Item: Outreach
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Outreach

Usability

It's okay. There are a lot of drop-down menus/interfaces that all kind of seem to do the same thing. Universal task flow also really bumps you around and gives very little warning/indication about what is happening.

It's also unclear with some settings as to what they do and why. More of those little question marks that you can hover over would be nice.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Outreach is used by our sales and customer support teams. We manage an inbound funnel, so Outreach helps us maintain the proper amount of touch points with prospective customers. In particular, it is helpful for automated email sequences when we have customers that don't leave phone numbers. It allows us to continue to follow up without needing much manual input.

Variables are really nice as well for adding a customized touch.

Pros and Cons

Pros

A/B Testing — very helpful for testing different phrasing
Variables — allows us to put in personal goodbyes/calendar links
Inbox/SFDC syncing — data comes through very well on most platforms

Cons

Logic around sequence steps — would love to see call steps automatically skipped for prospects without phone numbers, or maybe prospects automatically advanced if manual tasks aren't done in time.
Collaborating on sequences — there should be easier ways to get people to comment/add onto sequences, and transfer ownership.
Editing live sequences — wish this was possible.
Data for response/open rates are confusing.

Reports Used with Outreach

Really not many. I find the reporting feature quite convoluted. We do most reporting through Salesforce.

Return on Investment

Easier to manage different lead flows, making sure they all get different content/touchpoints
Really good for product sign ups, people are automatically added to sequences and we get meetings scheduled automatically
Hard to say exactly the input that outreach has, but it means I don't have to manually keep track of everybody. And that's nice. Cause nobody likes to heard cats, nah'msayin?

Working with the Outreach CSM Team

Our CSM has been very responsive even though I am a lowly grunt on our sales team! She made time to video chat and that was cool. Helped me better understand the data/metrics behind some of the sequences.

Alternatives Considered

It does pretty much everything I ask for, except the complaints I outlined earlier. Would also love to see the ability for entire steps to be A/B tests.

Other Software Used

Google Drive, Slack, Lifesize Video Conferencing

Likelihood to Recommend

Only reason 9 not 10 is that I just don't know the landscape well enough to say definitively that Outreach is the best.

Specific scenarios where Outreach is well suited: following up with prospects that have a specific interest. Outreach makes targeted sequences very nice.

Scenarios where not well suited: general prospects that have non-specific interests.

Comments

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BDR's review. A grunt's honest perspective.