BTSM Sales Stack Review: Outreach.io – the follow-up master

These days sales people are taking advantage of technology in ways that never could have been imagined years ago. The “sales stack” is becoming as important as your training process or sellers themselves. With so many new, innovative tools out there it’s hard to know what’s essential and what’s just a “nice-to-have”. We’ve taken some time to give our thoughts on some of the most talked about tools out there. Thus, without further ado, our Sales Stack Review series. First up: intelligent sales communication platform, Outreach.io.

Summary

The most successful sales teams identify a process for reaching out to prospects. Outreach.io lets you input that process, scale it to an entire team with little training, measure the results, and then iterate. Each process you put into outreach.io is called a series. You can measure the effectiveness of a series across a team or you can measure the conversion for specific steps or messages within that series.

Value:

• turn your outreach into an automated process
• measure the results of that process and the messaging
• more easily scale the process that works to other parts of the team
• a usable organization system for sales people that actually makes them more effective

Examples Series:

• cold outreach sequence
• nurture sequence
• getting a meeting set sequence
• client set up sequence
• inbound lead sequence
• post-pitch sequence

Individual Contributor:

This software effectively gives you follow-up super powers. Yes, you can use tasks in salesforce, events in google calendars, tasks in wunderlist etc. But those systems were not designed specifically for selling or ease of use.

Managers:

See above, this makes it a lot easier for your team to stay on top of all the leads they are working. Its an organizatinal system that you can hand to a new sales person on day one that should help ensure they efficiently work all the leads they have, and its pretty easy to use.

Most importantly, there are numbers behind every series that you put together, so you can help guide your sales people to the process and messaging that converts best.

Director / VP:

As a sales leader, sometimes I’m jealous of the marketing team, they have an easier time tracking everything they do because it’s all software based. In sales, tracking things like the conversion rate of a pitch, or the efffectiveness of an outbound call progression can be much more complicated because of all the people involved.

Outreach.io provides a fairly flexible framework for putting numbers to those previously unmeasureable processes.

Once you’ve identified an effective process or series, it also makes it easier to scale that technique to the entired team.

Another added bonus is that the integraation is fairly light. Outreach is just a UI that sits on top of salesforce and creates a view that makes more sense than the default views in salesforce.

Recommmendation:

Worth a demo, and worth a pilot. I’d recommend doing a test run because you could feed 200 leads through this system, and then you could compare it to the conversion rate of your current process.