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…
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Velocify by ICE Mortgage Technology
Score 6.7 out of 10
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Velocify is a sales acceleration and automation solution acquired by Ellie Mae (now ICE Mortgage Technology) in 2017. The product suite includes Velocify Pulse automation app, Velocify Lead Manager for lead management and distribution, and Velocify Dial-IQ sales dialer. Also , Velocify LoanEngage is a sales referral management app for loan officers.
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.
Velocify is amazing if powered by the right management. Just like any piece of technology, garbage in - garbage out. I suggest making sure your management is well trained so they can ensure their users are effective. Velocify has some incredible talent working there. I suggest making great connections with those on your team and it will help greatly during the tenure of your working relationship.
The prioritized queue allows for management to set contact standards and hold users accountable. It removes all the guess work out of what lead to call next.
The Dial IQ feature is fantastic for powering through calls and maximizing speed to contact.
The Shotgun lead distribution puts the lead into the hand of the user that is ready and available to call that lead immediately. No handing off a lead to an originator and hoping they call. This feature allows for the system to notify multiple users simultaneously and first user to press 1 wins the lead. Talk about creating a competitive sales environment!
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.
Velocify would be well served to create a more robust email drip campaign platform.
Velocify could revamp their dashboards and prioritized views our individuals work out of daily. It's rather overwhelming when working with a lot of leads. Adding interactive graphics - calendars, easy to view alerts, etc would be great. (Big Purple Dot does this well)
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.
I am sure that we as a company are likely to continue using Velocify. I am not involved in the selection process, but I have not heard any negative feedback and switching programs would more than likely be too much work
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.
Users can gain a very good understanding of the system quickly. The administrator can use terms that are familiar to their company when setting the system up. Most new administrators error to the side of complexity when setting up the system. With Velocify less is more.
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.
While I didn't speak with the Support team often, they seemed very accepting and reliable. My favorite was the company emails that we would receive whenever something wasn't working correctly so that we would know that it's being worked on, providing a bit of relief to the other employees that were having trouble.
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
The in-person training if you will is done via GoToMeeting or some other service. I have been told that the moderator goes way too in-depth and too fast.
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.
If you plan to have more than 20 users on Velocify you should outsource implementation to someone that knows how the system can best be implemented for your business/process flows. If you have fewer proposed users try to use one of the canned levels.
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.
Before we went with Velocify, we had Salesforce and Hobson's EMT Connect. Both of these systems were rather expensive and didn't give us exactly what we needed for lead conversion as well as the customization we desired. However, I feel that some of the reasons we went with Velocify were not exactly truthful as we found out during the implementation process or much later that there were things they said that they could do that once we started getting into the weeds with it they weren't able to execute. From a lead conversion and speed to lead standpoint, this is a good product. From a reporting and lifecycle management standpoint, this is a very poor product compared to the other two
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.
Faster lead conversion lead us to higher potential for "first school wins" philosophy.
Negative return on time spent maintaining Velocify. Because manual reporting was needed and much had to be done outside of the system, there was a monetary loss of time because of this.
Predictability was near impossible for us, and the fact that we had to purchase an email automation system because Velocify did not do anything we needed was a negative ROI for our business.
