Robust Automation for Mail Merges and SDR Workflow
January 12, 2018
Robust Automation for Mail Merges and SDR Workflow
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Outreach
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.
- 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.
- 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'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.