Robust Automation for Mail Merges and SDR Workflow
January 12, 2018

Robust Automation for Mail Merges and SDR Workflow

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Outreach

One of Outreach's strengths can also be a weakness - the number of features they develop and provide to their users. If you compared Outreach to a smart phone, it would be more analagous to Android than iPhone. The features and settings are myriad and highly customizable, but to such an extent that the average user can get lost in all the switches, menus, buttons and links. Some simplification of the user interface (or perhaps and option for Basic v. Advanced interfaces) would go a long way in helping users adopt many of the more useful features. Some available actions can be confusing (for example, when trying to get a prospect working in a sequence, there are options to 'Activate', 'Resume' and 'Retry', when in reality the end goal is to turn on the sequence for that prospect, and one single action could reasonably accomplish all three versions of that task.)
Outreach is currently used primarily by our SDR (insides sales prospecting/qualification) organization as a CRM and email campaign platform. We also have a couple of seats provisioned to training account managers that close training-only deals. This platform allows our reps to conduct massive outbound email campaigns to cold prospects, without storing that prospect information in our Salesforce instance and polluting our otherwise warm lead pool. Users import CSV files with prospect information into Outreach or import directly from Salesforce using the 'Outreach Everywhere' Chrome extension. Once imported, these prospects are 'sequenced' using custom-built email campaigns, which send mail merges at specific intervals. These sequences also create reminders to call prospects based on manual scheduling, or automatically based on the number of times a particular prospect has opened an email. Outreach makes it simple to automate the tracking of prospect information, such as how many times they have been called or emailed, what their current stage in the process is, and when they can be contacted.

Pros

  • Outreach has a lot of thoughtful features, such as automating stage changes based on the prospect's action (mark them as a certain stage if they reply, or another stage if an email to them bounces).
  • The integration with Salesforce is fairly robust - you can map the most important object types to certain objects in Outreach, as well as just about as many fields per object as you could possibly need. You can also set how and when these fields are synced, whether updates are pushed back into Salesforce or only one direction.
  • The culture at Outreach is commendable - every employee I've had the pleasure of working with has been professional, understanding, and takes our pains and recommendations to heart. They generally find time to consider our feature requests while working on their own upgrades.

Cons

  • The biggest complaint from myself and our other users is how noisy and inconsistent the user interface is. Some screens will contain multiple headers, a sidebar on the right, as well as pop-out sidebar on the left for searching and filtering, but some options are only available depending on what screen you're on. Some screens have too much going on, while others lack some key list-sorting and selection capabilities.
  • Recently, many updates have been pushed to our org without prior notice, causing headaches for our users and the support team. Some of the updates have included turning on features that are related to parts of the platform that not all of their customers use, such as the dialer, while others were simpler user interface adjustments that confused users because they were not communicated ahead of time.
Outreach provides satisfactory reporting capabilities, including the ability to see overall email volume on a user by user or team by team basis, as well as important metrics like Open, Reply and Click rate - these are all tracked using pixels embedded in outbound emails. As a user, you can also keep track of a "360* view" of your business, with insights into how many emails are scheduled to send over the coming week or month, plus upcoming tasks that need to be accomplished. You can also report on calls made even if you are not using Outreach's dialer, since these are logged as 'call tasks' which the user opens, logs notes in and completes while they accomplish the actual call via another method.
  • Outreach's robust mail merge capabilities have saved countless minutes for generations of SDRs.
  • The ability to cater messaging for different audiences automatically has allowed repeatable success for reps across different teams, targeting different industries.
We've worked with a couple of different CSMs since I've been around, and they have all been very professional and competent. They've listened patiently while some of our...less tactful employees complained passionately about missing features or bugs, and replied calmly and with empathy regarding possible solutions. We have also been contacted to consult with their VP of Product Strategy to comment on overall use case and strategic direction. This is a company that despite the few flaws in its product has made concrete, quantifiable efforts to constantly improve their offering and maximize the value provided to their customers.
Outreach excels at automating repetitive communication tasks. For example, if you have a large list of contacts to whom you would like to send relatively identical messaging (except for maybe their names, companies, or other variable fields), Outreach is a great way to write the email once and distribute it to all of the appropriate contacts. It's also very useful for scheduling reminders and other tasks, such as when to call a prospect who has replied to one of your emails, or when to send a follow up email if you don't receive a reply. They've got some other features that look good too, which we just haven't adopted - these include a soft-phone / dialer that integrates with their sequencing and tasks very well, and a calendaring feature that is helpful for scheduling meetings across multiple calendars. It is not necessarily helpful as a general email platform, but is better suited for situations where you are sending multiple copies of the same email at once, or sending the same type of email to people over and over again, e.g. download follow ups.

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