Ease of use - all my contacts are in one place, and sending automated emails I have built in my sequences give me so much time back in my day.

Incentivized

• Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
• Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
• API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
• Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.

Incentivized

• Customer Service - zero support for small - medium businesses.
• Billing - billing is messy, and customer service for billing questions is pretty awful (if anyone is ever available).
• Bounce Rates - our bounce rates are through the roof when using Outreach which isn't a problem we have with HubSpot or Pardot.

Incentivized

• I have hard-coded the auto-update of the phone number format and state format from some codes shared by the community, but I do not know where to do it. I cannot reset it either.
• It is unclear what functionalities each version has. We use the enterprise version, and it seems we can only have one design of the pipeline. But different business segments would have very different sales cycles, and hence, pipeline tracking would be different. It would be nice to have this available in our version.
• It seems I cannot create a report to pull notes logged at the account levels.

Incentivized

I like Outreach, but I do wonder about new competitors that are 25-50% less expensive.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

The ease of use for outreach is next to none. Everything is clearly explained, you can hop on a call with their support team whenever, and it effortlessly integrates into your computer. You can do everything you need sales related on it, and the learning curve is small. I'd recommend it as a first and last CRM.

Incentivized

Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.

Incentivized

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

The overall support of Outreach has been great. Whenever I have a problem, they were quick to fix it and typically respond within one business day. I don't typically have many requests for support because a lot of my questions can be answered through their knowledge panel. They have been fantastic to work with overall.

Incentivized

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

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 have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Although we required a special setup, the process was quick. But we paid a lot for the implementation and didn't use 33% of the hours we purchased.

Incentivized

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

We found that Outreach was superior to Salesloft and Gong, and a better fit for our organization for the following reasons:

• User interface and overall experience: it's just a cleaner platform and easier to work in than the other two.
• Feature set: the other two tools had more bells and whistles, but sometimes less is more, and the core functionality of Outreach is preferable.
• Integration with Salesforce
• Price
• Customer support and training options are superior on Outreach

Incentivized

Salesforce Sales cloud is well integrated with a lot of other marketing and sales technology SAAS products that we use within our business, which is a big part of why I enjoy using it. Compared to NetSuite, it is a lot more user friendly, a modern platform that provides better visual understanding of sales pipeline and contains more useful data across the customer journey.

Incentivized

Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

I don't think there is a limit to Sales Cloud's scalability; at least, I haven't encountered one or heard of one. My data is not enormous, so perhaps some companies might encounter lags, but nothing from my end. I think I'll be able to use Sales Cloud from now until infinity.

Incentivized

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• The huge positive impact it had was the team not needing to spend as much time as disengaged opps as they were engaged ones. We were able to set sequences to work with them while the team could focus on generating new leads or converting Opps.
• For an AE - post demo communication is important. With templates and snippets we could just click a few buttons and have a really nice email sent out with the relevant information and then the next several steps already planned out. This freed up time for us and even allowed us to take calls a lot sooner after demo's then before. For busy days this was very helpful.

Incentivized

• All tools we've implemented with Salesforce had a pretty quick positive ROI with the exception of CPQ & Billing. That was a very large project that I would only suggest for businesses with many SKUs that tend to be packaged together.