Outreach Reviews

From Salesloft to Outreach: Escaping the Twilight Zone

Comments: In the end, the switch from SalesLoft to Outreach was like stepping out of the shadows and into the light. It brought relief, efficiency, and a renewed sense of optimism. So, if you find yourself trapped in the highly overrated SalesLoft, take my advice and set up a demo with Outreach. Escape the twilight zone and embrace a sales engagement experience that is refreshingly what you need and want.

Pros:

The platform's design embraces clarity and simplicity, making it a breeze to find what you need without getting lost in confusion. Automation is your ally in Outreach. The platform's advanced automation features offer a level of efficiency that you don’t see in SalesLoft. We switched off of SalesLoft, and I never understand why SalesLoft is always getting high marks across review websites, it frankly doesn’t come close to things like the UX or Outreach's machine learning capabilities, SalesLoft doesn’t have any real AI or ML built-in at all. Optimizing my sales processes as a manager was incredibly easy to set up and roll out and guided me toward the most effective outreach strategies. Collaboration also takes center stage in Outreach. Teams united in the same platforms without redundancies or extraneous subscriptions breeds a culture of learning and success through sharing best practices and tracking performance metrics with ease —teamwork and camaraderie fueled our collective success and Outreach definitely had a direct role in helping progress that forward.

Cons:

Of course, no system is without its quirks. Outreach had its fair share of moments that made me scratch my head in bewilderment. But compared to the Twilight Zone-like experiences of SalesLoft, these were mere comedic interludes, where it became less of me banging my head against the wall and really just requiring a little bit of figuring out where I was going wrong.

Alternatives Considered: Groove

Reasons for Choosing Outreach: Comparing Outreach to SalesLoft is like comparing a circus performance to a rollercoaster ride. SalesLoft had its moments though they were fleeting the UX was so poor and the performance of the product was so clunky that it felt like I was dealing with a UX/software only compatible with Windows 2000. Outreach, on the other hand, is truly a breath of fresh air from the moment you log in. While, for me, it was like stepping out into a sunny day after a never-ending storm, for users who maybe aren’t as tech-savvy or naturally capable of hopping in a new program and figuring it out yourself, I would say to just get yourself properly trained first before wasting your time attempting it on your own.

Switched From: SalesLoft

Reasons for Switching to Outreach: It really had to do with where we were at during that given period of time and the number of people on the team that had prior experience using Outreach making the implementation process easier and the need for individual training not nearly as steep. That being said, we later switched over to Groove, and that largely had to do with where we were during that given period of time.

Best sales sequencing tool on the market, hands down

Comments: Overall, I'm a huge fan of Outreach. It's a tool that I'll look for in my next company or at least recommend. If you have a large SDR and Inside Sales force, it's just silly not to invest in this technology. I save so much time on my prospecting and it holds me accountable. The reports on your progress are easy and when I work with my SDR multi-threading into an account, we can see each other's activity so we don't overlap.

Pros:

At first, Outreach can look a bit overwhelming, but once you get through some early training, it will become second nature and best friend for prospecting. We also use Outreach as our dialer. What I love most is the ability to make quality drip campaigns, email sequencing that can be combined with phone and LinkedIn messaging, along with integrating with SFDC. I'm also a big fan of using Snippets which is a great way to create short sentences or data that you want to include in emails, while not going overboard on boring templates.

Cons:

Not much, other than there's a lot going on. There are account and prospect views that you can build reports on top of that I really never use, but I'm sure could be useful. If you can focus on core functionality, then it's really quite easy to use.

Surprisingly bad implementation of lots of good ideas

Comments: I was very impressed by their sales process, they used their own product, and I saw how well they did. Their product was clean and impressive looking, but as soon as we began implementing, i felt like i had made the wrong choice... I was SO surprised by how poorly the integration is designed, especially field mapping. Then we discovered that their ability to sync data from one system to the other was spotty and unreliable. and their customer service was almost non-existent.

