Outreach : Full Review, Testing, and Presentation (2024)

What is Outreach.io?

Outreach.io is a sales engagement platform that helps sales and marketing teams automate their approach processes. Its goal is to help sales teams close more deals by making it easier to get in touch and connect with potential customers.

Since 2014, the software claims to have successfully helped businesses like Zoom, Sap, Sap, Siemens, Snowflake, and 5,000 other businesses increase business productivity.

Its AI-assisted sales engagement platform is actually a suite of tools to help sales people and team leaders use time-saving data, information, and shortcuts to improve workflow and increase revenue. As we'll see, there's not much that Outreach didn't include in their offering, which is probably why it's the top-selling product in its category.

Modern sales teams are a world away from 20th century standards, based on intuition, assumptions, and fierce competition. In fact, some of the concepts that Outreach plays with, like collaborative success plans (where the seller and the buyer collaborate seamlessly to complete a deal) would seem odd to an old-school sales rep.

But sales teams that use Outreach have data on their side, allowing them to back up their strategies with statistics. The platform uses the Datascience, The AI and machine learning to glean information at scale and in great detail. Sales managers can follow the evolution of each business or the performance of each representative, or even have an overview of their team, offer, or strategy.

Outreach is divided into three main areas: its platform, Outreach Kaia, and Outreach Commit. Let's look at each of them in turn.

Platform

The main dashboard used by salespeople and team leaders breaks down leads by business and by buyer and shows the current state of affairs in terms of engagement for each of them.

Users can see at a glance the health status of each lead and the engagement metrics are clearly visible, including the proportion of outgoing emails to responses, the number of prospects engaged, and the stage reached by each deal. The system flags risky deals and under-committed accounts.

From the representative's perspective, whether they choose to work directly on the platform or from their email box through integration, Outreach is designed to eliminate much of the chore and chaos of the representative's life. Automation takes care of follow-up emails, meeting scheduling, and other mundane tasks, allowing the representative to actively engage with their customers.

It also makes it possible to avoid approximations in daily priorities, by automatically classifying the workload into a systematized task list. This promotes accountability and rigor.

Sales reps who like to plan their own tasks for the day may find this a bit overwhelming, but it's much harder to make a mistake by forgetting a reminder, not sending a follow-up email, or letting a lead cool off. And when faced with a quarterly performance review, most representatives prefer improved success rates to total personal autonomy no matter what day of the week it is!

Outreach Kaia

While there are plenty of platforms offering sales information and productivity tools, it's with Kaia that Outreach really starts to weigh in. Kaia is a digital assistant that monitors, transcribes, and activates meetings in real time. For example, during a call, a representative offers to send a proposal document. Kaia will realize this and trigger a reminder to this effect, or bring up a relevant document, thus allowing the representative to respect his commitment at the time.

Kaia allows each representative to have their own digital assistant, which helps them stay in control of the many actions and touchpoints that make up an individual transaction. This allows the representative to focus on human interactions, while the digital assistant controls the process.

Outreach Commit

Commit is Outreach's analytics suite, which brings together all the statistics related to sales behavior, lead conversions, and engagement in one place, and adds a forecasting tool to set goals. The idea behind Commit is that data from across the team can be leveraged to increase certainty when pursuing new strategies.

Commit allows sales managers to see what types of engagement are working best, and which specific playbooks and individual communications are underperforming. It displays this information in an easy to interpret dashboard, with full transparency across the entire conversion pipeline.

Outreach will also show forecasted revenue, giving the team realistic results to achieve.

Success Plans

A final component of Outreach that's worth mentioning is its Success Plans panel. This dashboard is designed to allow sales managers to track the individual performance of their representatives and then direct coaching to where it is most needed.

In the Success Plans view, all current transactions can be analyzed and obstacles identified, whether they are related to a lack of commitment, a lack of training, or a game manual that needs to be changed.

Overall, Outreach is a very comprehensive suite of sales management tools for medium and large teams.

The resource portion of their website includes a blog, webinars, articles, articles, a podcast, and a “sales hacker” community where Outreach users can exchange tips, comments, and questions. It can be said that there is no shortage of ways to learn how to optimize the platform for your benefit.

Features

1. Communication portal

You can email, text, schedule calls, or video meetings, all from the Outreach portal. It can also be integrated with email, for representatives who prefer to work from their inbox.

2. Kaia's awareness

As described above, this AI-driven digital assistant transcribes both parts of your meetings, flags future actions, and offers helpful hints, such as price lists, when they appear in the conversation.

3. Awareness-raising commitment

This sales forecasting panel gives managers an overview of the pipeline and all current deals, allowing them to identify areas that are not performing well.

