At the first “Outreach Explore” event, the company unveiled a host of new features, including deal acceleration and admin tools, and a certification program
Outreach, a leading sales engagement platform, announced several significant enhancements to their platform, including Outreach Insights, featuring Buyer Sentiment Analysis — a first-of-its-kind machine learning technology that classifies buyer emotions and signals to accurately measure sales engagement — as well as new deal acceleration tools, new administrator tools, and a new administrator certification program.
Read More: The Impact Of Augmented Reality On B2B And B2C Sales
“The buying and selling experience is laden with emotion – from both sides – but the best sellers are the ones who can truly get beyond what their buyer is saying to understand what they are feeling. But, that intuitive skill is tough to teach, and even harder to scale,” said Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach. “Now, we can give all reps a deeper understanding of how their buyers are feeling, right within their inbox, while simultaneously reporting on it. Buyer Sentiment is a superior metric to measure pipeline and rep performance that will help sales leaders focus in on actions and content that drive better outcomes with their customers.”
Outreach Insights includes both Sequence Performance and Team Performance Report.
The Sequence Performance Report helps sales leaders and their teams measure and analyze true engagement with Buyer Sentiment Analysis to optimize Sequence and content performance. The traditional lens for performance measurement includes reply rates, open rates, click rates, and booked meetings, but those activity measures are now insufficient. Buyer Sentiment Analysisprovides a deeper layer of information that provides a more accurate measure of Sequence performance. Buyer engagements are broken down by positive responses, objections, referrals, unsubscribes, and other reactions such as “willing to meet” or “needs information.” Sales leaders can also filter reports to measure the performance of specific Sequences, content collections, teams, users, tags, and more. Automated Buyer Persona Classification, another new artificial intelligence-driven capability, analyzes personas to understand better how Sequences and messaging resonate with buyers. Now, with real buyer feedback, sales leaders will never again rely solely on basic engagement metrics like reply rates.
Read More: 8 Handy Tools For Sales Reps When Working Remote!
The Team Performance Report gives sales leaders and frontline managers line of sight to how their prospecting reps are performing. It also provides coaching tools to diagnose how well each rep is doing, and opportunities to discover underperformance so reps can be coached and brought back on pace in real-time. It tracks meetings booked and uses machine learning to estimate where reps are likely to end the month, providing an at-a-glance forecast so managers can better predict if the team will collectively hit its monthly goal. Reports can drill into how prospects were Sequenced, prospect meeting conversion rates, touches per prospect, and response times. Response times can further be filtered by buyer persona, revealing how quickly reps respond to the most important people in an organization, a key leading indicator of sales success. The Team Performance report also uses Buyer Sentiment Analysis to break down buyers’ responses at every point in each Sequence for each team member. Titles of prospects are classified into buyer persona groups to help illuminate which types of buyers are most successfully being targeted by the team.
Outreach Insights, featuring Buyer Sentiment Analysis will be available for public beta to all Outreach customers at the beginning of 2021 and generally available later in 2021.
Outreach also announced new Deal Acceleration tools today, which help sales teams adapt to the remote selling reality. Deal Acceleration tools provide data-driven insights in real-time, enabling sales leaders to easily see a team’s or individual rep’s pipeline, top accounts, and engaged prospects, as well as which deals are moving or are at-risk. This information makes it easy for sales leaders to see how a deal is being worked and provide reps with guidance and in-the-moment coaching.
Read More: How Can Your Sales Team Stay Agile In A Remote Working World?
Outreach also launched a new, industry-leading certification program for administrators. The new certification program will validate “Outreach Experts” to better arm revenue leaders with the right knowledge to adopt leading-edge sales methodologies using Outreach.
Finally, Outreach further cements its sales engagement leadership amongst enterprise companies with its announcements of User Provisioning via SCIM API and CRM Plug-in Configuration Manager. Administrators at Outreach’s largest customers report time savings of up to 20 hours per month and reported these features help reduce effort and improve operational excellence. SCIM API enables admins to automate user provisioning and management so reps have access to Outreach from the moment they start work. Plugin Configuration Manager gives administrators the ability to export, migrate, and restore CRM Plug-in configurations to test changes in a sandbox and then promote them to production in minutes.
