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 outstanding for volume outreach, as it allows you to touch many prospects and accounts with limited time, while also storing data on historical interactions with prospects. It can be useful for SDR/BDR roles, as well as SMB and MM volume of sales pipe, but I don't think it would be nearly as useful for enterprise sales where more strategic and lower volume outreach is needed. I believe that incorporating more AI assistance with writing would make it a more useful tool for strategic sales.
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.
Would be nice to have custom reporting available. Coming from Salesforce, the included canned reports are useful but I like to roll my sleeves up and build exactly what I want.
Conversations will record meetings booked via MSTeams but requires the BDR/SDR to hit record. Other solutions (e.g. Chorus.ai) join as a participant and don't require a user hitting the "record" button. We have to change our flow to make this work and it is a bit clunky.
It's a strong tool that helps our sales development team manage a large number of qualified leads. The sequence framework ensures that every lead receives enough contact attempts that we have confidence that we're not abandoning our prospecting too early without the overhead of managing those activities manually.
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.
Overall, Outreach is usable and scalable across team sizes. The only reason I give a nine and not a 10 is that there are improvements that can be made within the reporting feature. It is usable, but not everyone can easily self-learn the best practices. At times, it may require building 2-3 reports and then using a VLOOKUP in Excel to achieve the desired outcome.
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.
In our years as Outreach customers, I can count the number of outages we've experienced on one hand. Generally, outages have been very brief and have not completely frozen our access to the platform. Scheduled maintenance is always proactive communicated and the hours never interfere with standard business hours or scheduled sequences.
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.
Outreach is designed with a workflow-first approach, which helps ensure that reps adopt the process and allows AI and machine learning to understand the full funnel. On top of this, Outreach offers more robust functionality, reporting, and integrations than other competitors. Outreach also understands user workflows, which helps influence rep behavior and outcomes.
Salesloft blows outreach out of the water in all aspects. One of the biggest issues I had was their unwillingness to listen to customer feedback. I had requested several small changes to be made when I had previously used the platform that unfortunately fell onto deff ears. I am much happier using Salesloft and the positive results I've experienced are a direct result of that.
When I first joined the company we were a sales team of 10. Over the last 4 years we have grown to 30 and have used Outreach the entire time. Everyone uses Outreach and it works for virtually any size business. The seat model works perfectly for any size company plus Outreach can handle hundreds of thousands of emails being sent out. We never have to worry about throttling or any type of lag time based on usage. This is key when scaling.
It's helped me speed up my ability to reach out to customers. I like bulk composing but would be even better if Outreach was able to recommend (daily/weekly/etc.) who we should reach out to based on intent/other metrics.
I will say outreach has improved our ability to book more meetings simply because it enables volume activities.
I have been with a company that was using Salesloft, but moved to a competitor. I can't say it was exactly the competitors fault, as a lot of other internal changes were happening, (hence leaving the system that was working well), but we had the worst sales year in company history that year. Reps who consistently performed at or above quota were suddenly struggling to keep their pipelines in order, and the middle of the pack reps were going on PiPs and being let go.
Is it the dialer, or the leadership? You decide.
But the leadership also changed the dialer - so maybe it's both?
