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Cold Emailing
Outreach.io Review: The Most Complete Outreach Tool for 2024?
lemlist team
July 25, 2024
|
7 min. read
lemlist team
LAST UPDATED
May 16, 2024
READING TIME
7 min.
Selling products and services online through sales lead analysis, prospect interviews, and deal closing is getting increasingly challenging. Most businesses and sales teams rely on a set of sales outreach enablement and management tech stack.
Outreach.io is an AI-powered sales enablement tool.
This thorough review of Outreach.io will help you figure out whether this expensive sales engagement platform is really for you!
Outreach.io: what is it and what does it do?
Outreach.io is a cloud-based sales outreach tool that enables you to increase seller productivity manifold. It does so by bringing all the outbound and inbound sales outreach under one software and automating tasks with AI.
The platform is essentially a one-stop shop for various sales tools aiming to boost sales team efficiency and close more deals.
Oureach.io offers the following functionalities:
Sales engagement tools: Streamline tasks like email outreach, scheduling meetings, and managing communication with potential customers.
Deal management and insights: Organize and track sales opportunities throughout the entire sales cycle.
Sales outreach conversation intelligence: Analyze sales calls to identify strengths and weaknesses in communication strategies.
Deal insights
Pipeline management and forecasting: Gain visibility into your sales pipeline and predict future sales performance.
High-quality training materials for sales reps: Provide insights and recommendations to help salespeople improve their performance.
Outreach.io helps businesses centralize their sales operations and equip their teams with data-driven tools to improve sales productivity and close more deals.
Quick Overview
Outreach.io delivers what it promises but you must go through a lengthy learning curve before using it productively.
If you are a medium to large business with an abundant sales budget, you can pick Outreach.io as your go-to sales tool.
However, Outreach.io is not the right sales outreach tool for you if you are a small business or startup with a limited sales budget.
Moreover, Outreach.io is not transparent with its pricing plans which can be frustrating for many potentially interested users.
Affordable pricing plans, only $83 per user per month annually
Expensive, Opaque pricing policy, Costs above $100 per user per month for the basic tier
Subscription plans
Monthly and annual
Only annual
Email outreach
Advanced
Basic
Cold emails
Available
Available
AI email writer
Advanced
Intermediate
LinkedIn outreach
Advanced
Intermediate
Custom landing pages
Available
Not available
Third-party app integrations
40+
100+
Sales enablement AI
AI campaigns, AI icebreakers, AI pipeline auditing, AI meeting assistant
-
Chrome extension
Available
Available
API access
Available
Available
Email warm-up
Available as Lemwarm free bonus
Not available
Who is Outreach.io best for?
While Outreach.io is designed to meet the needs of sales teams, these users will benefit from using it the most:
Sales development reps (SDRs): Uses automation, AI, and ML to help sales reps find the best times to contact prospects. It eliminates guesswork by using data and ML models.
Closing reps: It allows closing reps to automate administrative tasks and focus on sealing deals by automating follow-ups and increasing meeting hold rates.
Customer success managers: AI and ML technology automates tasks, saving customer success managers time and increasing efficiency.
Sales management and leadership: Offers analytics for tracking team performance, with all data integrated into the CRM for accuracy.
Sales operations: Helps streamline sales pipelines and enhance integrations, ensuring adherence to established processes.
Marketing: Provides tools for personalized multi-channel marketing and seamless transition to sales, improving lead follow-up and close rates.
Features
Find below an in-depth review of the major features of Outreach.io that you can utilize to close more deals and achieve forecasted sales revenue.
For each of these features, we have included use cases against which we tested the Outreach sales platform functionalities.
You can quickly relate these tasks to your sales outreach projects and understand if you should give Outreach.io a try.
1. Sales engagement
The primary feature of Outreach.io is sales engagement—a bundle of various tools to help you connect with leads, convert them to prospects, and close more deals as wins than losses.
For instance, one of your leads is interested in subscribing to an email outreach software for the next 12 months. Your sales development rep is already in contact with this lead, but they are trying to pitch in a sales CRM. So, there is a gap in pitching the right product.
Outreach.io’s AI-powered sales enablement tool lets your sales rep notice such sales signals and pitch the right tool in which the buyer is more interested.
The sales outreach tool does so through the following features:
Pipeline calculator
The Pipeline Calculator tool creates a prediction model on how many sales sequences your team must build to achieve the sales revenue target for a quarter or year. This benefits you when you see a shortfall of earned revenue compared to forecasted revenue.
The tool analyzes past sales outreach activities and their success rates to forecast a customized pipeline activity for your sales team.
Outreach sequences
Predictive sales outreach projects use a sales sequence or workflow.
You can automate this process on Outreach.io using its Sequences tool. It’s good because you can use sequence templates of the tool that works for most businesses.
Later, you can customize the sequence steps of the template to create a unique workflow.
