Are you confused if Outreach.io is the right fit for your sales outreach activity? Well, this blog on Outreach.io review will give you in-depth information about the tool.
Outreach.io is one of the top sales engagement platforms that consistently grabs attention with its robust feature set. But is it just the hype, or does it really have what it takes to boost your sales to new levels?
At the onset, I would like to mention that Outreach.io is an enterprise solution, so if you’re looking at being cost-effective, then you should consider looking at other Outreach.io alternatives.
Let’s find out together.
By the end of this Outreach.io review, you will learn about:
- Outreach’s key features
- Outreach’s latest pricing
- Pros & cons of using Outreach for sales
- Experiences and reviews of Outreach users
- SmartReach vs Outreach – An alternative solution
So, let’s get started with a brief overview.
Outreach.io review – An overview of the tool
Outreach.io is a sales execution platform designed to help enterprise teams increase their productivity and close more deals. It provides a comprehensive set of tools for managing the entire sales cycle, from prospecting and outreach to deal management and coaching.
It is considered a leader in sales engagement and enablement.
Here is an overview of the key features of Outreach.io
- Multichannel Outreach: Manage email, calls, LinkedIn, and live chat in one platform.
- Outreach Automation: Build personalized email sequences, automate follow-ups, and trigger actions based on responses.
- Integrations: Connect with popular CRMs, sales tools, and data sources for streamlined workflows.
- Interactive Dashboards: Monitor individual and team performance with customizable dashboards.
- Comprehensive Reporting and analytics: Analyze team performance, identify trends, and measure ROI with detailed reports.
Outreach.io review – Features analyzed
Outreach.io provides a vast field of features for your cold outreach. However, in this Outreach.io review, we will cover only the key features of the tool that will help you make the right decision.
Sales engagement
Outreach.io’s main focus lies in sales engagement, offering a comprehensive set of tools designed to facilitate effective communication with potential leads, transform them into prospects, and ultimately increase the number of successful deals compared to unsuccessful ones.
Below is the list of key features of Outreach’s sales engagement.
- Outreach provides a library of pre-built templates, snippets, and tasks that can be used to personalize outreach at scale. You can also create your own custom templates.
- Outreach’s personalization features allow you to insert recipient names, company names, and other custom fields into your outreach messages.
- It provides a sequences feature that allows you to create automated email sequences that can be sent to prospects and leads. You can also use Outreach’s reply features to quickly and easily respond to common questions and objections.
- The sentiment analysis feature uses AI to analyze the sentiment of your prospect and lead replies. This can help you identify which leads are most interested in your product.
- Outreach’s integrated call and meeting scheduler makes it easy to schedule calls and meetings with prospects and leads.
- Outreach’s A/B testing feature allows you to test different versions of your outreach messages, subject lines, and landing pages to see which ones perform best.
- Its pipeline calculator helps estimate the number of sales sequences your team needs to create in order to reach the sales revenue goal for a quarter or year. This is useful when you notice a gap between the revenue you’ve earned and the revenue you had predicted.
- Its team insights feature provides you with data-driven information of your sales team’s performance. You can use these insights to identify areas for improvement.
- Outreach’s sales playbooks feature allows you to create and share playbooks that outline your best practices for selling to different customer segments.
- Outreach’s rep coaching features provide you with tools to coach and mentor your sales reps.
- Outreach’s deal insights feature provides you with data-driven insights into your deals. You can use these insights to identify potential risks and opportunities.
Deal management
Outreach has a great built-in deal management system that helps sales teams close more deals by providing insights and data on their pipeline. It also helps sales leaders inspect and resolve at-risk deals in the pipeline. Below are some highlights of what you can do with the deal management feature.
Editable Deal Grid: Make changes to all your deals in one place using a customizable grid. Any edits you make will automatically update in your CRM.
CRM Validation: Make sure your edits follow your CRM’s rules to keep your data accurate and reliable.
Field Change Indicators: Quickly see recent edits that might affect your deals, such as changes in value or close dates.
Customizable Views: Set up the grid to show you the most important details for different situations, like sales stages or key contacts.
Deal Overview: Get a fast look at key details like Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), close date, status, health score, and forecast category.
Engagement timeline: You can track a timeline of interactions between buyers and sellers, like calls, emails, and meetings.
Health insights: Get a detailed look at the Deal Health Score, including trends over seven days and suggestions for action.
Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence in Outreach.io, powered by their AI tool Kaia, is a technology designed to analyze and extract valuable insights from your sales conversations. It goes beyond just recording calls and aims to improve the quality of interactions, helping teams understand deals better, close them faster, and coach reps more effectively.
Here is the list of things Kaia can do:
Transcription & recording: Kaia records and transcribes calls in real-time, even adapting to your specific industry vocabulary for accuracy.
Content cards: Get relevant sales enablement content surfaced during calls based on topics discussed, providing reps with easy access to crucial information.
Action item detection: Automatically identify key points and follow-up items mentioned in conversations, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
Topics and sentiment analysis: Gain insights into what interests prospects and their reactions to specific topics like budget, competitors, or features.