Pros:

It is feature rich, and enterprise level in what it offers.

Cons:

we ended up cancelling because of data syncing issues. we constantly had duplicates, inaccurate data (compared to the source: Salesforce), and the field mapping feature was horrendous.

Alternatives Considered: SalesLoft

Reasons for Choosing Outreach: we were looking for a more feature rich product with the ability to govern settings globally.

Switched From: Groove

Reasons for Switching to Outreach: sales process was smooth, and product looked more impressive.

Outreach Review

Pros:

It makes prospecting by account so much easier, especially if you have multiple prospects in each account. Additionally, leveraging their triggers and automation can help you scale your outreach.

Cons:

It is a very complex system but effective, there was much time spent configuring the platform to do what we needed but once set up it was awesome.

Made our SDRs way more productive

Comments: Great experience. Smooth during the sales cycle. Connects well to other solutions, pulling in key data on prospects. Product roadmap is also exciting (i.e. prospect insights and intelligence improving over time with AI insights).

Pros:

We moved across from Groove to Outreach and this was one of the best decisions we made. Outreach connects much better to other tools in our stack and the functionality is on another level. Outreach has enabled our SDRs to stop wasting time context switching between loads of tabs and focus on prospecting, maximizing their time prospecting. I am a big fan of Outreach!

Cons:

It would be great if it were simple to include a profile picture without the weird needing to have an avatar process on another platform.

Alternatives Considered: Bloobirds and SalesLoft

Reasons for Choosing Outreach: Groove was clunky and the support wasn't up to scratch.

Switched From: Groove

Reasons for Switching to Outreach: Industry standard. Connectivity. Great UX.

Great, but not perfect

Comments: Overall Outreach is a great tool for scaling out productivity but it seems to lack features in being able to automate follow ups on a one-off basis. You can schedule one email for further out but will have to actively remind yourself to continue following up which reduces the value automation can provide to a sales professional.

Pros:

Outreach is a fantastic tool that enables me and my colleagues to be much more productive in our sales outreach. It's great to be able to schedule emails in advance and even put prospects into sequences for more extended outreach efforts (no pun intended) without the need to actively manage and pay attention to them. It's also great at helping keep me organized in terms of tasks I need to follow up on like calls. They're ability to track email opens and clicks is also extremely valuable in identifying which prospects are engaging most with the material I send over. Outreach also has some other analytics that seem somewhat helpful as well, though haven't dug too much into these or really leveraged them to great extent for our team.

Cons:

There are some features that leave me wanting though. There are instances where I'd like to add just a slight bit of personalization for a very select few members of a sequenced group but in order to do that, I either need to have a reminder to catch that scheduled email right before it sends out (which defeats the purpose of the automation) or create an entirely new sequence just for 1 or 2 people which can really bog up my sequence view. Cheaper solutions like Yesware are able to allow for automated one-off sequences or email chains with a log built in to stop following emails if there's a response. Seems like it should be a fairly straight forward functionality but it's noticeably lacking in this platform.

Misled, big time.

Comments: My AE was good, he did his job the way an AE should. Everything are yet I signed the contract was just below the bar.

Pros:

Looks pretty, cheaper than some products but still expensive.

Cons:

I spent 12 months trying to troubleshoot issues I was having with my signature pictures not sending through, I went back and forth with their support being asked to try all these different things that genuinely never worked. What’s the MOST disappointing this about all of this is I asked on numerous occasions if this issue was happening with any of outreaches other clients using outlook and outreach together, I was told definitively that it was not happening with ANY integrations and it was only my business that the issues were occurring. I’ve now moved to another company that use Outreach, and of course, the issue with the signature happens again. It’s clear that integrity is low in the business, I was made to believe that our case was so so rare, and I spent hours and hours trying to fix it. It may seem like such a simple thing, a picture in a signature not sending though, but the way I work and the standard the business sets, we looked low tied to new prospects with sloppy email looks. The editing tool for templates and snippets is way behind the times, and it actually blew me a way how difficult it was to use, spacing, character size, and general format NEVER looked the way it needed to looks.

