Automation software has been a core necessity within marketing teams for years now, and it’s no surprise as to why. Businesses that implement marketing automation to nurture their prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads on average.
From all-in-one platforms like HubSpot to website lead generation solutions like OptinMonster, there’s a marketing automation tool for every moment in the customer journey.
But marketers have also shifted their efforts to align more with their counterparts in the sales department through sales enablement, and plenty of the tools that marketers use are applicable in sales as well. Sales enablement is a process of providing salespeople with the resources they need to close deals, whether those resources are creative assets, automation tools, or qualified leads that are ready to talk pricing.
One of the ways marketers can help the sales department is by helping them leverage Outreach. Outreach is a sales automation and engagement platform that integrates with popular marketing applications like Salesforce and G Suite.
Outreach frees salespeople from cumbersome tasks like data entry, but it’s capable of much, much more.
There are multiple ways you can automate sales activities with Outreach, but the most obvious capability that uses automation is the Sequence feature.
A Sequence is a series of actions a salesperson can take to engage effectively with a potential customer. Sequences act as a guide, ensuring the salesperson takes all the right steps in their process of nurturing their prospect.
For example, a sequence might begin with a manual email followed by a phone call, which is then followed by a LinkedIn message. These are all manual tasks, but once started, the Sequence will automatically alert the salesperson to perform them.
You can also create auto emails as part of your Sequence. These are emails you build beforehand and send out automatically based on time intervals or the actions of your prospect. You can choose to send out automated emails on specific days after your Sequence is started, such as days 1, 3, and 7.
You can also increase the efficiency of your representatives with Outreach Amplify. This is a suite of machine learning capabilities for Outreach that automates administrative tasks.
Amplify uses machine learning to classify the intent of incoming emails, just like a human would. For example, if your Sequence sends an Auto Email and it’s met with an automated out-of-office (OOO) reply, Amplify can detect the reply and automatically pause your Sequence until the specified return date in the prospect’s email. This prevents any automation snafus from occurring during the sales cycle and ensures your salespeople have more opportunities to engage.
Amplify can even extract phone numbers from emails, make automated contact referrals, and guide you through A/B testing so you can perform productive marketing and sales experiments.
Outreach Everywhere is Outreach’s Google Chrome web browser extension. It enables users to complete tasks in Outreach while using other products, such as Gmail or Salesforce.
Once Outreach Everywhere is installed on your browser, you can open it up in Window Mode to keep Outreach active no matter where you are on the web. From there, Outreach can dial phone numbers with a single click and even help your salespeople compose emails through the Outreach Gmail toolbar.
There’s no need to click back and forth between tabs on your browser to sync the tasks you complete in other tools with your Outreach tasks. This helps your salespeople import email templates easily, manage their Sequences more effectively, and avoid burdensome menial tasks like copying and pasting.
Not all your buyers are going to connect over the same channel. Some will prefer email, others prefer SMS, and others will want an old-fashioned phone call. Managing all these channels usually requires you to open multiple tabs in your internet browser and keep your phone in your lap, but Outreach fixes that problem.
Outreach brings all your communication channels into one platform. It siphons all your emails, calls, text messages, and calendar invitations onto a single screen, so you can stay on top of tasks more easily.
From your dashboard, you can send one-off emails, make callbacks, engage prospects on social media, and more. Outreach even integrates seamlessly with other apps, placing all your sales and marketing tools at your fingertips. You can do all your LinkedIn prospecting through Outreach, too.
Managers can monitor team performance and gain insights into their organization’s sales and marketing capabilities. They can see what works, what doesn’t, and then coach their staff members to improve marketing and sales performance.
The entire platform is designed to optimize the customer lifecycle. It helps you prioritize your next best steps for specific accounts and derives insights from your interactions with prospects to guide you. Outreach acts as an “always-on assistant,” so you can stop wasting time and generate more revenue for your company.
Most prospects won’t be interested in what you have to say unless you know their business and understand their pain points. Personalized emails help you break down walls and get to the heart of your prospect’s needs.
But to personalize successfully, you need to go beyond dropping “Hi ,” at the top of your next email.
Outreach provides you with tools to use personalization at scale. Instead of focusing on a few data points like company name and size, Outreach pulls in data from multiple locations to help you generate highly targeted messages.
(Source: Outreach.io)
You can create templates that align with specific customer personas and touchpoints, so your marketing and sales staff won’t have to spend all day crafting personalized messages. With the right integrations, you can even create psychological profiles of your prospects, determine which accounts are in the market to buy, and more.
Marketers are all well-aware of the marketing journey: the process your customers go through to become aware of your product or service, engage with your brand, and convert into a sales prospect.
Enabling lifecycle sales with Outreach is all about creating a sales journey for your customer, just like you would create a marketing journey. There should be a seamless handoff between marketing and your sales team, so the entire journey feels like an organic process of discovery, conversation, and problem-solving.
Outreach helps by combining the best elements of marketing automation and sales engagement.
Outreach’s Sequences feature helps your salespeople create a line of touchpoints to engage their prospects. Using data science, they can draw in insights about those prospects to include in their personalized messages. With the right Sequence, your marketing and salespeople can build a clear, documented marketing and sales journey that turns leads into prospects and prospects into customers.
They can do all this using automated features within a single browser, freeing up time to engage more effectively with potential customers. Both marketers and sales professionals can use Outreach to generate prospects, nurture leads, close the deal, and provide personalized service to your existing customer base.
If you’d like to learn how to integrate Outreach into your marketing and sales process, talk to us at A8. We can show you how to get immediate benefits from Outreach and develop a long-term plan for success.