Outreach Review — Sales Development and Email Automation Tool

Outreach.io is a software platform for sales development and prospect outreach. Its primary purpose is to help you achieve better communication with sales prospects via texts, calls, and emails. 

Sales engagement is not simple for a variety of reasons. Approaching one cold prospect in a way that increases the chance of their conversion is challenging enough — handling the logistics of hundreds or thousands of leads is exponentially harder. 

That’s why software platforms with email marketing automation features—outreach among them—serve to simplify the process. There are plenty of solutions for sales management that provide autoresponder features, but the real question is—are these templated responses organic enough to enable high conversion rates?

Through our in-depth review, we’ll examine how Outreach handles this process. 

Why You Should Listen to Us About Outreach

We are more than familiar with the world of sales development, as well as the outreach and lead generation aspects that come with it. Mathieu Picard, the CEO of Sell SaaS, also founded AnyLeads—a widely successful lead generation company that cooperated with industry giants, such as Amazon and Microsoft. AnyLeads has aided a variety of companies in generating more than ten million leads over five years. 

These results serve to prove that we know what we’re talking about when it comes to cold calls, email outreach, text message marketing, and other tools and processes used to generate leads and drive conversion. Being industry veterans gives us a professional standpoint from which we can surmise the quality of platforms such as Outreach. 

That’s not the only tool of this kind that we’ve reviewed either—we’ve conducted detailed analyses of more than twenty of email outreach and SEO audit tools. Feel free to take a look at the Outreach alternatives that we’ve reviewed as well. 

About Outreach

Image source: vectorlogoseek

Outreach is a software suite designed to increase the efficiency of sales representatives. It provides sales teams with the tools needed to manage and monitor outreach campaigns of any volume or length. 

It’s important to note that Outreach doesn’t seek to supplant all other sales software. In fact, its developers frequently tout its extensive integrative capabilities with the likes of Salesforce. 

As for Outreach itself, it allows users and businesses to:

• Communicate with sales prospects more easily

• Design sequences that automate the lead conversion process

• Utilize machine learning for increased sales performance

• Gain valuable insights for higher prospect engagement

Outreach First Impressions

Once you arrive at the Outreach landing page, your first impression is likely to be a positive one. The sleek and modern design of the website immediately shows you that this is a company seeking to be on the cutting edge. If you opt to use Outreach, you will find that their software has a similar aesthetic, making this an excellent intro to the overall experience.

Most companies looking for sales development software don't put as much stock into the aesthetics of the software that they're using—certainly not as much as they care for practical usability. While Outreach does not disappoint in this regard, it’s important to note that this platform does not offer any kind of free trial period.

Seeing as this service is supposed to be integrated into companies with dedicated sales teams, it’s mind-boggling that the Outreach devs expect you to pay for their platform without trying it out. 

After providing your professional details, you can request a demo. We’d be remiss not pointing out that this demonstration is a subpar solution compared to an actual free trial, but at least there’s a way to see the platform in action. 

Outreach Request a Demo Page

You can have a look at the basic facts about Outreach here:

We can’t help but highlight the fact that Outreach’s pricing is outrageous. Given that there’s no free trial, we find it ridiculous that the company expects you to pay $100 per user upfront. Outreach is geared towards sales teams—with ten sales reps, you’d be looking at $1,000/month, for a tool you can’t be sure will meet your business’ needs. 

Outreach Features

Outreach comes with a wide array of features. They can be surmised as:

1. Content management

2. Data analytics

3. Prospecting

4. Sales team training

5. Communication

6. Contact management

7. Insights

8. Customization

9. Workflow management

Outreach Sales Insights Interface

Source: g2

Content Management

Many rookie sales representatives do not realize that content management isn’t something reserved for online marketers. Even if you’re not using content management platforms, you still have marketing collateral as a sales representative.

The “collateral” in question represents all of the different media that you have at your disposal while communicating with prospects. This is the content that you’ll use to illustrate the worth of your product to any prospective buyers. 

Outreach boasts extensive features when it comes to collateral management. It allows you to easily import and manage any marketing and sales collateral that you’ve created via external tools. 

There are also options for creating your emails inside the platform using Outreach pre-built templates. The content management itself is simple, allowing you to use a search interface to find the precise collateral that you need. 

Data Analytics

One of the main reasons why people use sales management software in the first place is increased efficiency. In part, this stems from the fact that software such as Outreach provides accurate insights to sales managers and their teams. One of the biggest boons of using a dedicated sales platform is that you have accurate data on the performance of your employees and your sales campaign as a whole. 

Outreach provides detailed reports on each interaction with a prospect and their reaction to the collateral materials used in the process. There are automated report templates built into Outreach, but users can also create custom reports. 

The platform also has notifications that alert sales representatives when a potential customer interacts with the emails that they've sent. This kind of feedback is essential when tracking the engagement levels in your campaign. Additionally, you can use the platform to track long-term engagement with a particular account. 

Managers can see how often sales employees use a specific piece of collateral and assess the performance of each piece of content they share via email. This lets you create the most effective content strategy that wastes no resources and guarantees maximum consumer engagement. 

When it comes to email campaigns, Outreach gives you access to crucial data analytics as well. You can use it to see the precise open and click-through rates. 

Prospecting

Finding and engaging prospective leads is every sales representative’s most important task. Platforms such as Outreach streamline the rest of their more menial tasks to let them focus primarily on prospecting.

Outreach doesn't just make the daily administrative and management tasks related to sales easier—it also has options for better prospecting. You can use the platform to perform live presentations to potential prospects over the Internet. This feature isn't limited to your desktop or laptop, either. 