Comprehensive search: Easily find past conversations based on keywords, topics, or sentiment, helping you learn from historical interactions.
Pipeline management
Pipeline management in Outreach.io refers to a set of tools and functionalities within their Sales Execution Platform designed to help sales teams and leaders visualize, assess, and optimize their deal flow.
Its core purpose is to ensure a healthy pipeline with enough qualified deals at various stages to consistently achieve revenue goals.
Some key features of Outreach pipeline management are:
Pipeline dashboard: Provides a holistic view of pipeline performance, including metrics like quota attainment, deal pacing, and historical coverage.
Weighted pipeline: Shows the likelihood of deals at each stage closing based on historical win rates.
Pipeline movement: Tracks changes in the pipeline over time, highlighting deals added, lost, or progressed.
Win/loss modeling: Identifies potential risks and opportunities in individual deals and across the entire pipeline.
Team and rep scorecards: Measures individual and team performance against goals and benchmarks.
Sales forecasting
Outreach’s sales forecasting refers to the process of predicting future revenue based on your current sales pipeline and other relevant data.
It helps you gain a clearer understanding of your team’s performance, anticipate potential roadblocks, and make informed decisions about resource allocation and strategy.
It’s key features include:
Total projected finish: See where you’re likely to end the current sales period by combining won deals and the remaining pipeline, including intraquarter and pulled-in deals.
Intraquarter modeling: Identify potential new deals that may close within the sales period, even if they’re not currently in the pipeline.
Automated forecast roll-up: View forecasts for your organization, with detailed breakdowns for each rep and deal.
Scenario planner: Test different forecast outcomes with scenarios like best case, worst case, and most likely values.
Parallel forecasting: Run multiple forecasts simultaneously, defining logic, assigning visibility, and creating custom metrics like renewal rates.
Deal insights
The feature helps sales teams understand individual deals better, identify risks and opportunities, and ultimately close more deals. It goes beyond just showing basic deal information by leveraging AI to analyze various data points and provide actionable insights.
Here are the highlights:
Deal score and health: Based on a scoring system, it helps identify the sales reps understand what’s working well and where to focus their efforts.
Comparative analysis: Deals are compared to similar deals at the same stage and size, uncovering potential issues or highlighting best practices, showing the industry trends and benchmarks.
Actionable recommendations: Outreach suggests specific actions reps can take to improve the deal’s health based on analysis.
Outreach.io review – Pros & Cons
According to recent user feedback from platforms such as G2, TrustRadius, etc., here are some of the latest strengths and weaknesses of Apollo.io as of February 2024.
Please note that the following advantages and drawbacks are based on user reviews and may not reflect everyone’s experience.
Pros of Outreach.io
- Automates various tasks like email sending, follow-ups, and data entry, freeing up time for reps to focus on building relationships.
- Offers a wide range of features covering sales engagement, deal management, conversation intelligence, pipeline management, forecasting, and more.
- Leverages AI to analyze data and provide actionable insights for improving outreach strategies, deal health, and rep performance.
- Integrates with various CRM platforms, marketing automation tools, and other business applications.
- Can scale to accommodate growing sales teams and complex sales environments.
- Offers dedicated customer success managers and comprehensive support resources.
Cons of Outreach.io
- Compared to other sales engagement platforms, Outreach.io can be expensive, especially for smaller businesses.
- No free trial is available, making it difficult to test the platform before committing.
- The interface can be complex for new users, requiring some time and effort to learn.
- If not used carefully, automation can lead to impersonal communication and negatively impact relationships with prospects.
- Primarily focused on sales engagement, lacking advanced marketing automation features offered by some competitors.
- The pros and cons largely depend on on company size, industry, and specific needs. It’s crucial to consider your context when evaluating outreach.io.
Outreach review – What are the users saying?
If you’re considering subscribing to Apollo.io for your business, it’s advisable to check out reviews on platforms like G2, Getapp, TrustRadius, and other review sites.
On G2, Outreach.io has got 4.3 / 5 and on Trustradius it has got 8.3 /10, which is a good number.
Let’s check some of the positive as well as critical reviews given by it’s users.
G2 rating: 1/5
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
| “The worst outbound platform by far!!! DO NOT GET NEAR!” The functionality? Don’t even get me started. It’s as reliable as a house of cards in a hurricane. Glitches, crashes, and inexplicable errors are daily occurrences… Read more |
The customer belongs to a mid-market organization facing quite a lot difficulty with the platform, where he points out that the interface is very complicated and creates a lot of confusion. Even for a mid-market organization, their pricing seems to be too high as compared to the services provided.
G2 rating: 1/5
Verified User in Computer Software
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
| “Terrible renewal policy and billing” Instead, the billing team ignored my email for 2 weeks, sent me the renwal notice, and charged my credit card… Read more |
The user had issues with the billing team where even after sending repeated reminders to cancel the renewal process, they ignored and charged their credit card.
Trustradius rating: 6/10
Nathaniel Sintros
Sales Operations Manager
TessianComputer & Network Security, 51-200 employees)
| “Powerful tool but beware of customer service” Would you buy Outreach again?No… Read more |
The user is satisfied with the overall features by outreach, but has issues with the customer support and finds the UI quite confusing.