4. Success plans

A collaborative approach to concluding an agreement where stakeholder engagement and implementation are made transparent between buyer and seller, which improves trust.

5. Playbooks

Build a library of effective “playbooks” and call them whenever needed to move buyers forward.

6. Sentiment analysis

Outreach's research has shown that email response statistics alone are not reliable. That's why the company uses AI-driven sentiment analysis to break down shopper responses into categories like “positive,” “objection,” and “unsubscribe,” so you can better understand the data. These findings are presented in the Outreach Insights report series.

7. Transaction acceleration tools

These proven sequences can be added to individual operations to speed up conversions. Managers can trigger them for underperforming accounts, by automatically adding them to their representatives' to-do lists.

Pricing

The Outreach site offers a contact form to get quotes, based on its estimates on the number of people and the use case. It is therefore difficult to give a clear idea of what you could pay. However, we were able to glean the following information from the user forums:

The base price for Outreach is $100 per user per month, which is $12,000 per year for a business with a 10-person sales team.

There are more advanced subscription options that increase the cost per user, while adding additional features. At these prices, Outreach is clearly not a tool for small businesses or freelancers.

Alternatives to Outreach.io

When it comes to deciding which software to use for prospecting, lead generation, and sales and marketing automation, it becomes very difficult to find the right and appropriate tool for your business.

The criteria we have taken to offer you the best alternatives are as follows:

Prices: We only considered alternatives that are cheaper than Outreach.io or that offer a better price/functionality ratio.

Features: The software's features must be equivalent or excellent in some areas to be considered an alternative to Outreach.io.

User reviews: We gave preference to alternatives that had better user ratings than Outreach.io.

To make it easier for you, we have compared and proposed the 2 best alternatives so that you are no longer disoriented by other options.

1. Cleverly.

Cleverly is an alternative to Outreach.io, which is cheaper and has lots of features to automate your sales process!

Key features of Cleverly include:

• Mail merge : With Cleverly's mail merge feature, you can send personalized emails to your prospects in bulk!
• Contact Management : Cleverly helps you keep all of your contacts in one place for easy management.
• Automatic tracking : The software allows you to define automatic follow-ups, so you never miss an opportunity!

How much does Cleverly cost?

Cleverly is offered at 3 different prices as shown above.

• Silver - You get 250 leads per month but cannot generate messages on LinkedIn.
• Gold - You get 500 leads per month, but you can't generate messages on LinkedIn.
• Platinum- With Platinum, you can do everything listed in the image above. You have access to all the functionalities of the platform!

User ratings:

Cleverly has an excellent user rating with a 4.5/5 rating on G2, which is equal to the Outreach.io review!

2. Salesrobot.

Although Salesrobot or our product, we suggest it to you because it meets the criteria and is one of the best LinkedIn lead generation software!

Salesrobot is designed specifically for people who want to do prospecting, campaigning, and lead generation on LinkedIn.

Nonetheless, it also takes care of integration with CRMs so you can have everything in one place!

Here are some of its characteristics:

• Salesrobot has several secure methods for bypassing LinkedIn limits so you can send up to 200 messages and connection requests per day. Salesrobot can also send group emails to group members and use email and InMail.

• Salesrobot offers great security practices to its users by randomizing activity, skipping holidays and weekends, delaying actions, gradually increasing activity levels, and setting daily limits for various activities. By faithfully mimicking human behavior, Salesrobot can offer nearly perfect protection against being flagged or banned by the LinkedIn algorithm.

• Salesrobot's newest AI technology can scour profiles for unique information, like volunteer experience or certifications. You can more easily send personalized messages and requests by identifying these items of interest.

• You can avoid unfortunate communication mistakes with your prospects by creating campaigns and message sequences. All you have to do is use one of the customizable templates that adapt to any need. Moreover, these sequences are based on the actions of your potential customers. So there is no risk in sending a follow-up when they have already responded to your initial message.

• Salesrobot sales funnel development software allows you to add various tools and services. This service allows customers to get a summary, including quotes from your lead magnet. This option allows the tool to easily discover and validate the professional email addresses of your prospects. Because Salesrobot has access to verified email address data, the likelihood of a lag or verification difficulties is reduced.

How much does Salesrobot cost?

Salesrobot currently offers three plans:

• Advanced : for $79 per month per account (annual payment).
• Professional : $179 per month per account (annual payment).
• Payment plan per lead : (price to be determined after contacting their representative).

Salesrobot also offers a 14-day free trial, so you can try it out right now!

Without any load!

Final verdict

While it's a bit expensive and there may be lag issues during peak hours, Outreach is a very comprehensive and sophisticated way to optimize your entire sales pipeline and support your sales team, while ensuring that they're operating consistently.