Alternatives Considered: Mixmax and SalesLoft

Reasons for Switching to Outreach: Pricing, and MixMax did not have an integration with Outlook.

Outreach Review

Comments: Great sales platform for teams looking to become more organized and increase their prospecting efforts.

Pros:

Great sales engagement platform for any sales org looking to take their prospecting analytics and reporting to the next level. Sequencing, call recording, prospecting tracking, Salesforce integration are all great.

Cons:

Very click heavy. I've had a lot of glitchy experiences where imports, mail merges, sequences fail and there is not a clear explanation as to why.

Very impressed

Pros:

The reporting and amount of features is incredible to a point where I get embarrassed at our own efforts. Spectacular onboarding and overall experience getting started considering the technical part was quite immersive in our backend and Salesforce.

Cons:

It is becoming a bit more troublesome to navigate and figure out a perfect solution but it seems to be addressed with the help of more CS and help desk articles.

Alternatives Considered: SalesLoft

Reasons for Choosing Outreach: The IP phone integration as part of a sequence is the best I've ever seen.

Reasons for Switching to Outreach: Not directly related to the product but I thought their content marketing was better and made me believe more in the people behind the product.

Great Sales Engagement Platform

Comments: So far the implementation and training team have been great. The product is reliable and really helping our team work faster.

Pros:

Outreach makes it easy for my sales reps to take action on leads. There are ways to automate many steps they would have to do manually, thereby giving them more opportunity to focus in other areas. Outreach is very customizable.

Cons:

Setup is complicated. It isn't just "plug and play". Until you spend a decent amount in the product, it is hard to remember how to get to everything.

Alternatives Considered: SalesLoft

Reasons for Choosing Outreach: Looking for a system that was a little more robust than Groove.

Switched From: Groove

Very powerful software. Great integrations with SFDC and Gmail as well that make it super easy .

Comments: Outreach makes it so easy to meet that crucial nexus point in sales of volume + quality of messaging. Being able to have measured feedback on how well your emails are received means you can keep tweaking until you get open and response rates as high as possible. It makes me faster as a sales rep and more data driven as a team.

Pros:

Outreach can do a TON. Being able to import a list of leads and have relevant info show such as title, last contact, etc.. is an amazing time saver when trying to make sure you're list (csv, sfdc report, etc..) is 'clean' and good to go. Being able to call directly through the platform is a huge time saver as well. All of the reporting around your sequences is a huge win. I will go through all of my sequences once every week or so to see what's doing well, what isn't, and tweak to optimize performance. There is a huge amount of data you can use to compare yourself to others, measure the efficacy of your outreach, and collaborate on best practices with team members. Over all Outreach is a huge win and is very well integrated with every one we use from a customer facing team perspective (gmail, sfdc, Linkedin)

Cons:

Outreach feels like they are probably an engineering first design second kind of company. I say that because their software can do SO MUCH, but it's not always intuitive how to do specific things. It has taken me awhile to get fully up to speed on some of the tips and tricks that really make outreach awesome. This is barely a con, more so just a training or user experience comment. Outreach can do so much it'd be tough for them to make every little feature super easy to find and obvious. Perhaps some more specific live onboarding/training would be helpful as well.

Best tool in its category

Comments: Overall, I would choose Outreach any day over the competitors and recommend it to others.

Pros:

Outreach suited our needs the best out of other tools in the market. It is very comprehensive and integrates with other tools in our sales enablement stack seamlessly.

Cons:

The reporting function needs improvement; too much data and not the right metrics - it would be good to see output through the full funnel instead of standalone metrics. Also, calls connected should exclude voicemail.