G2 rating: 4/5
Adit J.
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
| “Outreach’s proactivity and simplicity is the best in industry” While Outreach is generally user-friendly, the reporting features could use some improvement. The analytics are somewhat basic, and more in-depth insights would be beneficial… Read more |
The user is quite happy with the automated follow ups, personalization, etc. but still is looking out for some improvements in the reports section.
The intention here is not to disparage Outreach.io. These reviews are insights shared by its users. It is important to carefully consider these perspectives when evaluating the decision to subscribe to Outreach.io.
Outreach.io’s No.1 Alternative – SmartReach.io
Outreach.io is undoubtedly one of the best & challenging sales engagement platforms. However, there are other Outreach.io alternatives and competitors available, including SmartReach.io, Woodpecker, Lemlist, and others.
In this section, we will discuss how SmartReach.io can be one of the best Outreach.io alternatives.
What is SmartReach?
Like Outreach.io, SmartReach is a sales engagement platform built for B2B outreach. It covers everything starting from prospecting, automating email outreach, and handling responses to analyzing detailed reports and, ultimately, aiming towards deal closures.
Now, let’s check the key features of SmartReach.io.
Prospect finder: With SmartReach, users get free ProspectDaddy credits to find and create a list of verified details for prospects on LinkedIn. This includes business emails, LinkedIn profile URLs, names, companies, job titles, locations, and more.
AI-Generated Content: The SEP also offers email content created by AI using the information you provide. You can make different versions and pick the one that fits best.
Cold email automation: SmartReach.io allows you to run fully automated and unlimited email sequences. You can also automatically pause the campaign when you get a response.
Multichannel Outreach: With SmartReach, you can perform your cold outreach through various channels like email, LinkedIn, calls, WhatsApp, and SMS to connect with a broader audience.
Complete LinkedIn Automation: SmartReach lets you automate actions such as viewing profiles, sending connection requests, send messages, and send Inmail.
Power Dialer: In the SEP, you can use the power dialer for making calls as a part of your outreach sequence. You can make calls through the extension or the mobile app, and there are some excellent features for cold calling.
Meeting Scheduler: You can link it to your Google or Microsoft calendars, send personalized meeting links to potential clients, and include features like round robin – all at your convenience.
Inbox Rotation: SmartReach provides an inbox rotation feature where you can schedule your outreach campaign at scale without having to worry about the sending limit. It also reduces your email deliverability challenges.
Shared Inbox: This feature improves team communication and transparency. It also includes reply sentiment, which helps monitor the sales pipeline’s health.
Opportunities pipeline: The tool includes an opportunities pipeline, giving you a complete overview at your current pipeline, giving option to predict the revenue.
Integration & Workflow: SmartReach easily links up with CRMs such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Zoho, as well as email finder tools. You can also integrate other CRMs through Zapier. This ensures your team can always access the latest data, no matter which platform they are on.
Reports & Analytics: SmartReach provides detailed reports like team activity, deal grid, sequence performance, advanced tracking, hot prospect reports, and more. This helps in making decisions based on data.
Smartreach.io is designed to make the sales outreach process easier and more efficient. It helps businesses reach out to more potential customers, engage with them effectively, and ultimately, close more deals.
SmartReach.io vs Outreach.io – Which one should you choose?
Both SmartReach.io and Outreach.io are sales engagement platforms aimed at helping businesses with their cold outreach, managing deals, and improving sales performance. But which one of them should you choose for your next sales outreach campaign?
Below is a comparison of the two tools based on a few critical factors for your informed purchase decision-making.
Effortless onboarding
SmartReach provides a user-friendly platform that minimizes the learning curve and onboarding time. Whereas Outreach.io’s UI is quite complex and confusing.
Pricing
SmartReach believes in maintaining transparency in its pricing with no hidden charges. Whereas Outreach.io is expensive and the interested leads have to connect with their support for getting quotation.
Reliability on automation
SmartReach provides an option to run campaigns in both manual and automated sequences, providing the option for its users to add a personal touch while getting in touch with their prospects. Also, it keeps your sending accounts safe with a healthy threshold of sending. Outreach’s users say that the tool is over-dependent on automation, making the process less personal.
Outreach.io Review: Final Verdict
Outreach is well-known for its sales outreach tools, offering features like deal and pipeline management and multi-channel outreach capabilities. Yet, it comes with downsides like higher pricing than competitors, a complicated interface, and users experiencing support issues.
Deciding if Outreach is a good investment for your cold outreach depends on your needs and budget. If you prefer a budget-friendly option, you might get better value with alternatives like SmartReach.io, offering similar features at a lower cost.
Some of the points you should keep in mind while choosing a sales engagement platform are:
- Your company size and budget: Outreach.io is best suited for larger sales teams with the budget to afford its premium pricing.
- Your technical expertise: The platform can be complex to learn and use, so some technical expertise is needed.
- Your specific needs: Consider which features are most important to you and compare Outreach.io to other platforms that offer similar features.
