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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Salesloft
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Salesloft’s Revenue Orchestration Platform uses AI to help market-facing teams prioritize and take action on what matters most, from first touch to upsell and renewal.
Salesloft and Outreach are both sales acceleration tools and sales engagement platforms. They aim to help sales reps automate and streamline the process of reaching out to prospects to speed up the sales cycle. Both include the ability to set up outreach cadences over email or voice calls, create new account profiles, track engagement activity, make voice calls, and report on sales outreach performance.
Features
Each product provides sales teams, account teams, and customer success teams with tools to help automate outreach. But each product also has a few stand-out features.
Salesloft is primarily used by SDR/BDR sales teams to set up and execute communication cadences and track outreach activities. Salesloft customers on TrustRadius value the ability to create multi-step cadences and the CRM integrations it offers, especially integration with Salesforce.
Along with helping sales teams streamline prospect outreach, Outreach also provides customer success teams with customer interaction history information. Outreach has robust task management features, including reminders and the ability to sort tasks by priority level.
Limitations
Before investing in either tool, here are a few limitations to be aware of.
Salesloft customers frequently mention technical difficulties with the platform, especially around cadences. For example, certain steps in cadences may be missed, and contacts on the ‘do not contact’ list still receive outreach occasionally. Salesloft also does not allow users to pause cadences.
While customers on TrustRadius say that Outreach’s user-interface is easier to use than Salesloft’s UI, the amount of information that gets added to prospect profiles can become overwhelming. Users also note that Outreach’s settings are complex and it can be difficult to understand what’s happening under the hood.
Pricing
Both products have a subscription pricing model and different levels of plans available. For example, Salesloft has plans focused on pipeline generation, opportunity management, post-sales customer experience, and for enterprise organizations. Both vendors do not disclose pricing information on their website but will provide a quote upon request.
Which Is Right For You?
Salesloft is well suited for sales development teams that need to reach out to a large number of people. It’s great for prospecting, but not ideal for one-off prospect or customer communications. Salesloft is ideal for SDR or BDR teams that send upwards of 100 emails a day or make over 100 calls a day.
Outreach is also ideal for sales teams reaching out to a large amount of prospects. Customer success teams can also benefit from Outreach’s customer interaction histories and outreach activity reporting. This may be the better option for teams that are looking for a very easy to use sales engagement platform that has superior task management features.
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.
I find it to be the best resource for scheduling calls with clients. Specifically when the call includes multiple people using Salesloft, it's so simple and easy to use to send open times to client and then to be able to send active links to the client where with one click the calendar invite shows up on my calendar? it's the best most efficient tool I have in my toolbelt at the moment. When it comes to logging, it's also simple but I wish I could add a contact to SL from the Microsoft integration.
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.
The inbound dialer. I don't particularly like having to open a second window just for inbound calls. Especially if I forget to close it during a meeting and get interrupted.
The texting interface. I can have emails templated, to fill fields pulled from the lead profile, like name, company, positions, etc. I would like the same functionality for texting, especially since I send as many texts as I do emails. Even being able to save snippets or templates would be nice.
On the note of texting, having a dedicated tab in the People view for text messages would do a lot to let me catch up on other people's conversations with the lead, instead of having to find them on the main Activity tab.
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.
SalesLoft is absolutely VITAL to our daily operations. We could not function without it or a program like it. Speaking as a Sales Person who has had to operate without a product like this, the difference is night and day. The ability to stay organized, automate tasks, easily log activities and notes, review calls, and coach team members is an absolute gamechanger.
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.
Drift was extremely easy for both our demand gen team and SDR to jump right into. It was feature rich and purpose-built for marketers—it was remarkably easy to connect our marketing automation, CRM, and more to the platform and get everything to work together. Now the ability to create digital experiences and conversation landing pages is democratized—empowering our team to do better work and provide better prospect/customer experience.
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.
The availability is pretty good, we do sometimes have errors or delays in syncing activities but nothing that has been too detrimental to our workflow. Most recently we had an issue with Lofting through Outlook due to a change in security token that took a few weeks to resolve but it is fixed now.
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.
Yes timely and easy to use. The only delays we have are when we run our big month sales blitz and activities take some time to sync to the reporting as well as SalesForce
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.
The support team was very responsive but at the end of the day they took a long time to fix our issue. The issue did get fixed, though, so that is what matters. Very nice people who are there to help in any way they can.
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.
We had some virtual training with our CSM which was very well constructed. It took some time to get into the full swing of things but with a few weeks of hands on experience I was feeling confidant. The SL team was always available to answer questions or jump an a call to walk us through stuff. I also used the Customer Help Center for a few self guided learnings on how to use specific features related to reporting and team management.
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.
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.
Salesloft Rhythm (BDR/SDR home screen) provides a landing page where all the prioritized work is queued for immediate execution. The UX is clean and the only other elements is a stream of activity indicating prospects interacting with content (e.g. clicking a link in an email). My experience with other tools was that their "home" pages had a dozen icons and it was confusion for someone new to the platform to figure out where to go to work on the next item.
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.
Seen a 200% increase in productivity from our SDR team.
We now have robust data about when the best times to call are and can focus our power hours around those.
We now have an audit history around our emails sent and can dive in and make small changes to templates and snippets to continuously increase our open and click rates.
