SalesLoft<Outreach
January 26, 2018

SalesLoft<Outreach

Brandan Chang-Barstow | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Outreach

Very easy adoption. We had great support from Adam throughout the process. Outreach was very intuitive to use and the team quickly picked up how to run their business on the platform.
The ADR and Account Management team have utilized Outreach. The Sales department utilizes the tool only. Outreach assists us with managing prospects, communicating, following-up and tracking everything on the back end in conjunction with Salesforce, Marketo and Demandbase. It helps address challenges with the organization (follow-ups, notes, etc) and most importantly provides data so we can determine the most effective methods, language and time to reach our prospects.

Pros

  • Outreach makes automation easy! It's very simple to set up communication with prospects, deciding when and what message to send depending on the lead type. This saves us tons of time and ensures that we don't let any prospects slip through the cracks. A very powerful tool compared to SalesLoft (which we were using previously)
  • Task management. I love how easy it is to create items, e-mails or calls with prospects. This is a great strength because it not only saves our team a bunch of time but with the reminders and great visibility it ensures that we won't miss anything.
  • Calling. Very intuitive and easy to reach out to prospects via VOIP. Doesn't require a lot of back-end work to set up, or maintenance to keep it running smoothly. It's very helpful to verify information in Salesforce (country code) prior to importing, and amazing that Outreach automatically recognizes--saves us a lot of editing time.

Cons

  • API/Integration with SF. We had a difficult time initially with the different fields being pushed and updated on the back-end with Salesforce. It was challenging for our ADR and AE team to log notes and other activities because the profiles were constantly being updated and overwritten.
  • Calling, while very intuitive suffers from some connection difficulty, our lines frequently will be "empty"--prospects cannot hear us but we can hear them, or calls will drop dead for some reason.
  • -When prospects call us back into Outreach, it's nearly impossible to answer the call from the browser--we have to let it go to RingCentral or our direct line. If we answer in the browser the prospects are unable to hear us and we need to call them back.
  • Reporting. Would be nice to see expanded reporting features--like "smart" reporting: highlighting the best times for the team to reach out/send e-mail based on open rates, call connection rate, etc.
  • Using local numbers. I get TONS of wrong numbers calling me. Very disruptive to my workflow and day when the phone is ringing for irrelevant calls.
As the senior ADR, I am typically looking at Call Overview, or open rates across my campaigns. The information is great, would really like to have some guidance on analyzing the data to help determine the best time for us to reach out.
  • Outreach has saved our team a ton of time! We were manually sending e-mails through Outlook and just managing our sequences through SalesLoft. We now have more time to prospect, prepare for calls and send targeted messaging to our prospects.
  • I've personally seen an increase in meetings. After we started using Outreach I saw a big spike in productivity, and from August-December I was able to successfully manage our Inbound leads as an individual. My meetings ranged from 105-170% since we have started using Outreach.
  • For reference, we receive ~2000 inquiries and log ~7000 touches per month.
We had great support from Adam. He is quickly responds and is very helpful if we're experiencing any challenges in Outreach. The training session definitely helped our team get up to speed and familiar with a new tool efficiently.

Night and day difference. We were originally using SalesLoft and the team was not nearly as helpful or responsive.
Outreach is a much more intuitive tool in terms of creating and running a sequence (or cadence). The way it functions just makes more sense! We had a bunch of work arounds for SalesLoft, towards the end we were hardly using any features in the tool. SalesLoft was difficult to navigate and very clunky. The call quality was awful and our prospects typically couldn't hear us, calls were dropped often and got "rejected" frequently. Outreach integrates much better with Salesforce (although there are some challenges with the API and updates) and actually logs our activities. In SalesLoft, we were manually calling and e-mailing because the service was so inconsistent. Many of our e-mails were flagged as spam, we saw MUCH better open/response rates switching over to Outreach. Outreach is simply a better tool. It is more thoughtfully designed and provides features that support our business and efficiency. The support is very responsive and helpful. While I didn't make the decision personally to move forward with Outreach, I definitely supported it because of the intuitive nature, extra sales tools (reports, automation, etc) and the sense that the CSM team would actually respond and be helpful with any issues.
Outreach is a fantastic tool for any SDR team, or team doing outreach. It communicates really well with Salesforce and is appropriate to use if they are reaching out to cold, or warm leads. At LiquidPlanner, it seemed less efficient and effective for the account management team to use for their campaigns because they involved very personalized messaging and it was time-consuming to constantly edit the messaging.

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