Alternatives Considered: SalesLoft

Switched From: Mailshake

Job Critical Software

Comments: Outreach is job critical for me and my reps. I would riot if my company took the tool away. I attribute my success as a sales rep to Outreach for allowing me to not let anything fall through the cracks.

Pros:

I use Outreach daily to manage my work process. I honestly don't know how I did anything without the tool. It is something that I would like to use for the rest of my career.

Cons:

Not often, but every once in a while I come up against small issues that can be frustrating, like not being able to sequence users. I have found though, that most of the time it is user error, but sometimes errors are not clear.

Great Prospect Management Tool

Comments: Eventhough UI is not simple yet once learnt, it's a great tool to manage all email cadences and managing the Prospects/ Leads and Campaign

Pros:

Great Sales Cadence for effective Lead Management Detailed Email Analytics for Campaign Management

Cons:

Inability to integrate with Google Sheets and only allows upload thru CSV Takes time for User to familiarize themselves with the Tool UI

Alternatives Considered: SalesLoft

Reasons for Switching to Outreach: Because of it's better email cadence feature

Great tool for automating sales prospecting

Comments: This tool helps automate email-based prospecting and marketing so your sales team can be more efficient.

Pros:

I like the fact that Outreach has a wide array of functionality from email tracking, to email sequencing, reporting, and calendar integration. It serves a bunch of fundamental purposes for any sales team.

Cons:

The biggest drawback of Outreach is the initial adoption and learning curve. It can take about a month or so to fully learn the ins and outs of the solution. Make sure your company invests in training when you roll this product out!

Live in Outreach for my day to day prospect management and outreach

Comments: Overall, Outreach helps streamline my day to day outreach, gives me great tools for building and executing messaging, and allows for visibility across our team and sales org.

Pros:

Task management and sending emails / completing tasks from the platform is extremely helpful. I know exactly where to start each day. The Salesforce integration is also extremely helpful.

Cons:

Unfortunately our Salesforce integration is not always optimal and syncing sometimes fails (so some leads show in different stages on Outreach vs. Salesforce). Additionally, it is sometimes hard to filter and build lists based on specific criteria and I need to do this in Salesforce and then manually select the prospects I want to reach out to in Outreach.

Outreach has flipped the table

Comments: First off, it's incredibly easy to figure out. I'm tech savvy but not many tools are as easy to figure out as Outreach. My previous sales positions were very hard work - lot's of manual work like sending emails, cold calling from lists, manual note taking and cadence tracking. Needless to say, my mind was a bit scrambled when the new boss at my current company started explaining what this platform would do for me (hint, nearly everything). As with any workflow change, it does take some getting used to, but all of the changes are positive. I haven't done the math but this platform has given back so much time in my day and allows me to focus on more meaningful tasks instead of mindlessly sending out templated emails and keeping meticulous manual records of all the calls I make. For those who have read this far, I'm sure you get the point. At the very least go schedule a demo so you can see for yourself, this platform has so much value!

Pros:

How easy to use it is! This platform is reinventing the wheel but has created an incredible user interface and design that lets you hit the ground running.

Cons:

Nothing about the platform is sub-par or oversold, but I would really benefit from having some sort of mobile app.

Horrible Customer Service

Comments: Annoying to setup, difficult to train team to use extremely well, but the very WORSE part about it is how horrible their customer support and their Billing department is. They will randomly send invoices with literally no explanation. After responding to their team it will take often days to get a response on the invoices. Their overall support system is a complete nightmare and I would avoid this software solely because of that.

Pros:

Outreach helped our SDR team more effectively call new prospects, however, it isn't easy to setup and it isn't easy for new SDRs to learn.

Cons:

Hard to learn which caused SDRs to make simple, but not obvious mistakes because of the software's design. Once they learned the system it did work fairly well. The customer support is absolutely horrible though so good luck getting setup and figuring it out yourself. You are better off finding other software.