Sequences also enable your sales reps to stay on top of their tasks. When they explore workday tasks, Outreach.io automatically takes them to email replies or document request emails the prospects sent earlier.
Calendar
In your sales outreach campaigns, you often send free demos, product introductions, or deal discussion meeting invites to prospects.
Outreach.io makes it easier for your sales reps to send free meeting slots to the prospects using the Outreach.io Calendar tool.
The tool also professionally adds meeting slots in your cold outreach emails as clickable buttons. Prospects can simply click the time slot buttons to book their preferred meeting time.
Smart email assist
I’ve often noticed that sales reps struggle to compose emails themselves in response to product demos or price request emails sent by the buyer.
They need a large language model and artificial intelligence to overcome this issue. Surprisingly, Outreach.io offers an advanced email assistant as a part of the Sales Engagement package.
While replying to an incoming email from a lead, sellers can now utilize the AI email writer. They just need to click the Assist button on the email body. There are various email writing customizations like setting the email read time, modifying the email text tone, variable fields for mass emailing, and more.
Of course, your sales reps and account executives must thoroughly read the email before hitting the send button. Email AIs often come with hallucinations and bugs that can decrease the readability of your emails.
Task flow and extensions
Sales teams often invest a lot of time finding tasks, ordering them based on priority levels, manually taking up tasks from the board by breaking the order, etc.
Such activities can significantly reduce the productivity of your sales outreach campaigns. Not to mention, manual picking of tasks also involves risks of human error.
I avoid this risk and hassle by requesting my sales team members to use the Task Flow feature of Outreach.io. Reps just need to go to their Outreach app dashboard or 360° view screen. The page already starts showing Due tasks in an itemized way, including Total, Action item, Email, Call, etc.
All you need to do is hit the Start Tasks button. The Universal Task Flow tool will pull the appropriate task that needs completing.
The task will also appear in the Outreach Everywhere extension if the seller is on their email app.
The Outreach Chrome extension also benefits your sales reps by showing crucial information about a lead, prospect, or buyer contact. For example, you can easily find sequences related to the contact, their LinkedIn profile, and upselling opportunities if the contact is an existing customer.
2. Conversation intelligence
The deal depends on how your sales reps or account executives promote the product or service to the buyer during video or audio meetings. Due to human errors, reps often forget to mention key selling points.
Sometimes, the buyer asks highly technical or complex questions to which reps only say, “I’m not sure about this. Let me get back to you.” Causing the rhythm of the meeting to drop.
Not to mention, sales reps and account executives also constantly need to take notes during meetings and sift their emails for product or service documents.
An advanced AI that knows your sales outreach campaign inside out and has access to product documents can surely help. Here, it is Outreach.io’s Conversation Intelligence AI — Kaia.
Kaia, within Outreach.io, is an AI-powered virtual assistant specifically designed to enhance sales conversations. It acts as a real-time companion during meetings, offering several functionalities to boost sales rep productivity and improve overall sales team performance.
Here's a breakdown of what Kaia does:
Live meeting assistance: Kaia joins and records sales meetings (with proper permissions), providing real-time features like transcription and capturing key moments.
Action item identification: Kaia automatically identifies action items mentioned during calls and associates them with the relevant parts of the conversation transcript.
Focus on the customer: By automating tasks like note-taking, Kaia allows salespeople to stay focused on building rapport and effectively communicating with potential customers.
Improved sales coaching: Managers can leverage Kaia recordings to analyze sales calls, identify areas for improvement, and provide targeted coaching to individual reps.
Enhanced sales efficiency: Kaia automates mundane tasks, allowing reps to spend more time on strategic selling activities.
Kaia Assist comes with live AI and machine learning capabilities to help your sales reps during the call. When the buyer asks a question, Kaia automatically shows several probable answers on the seller’s screen.
In-call engagement and listening are also key to closing deals. Reps must ask valid questions so the buyer engages with them. Also, reps should not just keep talking, converting the call to a monologue rather than a dialogue.
Here, the Kaia assist gives signals to the sales rep if they are being too quiet or too chatty. Other major features of Kaia assist are:
Content cards
Live call recording
Live call transcription
Automatic follow-up with product documents or quotes after the call
Automatic note-taking
Playlist of top-performing calls to train new sales reps
3. Pipeline management
To assess the quality, quantity, and maturity levels of sales outreach campaigns, you need a pipeline management tool. If you use Outreach.io, you no longer need to subscribe to a separate pipeline management tool.
Firstly, the tool enables you to oversee quota attainment for individual reps and their teams.
It is beneficial because you no longer need to sift through emails for the specific quota of sales teams or reps. You get to see the quotas for all in the dashboard view in the Outreach.io tool.
Secondly, Outreach automatically pulls data from all sales pipelines and creates individual pipeline health scores.
Its sales AI suggests what to do if a pipeline is at risk. Therefore, your sales managers can easily instruct the teams or individual sales reps on qualifying more leads, reducing coverage gaps, and so on.