If your representatives feel like they need to tend to a particularly important account urgently, there are options for making live presentations via mobile devices as well. You can also use screen sharing to create a guided visual display on your computer and stream them to your prospects. 

Team Training

Collaboration between different sales representatives is crucial for maximizing the efficiency of your sales team. Outreach has several features that facilitate sales management. 

Handling all the information obtained from different sales representatives and organizing it into a knowledge base that everyone can use for reference is a breeze with Outreach. The software provides decent training material for the onboarding of new employees. 

Managers can also use Outreach’s features to come up with custom “playbooks” that showcase their company’s specific approach to the sales process. Any user can also record their pitches or other prospect interactions for self-improvement and future reference. 

The platform also offers expansive features for employee feedback:

Managers can use Outreach to review any pitches and interactions that their employees have recorded and point out specific improvements that could be made in the future. Each team member has their "scorecard" in Outreach, displaying their sales performance in detail. If there are multiple teams within a company, each of them can have their scorecards as well.

Team leaders can also create snapshots of the scorecards and use them for coaching new employees or assigning individual action items and tasks to specific team members. 

Anyone who has worked in sales knows that competition is a massive part of most representatives' careers. That’s why Outreach has the option of public sales performance tracking designed to motivate employees and reward those that deserve it. Sales reps can also track their performance with real-time updates, allowing them to stay within their targets. 

Managers can even use the platform to come up with timed competitions with specific rewards and drive overall team performance. 

Communication

Communicating with prospects is essential for landing sales. The office of any sales team is continuously abuzz with phone calls, which is why Outreach provides features for managing this aspect of prospect communication as well.

For instance, you can use Outreach to record every call made by a representative for future reference. Outreach also increases the likelihood of prospects responding to a cold call by generating user-specific local area codes. Generally, prospects are more likely to pick up the phone when the call is coming from a local number. 

Sales representatives can use Outreach to make calls from any device they want—including desktops, laptops, or traditional mobile phones. Any user can make a call with a single click regardless of the hardware platform that they’re on. 

Contact Management 

When it comes to contact management, Outreach offers the following features

• Prospect data records

• Information locator 

• Personalization

Representatives can create prospect profiles and tag the contacts that they deem more likely to make a purchase. Also, Outreach makes it easy to find contact information quickly when making a follow-up call. The prospect profiles created with this platform contain all kinds of information — from data like contact engagement to the prospect's location and timezone. 

Outreach Insights

One of the most widely touted features of Outreach is its Insights. These provide managers and representatives with useful information that could help them optimize their performance. These include:

1. General notes

2. Activity summaries

3. Voicemails

4. Email automation

5. Prospect sorting

Outreach users can use a simple note-taking interface to create reminders at all times—even during prospect calls. You can say goodbye to the hundreds of post-it notes cluttering your desk. 

There are also daily activity summaries, which are designed to provide an overview of how a sales representative has spent their workday. There is always room for improvement, and Outreach helps you do that instantly. 

The platform also has options for automating some aspects of prospect interaction, like automated voicemails for potential clients who don't pick up on a cold call. You can use the same features for no-reply emails as well and design your automatic follow-ups. 

One of the insights provided by Outreach is their prospect organization feature — representatives can easily see which prospect has the most significant chance of converting based on their previous interactions.

Customization

Outreach allows you to automate most of your secondary administrative tasks and provides enough customization options to apply to any specific sales team. The platform enables:

• Platform integration

• Email scheduling

• Notification customization

• Email categorization

• Template creation

If your company uses other management systems, Outreach can integrate with all of them effortlessly. The platform supports integration with the major CRMs, autoresponders, and call management platforms. It also allows automated data importing, which saves you a ton of time you’d otherwise spend on manual data entry.

Sales representatives can also design custom emails and schedule them in advance. Outreach has a so-called “Sequence” system, which is their brand of trigger-based email campaigns. This set of features contains everything found in regular email automation software, such as template creation and categorization of emails. 

Workflow Management 

Outreach has plenty of options when it comes to workflow optimization. The platform helps automate the bulk of your sales team’s daily tasks. When it comes to the jobs that require human input, Outreach enables you to schedule them, assign them to individual sales representatives, and set up notifications and reminders. 

The platform also has automation options for sales channels that aren’t calls and emails, such as social media marketing posts or text messages.

Outreach Drawbacks

Most Outreach users report that the platform performs admirably when it comes to sales management. What it does, it does well. However, its developers tout it as a "sales development" tool as well, potentially leading people to believe that it contains tools for lead generation as well. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Outreach includes no options when it comes to lead generation.

Outreach can help you increase the efficiency of your sales team by optimizing your approach to existing prospects—leads that are already inside your marketing funnel. That said, if you need lead generation software, you will have to look elsewhere.

White-Label Software Options

If you want to generate more leads and streamline your marketing campaigns, Sell SaaS offers you powerful email marketing and lead generation tools that you can both use and resell. Some of our most popular software solutions include:

• Enrichment data software

• Email, phone, and social media extractor

• Email finder

• Auroresponder

• API to prevent fake email registrations

These are far more affordable options compared to Outreach and brand-name tools—with the same or even superior functionality. You can further increase their utility by making use of their white-label status and creating an additional revenue stream by reselling the software to your clients. Just stamp your company's brand and visuals, and you can become a software reseller today!

We provide you with the software and handle everything from product updates to customer support. All you need is an attractive brand—and you can keep between 60% and 80% of the profits from each sale!

Conclusion

Outreach is a worthy option if you need software that will help you optimize your company’s sales processes. It automates a lot of tedious tasks, provides neat features for workflow organization, and lets you access prospect information quickly. It falls flat when it comes to lead generation, though—other software solutions are required if you want to find brand new prospects.