Task Management Tool for SDRs

Comments: Overall, solid tool that allows you to reach your sales and marketing goals. It is a great tool for Sales Development teams that keeps them on top of their tasks all in one platform.

Pros:

Outreach is a great tool for organizing sales and marketing tasks. With its ability to send out mass or personalized emails, make phone calls, and organize daily tasks, this platform can accomplish a lot. The 360-degree view of your tasks makes it easy to stay on top of your goals.

Cons:

It would be nice to be able to configure or personalize the 360 view page. While it provides a lot of good insight into my tasks and updates, it would be nice to filter out some of the less prioritized panels.

Does everything a sales enablement platform needs to do!

Comments: This tool helps the entire sales team save hours of routine work! A competitor, Outplay, is giving a good run for their money and I'm tempted to migrate to save $$$ every month but Outreach is deeply integrated into a lot of our other tools, hence sticking to this tool for a while.

Pros:

Love all the features offered by Outreach - from email personalization to CRM integration to logging phone calls without breaking a sweat. Quick response from their Customer Support team - even hopped on a call when our issue wasn't resolved. Documentation is extremely helpful and easy to interpret.

Cons:

Their pricing plans seem to be on the higher side compared to the rest of the players. VOIP functionality is a little buggy, several recordings were affected from our first day.

Excellent Email Tool

Pros:

I love how simple it is to create and edit the sequences. As a sales person who sends a lot of outbound emails, it's very important to have a tool that makes it as simple as possible to create new sequences and Outreach is the best there is.

Cons:

Sometimes when you go to put a lead in another sequence, it won't allow you to do so for several hours if they have already been put in a sequence. I wish that you didn't have to wait as long between the two. For example, right when a new lead comes in, we have an automated email that is kicked out to them. After that email is sent, I have to wait several hours before putting them in another sequence to get them scheduled. There needs to be shorter wait time between the two.

Makes my job 2x easier than not having it

Comments: I automate my prospecting and follow-up efforts through Outreach. Whether it's queuing up sequences, using templates, snippets, or the calendar scheduling link, I've found Outreach extremely valuable.

Pros:

I love that Outreach has built a level of automation that allows me to speed up my workflow and make manual tasks into something I no longer waste time on. It's 2x easier to do my job with Outreach than without it.

Cons:

I've run into a couple things that can be frustrating when it comes to scheduling when emails send out, but other than this, Outreach has been perfect for my needs.

My experience with Outreach

Pros:

- Priority tool used by me in my day-to-day activities- Easy of usage in terms of lead management, sending out emails, messages, calls, etc- Tracking of daily activities, visibility of upcoming tasks and previous engagement with leads

Cons:

- Sometimes it becomes difficult to make calls due to bandwidth issues even if you are on high speed internet connection. It fails to recognises and doesn't connect call. This can be worked upon more.

Outreach updates are horrible and the CSM doesn’t know the product

Pros:

I use to like reporting and reliability but with updates none of that works

Cons:

It’s unreliable and drops constantly. The reporting is no longer live. CSM doesn’t even know that we can transfer calls. It’s worthless

Very powerful software for outbound sales teams

Comments: We use Outreach for all sales activities. Emails, tasks, sequences, booking meetings, calls. It became our main tool for outbound sales. You can do everything in one place, we have it integrated with Salesforce, so currently we use SF more as a database. As I previously mentioned, Outreach is designed to save your time, our sales process has never been so efficient.

Pros:

Outreach is very powerful tool. What I like the most is the functionality of the software. All outbound sales activities can be done from Outreach. Before using Outreach we worked by having tasks on Salesforce, we had a list of tasks and we did everyday sales activities by completing tasks in that list. Currently, we do everything from Outreach it is much more time efficient, we save a lot of time and we can contact more people per day. Outreach is designed to save time of sales people.

Cons:

At first it was not very intuitive but such powerful software can never be super easy to use because it has a lot of various functions and customizations. Also, a price is quite high, so it's not easily affordable for smaller sales teams.