InsideSales Playbooks (formerly XANT Playbooks) aims to help SDRs and AEs quickly build closeable pipeline, by helping salespeople get a hold of more of the right people. InsideSales.com uses their A.I.-platform called Neuralytics to target likely buyers combined with their cadence engine to help sales reps consistently engage all of their prospects in a personalized way. Just like Waze from Google helps drivers get to their destination quickly based on the data from other drivers,…
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Outreach
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Outreach is a sales execution platform that helps market-facing teams create and predictably close more pipeline. From prospecting to deal management to forecasting, Outreach leverages automation and artificial intelligence to help revenue leaders increase the efficiency and effectiveness of go-to-market activities and personnel across the revenue cycle. Outreach offers sales engagement, revenue intelligence, and revenue operations functionalities in a unified platform. The software…
Playbooks is great for sales organizations that need help with efficiency and cadence. It is well suited for heavy calling and high emails on accounts. Playbooks also does a great job at taking the guesswork out of accounts for my reps. The only time I would think that Playbooks would be less appropriate would be if a company already has a similar system in place.
Outreach is well-suited for organizations that want to send bulk sales prospecting emails and need a platform that can enhance domain and email deliverability. It is less suitable for organizations that don't use email prospecting or have fewer than 500 customers or prospects.
When sequencing, I need to mark multiple leads, and using the search bar, it will uncheck all the leads that were previously checked.
Calls drop constantly.
Syncing contacts and leads with SF is challenging. The buttons to synchronize with CRM are available when searching for a contact or lead, but you cannot sync it when viewing the lead or contact itself.
Based simply on cost savings, it would make the most sense for us to utilize Salesforce Sales Engagement moving forward. We already pay for access as part of our contract and it would provide more users with access to a sales automation tool. Upon vetting its capabilities, we've determined it can effectively replicate the core functionality that we get out of Outreach.
It only took a day to get comfortable with Playbooks. The ease of use and overall usability is fantastic in the sense that it's pretty straightforward once you get enough repetitions in the tool. I also like all of the videos and resources available if support is needed
Being in a role that required me to do a lot of prospecting, I spent more time in Outreach than any other platform. It had everything within that I needed to be successful in my role. It was extremely customizable and easy to learn. There were occasional bugs, but nothing that kept me from doing my job.
For the most part Outreach is always available. There are sometimes when they do a new update, and things might get glitchy for a couple of days. They usually fix it very quickly. Same thing if the dialer goes out or something. It is always handled in a timely manner.
Outreach's performance overall is very high quality. Pages load right away. Occasionally it might take a minute to generate a report, but not any slower than in other platforms I've used. Outreach is integrated into many of our other tools and seems to be a very clean integration. Everything runs very quickly.
There is almost zero customer support. What they do offer is a live chat feature which is active during "normal" business hours which is nice for instant inquiries if someone is available. However, you do not have a dedicated representative to address questions or concerns and their billing process is confusing and messy without any support.
We were trained in person and it was very easy to understand. And if we missed any pointers there was more training given to us. So i always like this tool. The drafts were also prepared for us to sync outreach with our devices so it was straightforward. Highly recommend
Lots of attention from the Outreach training team, with a great willingness to customize to our needs. To be clear, you get out what you put in. If you don't work with them, you'll get cookie-cutter training. But we asked for a lot of customization, and they delivered what we asked for.
I expected more assistance in connecting Outreach with Salesforce. We have a basic connection, but many fields were left without a sync. We can apparently sync data without adding the app into Salesforce, but believe we could get more functionality with a better integration. The basics of setting up our sequences and using Outreac to run them was was fine.
You can do so much more with Playbooks. the power dialer that we had previously just allowed us to take a few notes and disposition a call. with Playbooks, you can keep track of accounts. Keep track of conversations, lists of what needs to get done, schedule calls and much much more.
They're not direct competitors, but they share many of the same functionalities. Gong has a greater focus on spoken communications, such as calls and demos, rather than emails. I think Gong also has stronger AI capabilities at the moment. However, I don't believe so, Gong would be ideal for prospecting and mass outreach, as Outreach is. Outreach is more suitable for exploration and outbound communications management, whereas Gong is better suited for deal and pipeline management and analysis.
It has flexible permissions which allows to designate certain non-admins to build out sequences or add or remove people, which allows one main admin to handle the more technical end, while allowing team leads to build out sequences for other team members, allowing everyone to play to their relative strengths, while not allowing for chaos if everyone had full permissions
Increase in call metrics as it is easy to make more calls using Outreach features. Basically cutting down admin work time before the call.
Prospect journey and experience has been a positive flowing through a set amount of emails and calls rather than just being blasted with random emails. Helps BDRS stay focused on more important parts of the job.
