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…
Predictive Pipeline kept track of every change in the sales pipeline and predicts quota attainment boasting 80% accuracy, with Neuralytics, the XANT predictive engine. The product was based on C9 Predictive Sales, owned and supported by XANT (formerly InsideSales.com) since May 2015, and no longer available for sale.
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.
C9 is a good and economical solution for what it does. If evaluating them today, I would want to clearly understand their product roadmap and their ability to execute against it.
Pipeline management/ pipeline analytics: C9 is great for understanding changes in the pipeline. For example, comparing the sales pipeline today with with where it was at the beginning of the quarter.
It also works very well for quota attainment visibility. We can easily set and track sales quotas for individual reps and for sales manager roll-up quotas.
The product also offers some forecasting capabilities which we are not using yet, so I cannot comment on how strong these features are.
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.
We had uptime issues, weird error messages, sluggish performance, and bad data. I hope that some of this can be attributed to growing pains as the company was relatively new when we signed our initial contract. It actually was unavailable at EOQ one time.
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.
C9 is now part of the sales management culture here at IPC. There is no longer any guesswork about the funnel or the forecast. C9 does something that SFDC does not...it increases significantly the value of the information in SFDC by unlocking the meta data that we all need to run the business
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.
From a sales manager’s perspective it was fairly easy to use the base functionality (just viewing current pipeline) and much harder to look at analytics (pipeline changes over time).
C9 made this easier by allowing sales ops to publish views to sales managers.
The query tool was harder to use than it had to be. For example, there were no out of the box relationships set up between Salesforce.com tables (e.g. accounts to opportunities), so I had to create those relationships myself.
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.
Very simple implementation. They basically set up the imports and then they configure the tool per customer requests.
I wish there had been more consultation during the implementation, but it wasn’t bad given the effort expended. We ended up re-implementing after about a year and a half.
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.
Zoho CRM is less up to speed and much more out of date. The support at InsideSales.com Predictive Pipeline have been very helpful during the initial roll out face. Overall I was very happy!
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.
C9 enabled us to track our sales pipeline changes over time which ultimately led to a 17% increase in win rate.
The product paid for itself in months because utilization is dependent upon the managers, not the salespeople. Managers have the license, but the benefits are applied to the salespeople. Most subscription based products are under utilized when every person must hold a license.
1 on 1 conversations between managers and salespeople were more meaningful because they were discussing long term pipeline growth and health, not short term status reports.
