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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WhatCounts
Score 4.0 out of 10
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WhatCounts is a popularly-used, global enterprise level suite of email marketing tools from the company of the same name founded in 2000 and headquartered in Atlanta, GA. Their customers range from Costco, FoxNews.com, the Seattle Times, Red Lion Hotels, and number over a thousand.
Central to the platform is... email. From that it handles advanced segmentation, customer lifecycle building and automation, and personalization. WhatCounts bills itself as a full service marketing agency with…
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.
How big is your email list? For the money WhatCounts allows us to manage a large list and gives us great tools. If you have a small list this product might be more than you need. How many emails do you want to send? WhatCounts charges by the email and of course you get a better price per email the more emails you send. If you will not be sending many emails or are sending to a small list WhatCounts might not be the right tool for you.
We receive super customer service from a dedicated account representative.
The list management tools are easy to use and give us granular insight into what users are opening and where they are clicking.
The analytics give us a variety of ways to look at the types of devices being used to view our content and the ways our users interact with content. For example we can see that most opens are on mobile but if a reader wants to spend time clicking into more in depth content they move over to a desktop computer.
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.
Some of the list management tools were hard to find at first but now I use them every month. If I could change one thing I would allow the account details filter window to show all the available slots with no scrolling and I would add a feature to set / reset all selections on the dropdowns.
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.
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.
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 have a great representative. She schedules regular calls with our team and helps us learn new ways to use the tool. We get great personal support. I know she has many other clients but I always feel like she has time for me and genuinely enjoys working with our team.
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.
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.
We selected WhatCounts because it had the ability to help us manage our large list and gave us tools to help tailor our messages. In addition, WhatCounts had the ability to allow us to have an enterprise license but we could still have individual department accounts.
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.
We use WhatCounts as a communication tool to our external groups mainly families and alumni. In our case our main objective is to get these groups timely information. While some of our emails do have a call to action for example signing up for Family Weekend or a Reunion Weekend we don't use the tool to generate leads in the way many organizations use html email.
