Outreach

I love that this software is so heavily focused on outbound sales. This isn't marketing software that you can adapt to sales, this is software created and built for sales organizations. That fact is very obvious in the way they implement their features.

Outreach always leads the way in terms of feature innovation, and they continue to offer the best outbound email settings to truly automate your process. You can drop 1000 prospects into a sequence, throttle it to send 100 per day, set it to resume OOO replies after a few days, and set it and forget it. Just set up a schedule, make sure you exclude national holidays, and you don't have to touch it ever again.

Something they also do better than anyone is their task management. I frequently have a task as a step in a sequence (I.e. Connect with the person on LinkedIn), and when a prospect hits that stage it creates a task in the system. This happens hundreds of prospects at a time, but when you start your tasks it takes you into this workflow that lets you call/email/take notes on the action and just click next to take you to the next one. Really lets you get in the flow, and is an amazing tool for inserting a manual task into a sequence that you can still get through quickly.

Some examples of awesome features include:

1) Auto resume OOO
2) Fallback text in the templates
3) Automatically skip holidays
4) Phone call integration so you don't have to leave the app

I don't know that there are any cons. The only one that I can imagine is that when you start fresh on the system, the interface can be a little bit daunting. There are actually a lot of settings, and if you don't understand the hierarchy or what you use for what, it can get very complicated.

Thankfully they have good customer support and a LOT of good documentation, so it's not that bad if you spend some time learning it.

Sequences is what makes Outreach so powerful. The fact that you can time, automate, and blast various emails to prospects using custom variables for a personalized feel is what makes Outreach so powerful. My role requires me to send mass volumes of emails to specific personas at various B2B companies. Most people don't respond after just 1 email. By loading multiple folks into a sequence and blasting that sequence has saved me significant time.

Outreach also acts a CRM that keeps track of all communications. You can use filters to find specific prospects who have been sequenced or if they've been opted out or if they're in a specific stage in a sequence. These custom filters enable for specific targeting and tailoring.

Outreach does require level of training to some extent that isn't straightforward. For example, knowing how to load sequences, or create triggers, or how to automate certain tasks does require some playing around that is not intuitive unless you have some training. Our organization needed some 3rd party training for us to actually grasp the various aspects and nuances of Outreach. Without that 3rd party training, we would've made numerous mistakes and probably wouldn't have utilized the tool to the maximum efficiency.

nothing. After 3 months I am walking away from a $26,000/yr contract they will NOT let us out of, so I am STILL Paying and we are NOT going to use this trash of a platform. They do NOT care about you as a client.

Using this software cut our call volume in half, we had our WORST sales month in 2 years, we had so many problems getting set up, their software crashes, notes fail to save, hubspot integration is a joke, stand alone you lose features like deal pipeline, you can not sort by last time called, their throttles don't work as explained, cannot text, the list of cons goes on and on...

I love the ease of use. I work with many people new to sales, new to our industry and they fall in love with outreach. It automates our sales strategy. It helps us follow a cadence or campaign on emailing, calling, sending a LinkedIn message, etc. Without it, we would struggle to follow up with our clients.

There are some small things that I don't like with Outreach. Things get stuck in failed & pending states and you are not notified... These are usually found too late as well. Wish there was more of an aggressive notification when things happen that we should be aware of. Also - I would love for them to build out their interface better for closing roles and marketing roles. We have it for our SDRs but would struggle to have marketing and account executives use the tool at the same time.