Other notable features offered by the Outreach Pipeline Management tool for your sales outreach programs are:
Real-time pipeline movement
Pipeline coverages for the existing and future periods
Number of pipelines at par with the winning speed of your team
Score-card based on pipelines
4. Deal insights
You often notice that sales reps invest too much time in deals that are sure to fail. However, it is impossible to identify such deals until you try out the Deal Insights AI of Outreach.io.
The tool scans through present and past deal performances to create individual deal profiles. When reps click the Insights button, the tool displays which deals are winnable, which are at risk, and which are not winnable.
Other functionalities of the Deal Insights tool are:
Deal health scorecard
AI suggested deal troubleshooting actions
Quickly spot if vital deals are moving at a positive or negative pace
5. Data analytics and reporting
Outreach.io’s Reporting feature lets you determine if your sales team invests their workday to win sales deals. You will find critical data on all sales outreach campaigns in the Report section.
The Report page has individual tabs for Sales Execution, Team, and Sequence reports. You can customize the reports by applying various sorting and filtering rules to the raw data.
Outreach.io pricing
This sales outreach tool doesn't provide a transparent pricing page on the Outreach.io website.
In order to receive pricing, you need to contact Outreach sales reps, which can benefit enterprises and large businesses if they have no bar on sales tool procurement.
For small-medium size businesses and startups, the lack of pricing transparency can be somewhat frustrating.
That said, Outreach.io is said to cost around $100/user/month, per user, which is about average for the highest-end plans for most sales engagement software.
Outreach.io does not do monthly pricing. All Outreach accounts must be purchased annually.
Is it good value for money?
Overall, Outreach.io's lack of pricing transparency and annual billing with at least $1,200 paid up-front is not good value.
Outreach.io offering is just too expensive when compared with other competent AI sales tools like lemlist. Contrary to Outreach.io, lemlist can be purchased monthly, quarterly and yearly.
Outreach.io is a good solution that offers an advanced sales engagement platform.
More than 5,500 clients are already using it, and among these are esteemed businesses like Elsevier, NewtonX, Armory, Alan, Zoom, and so on.
But there are some critical disadvantages to Outreach.io you should be aware of:
Annual pricing contracts only
Learning curve
No public pricing information
Overwhelming interface
Customization and training required
We recommend Outreach for companies with higher sales and marketing budgets.
Outreach.io can also cater to businesses that are willing to arrange training and development sessions for their sales reps.
If you are on a tight budget and looking for a tool that you can put into operation right after buying, you need to look for an Outreach.io alternative, like lemlist.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is Outreach.io used for?
Outreach gives sales leaders a complete picture of the entire sales cycle so they can increase deal velocity, pipeline conversion, and rep productivity. At the same time, sellers have all of the capabilities and insights they need to build pipeline, run meetings, navigate buying committees, and manage deals to close.
How much does Outreach.io cost?
Outreach.io isn's transparent with its pricing, but according to users it starts from $100/user/month.
What type of tool is Outreach.io?
Outreach.io is a cloud-based sales outreach tool that enables you to increase seller productivity manifold. It does so by bringing all the outbound and inbound sales outreach under one software and automating tasks with AI.
Is Outreach.io a good tool?
Outreach.io is a good toll with a built-in deal management system designed to help sales teams close more deals. By providing insights and data on their pipeline, Outreach.io helps sales teams analyze and solve risky deals in the pipeline.
What is outreach AI?
Outreach AI is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to improve outreach tasks and make outreach campaigns more effective. It automates and optimizes processes like campaign creation, and email personalization, and helps businesses generate more responses and grow faster.
Does Outreach.io have an API?
Yes. Outreach offers an open API which will allow you to pull vast amounts of data and run specific analytics.
Is Outreach.io like Salesforce?
Outreach.io is built for sales engagement, providing a suite of tools to automate and streamline the sales process, while Salesforce is a CRM platform with general purpose.
How does Outreach.io track email opens?
Open-Tracking provides the user the ability to track if a prospect has opened an email by adding an invisible pixel to the email. Each time the email is opened, the pixel is downloaded and Outreach.io registers the action in-app.
Does Outreach.io record calls?
Recorded calls to/from unrestricted areas remain two-sided recordings. Users that do not have one-sided recording enabled for their profile will be unable to record calls to/from restricted areas. One-sided calls receive real time transcription during the call, just like two-sided recorded calls.
Does Outreach.io have a phone system?
Yes. The option to enable an integrated Sales Dialer is included in the Outreach Platform. Customers using the dialer pay for usage including voice minutes and phone numbers. We offer pay-per-use or subscription plans for both voice minutes and phone numbers.
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We've made a mistake with cold emailing! Luckily we've also found a solution: Warm outreach! Learn how to implement a warm outreach strategy in this guide.
Did you know that networking is an underrated way of getting new clients and growing your business? In this article, you’ll get our secret networking campaign framework that helped us generate $100k in revenue.
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