How Outreach Uses Outreach

Our SDR team over here at Outreach has the huge advantage of actually being the SDR team within the #1 SEP (Sales Engagement Platform). Outreach's entire employee base is minutes away at all times if we need anything and we sit at the nexus of thousands of the most innovative SDR teams in America.

Our skill in using Outreach became a huge competitive advantage for us. We have been able to grow faster than many of the incredible SaaS growth stories of companies that are inherently viral, started with a massive marketing engine, or leveraged a channel to go to market fast…

And we did it through cold outbound.

While we may be the only SDR team that is living in the middle of so many SDR resources, all companies can benefit from what we've learned. I put together this guide to point our customers to some the resources about how we use Outreach to allow them to get as much out of Outreach as we do.

A few unique things about us:

All new hires are on one of our Agoge teams for the first few months. The leaders of these teams specialize in ramping new SDRs and implementing experimental new processes. This structure has allowed us to dramatically improve initial production in the first 90 days, and has allowed our large SDR team of 40 to stay agile. Outreach + Agoge team = Dangerous combination. Here’s some advice for starting an Agoge in your SDR org.

As you refine your Outreach strategy, you will notice that more and more different candidate profiles can be successful at your company. By packaging up ideal prospecting processes into sequences the pool of individuals that can be successful on your SDR team will expand dramatically. Here’s a list of unconventional profiles that have been quite successful at Outreach. If you are hiring SDRs with no sales experience, check out: Interviewing SDR Candidates with no Sales Experience.

Outreach's Sequences

Sequences fall into three basic stages in your prospecting funnel. I'll break down each one.

Outbound

A solid outbound strategy depends on a solid prioritization strategy

Before the SEP (sales engagement platform) revolution, correctly coaching and enforcing prioritization was very difficult. No longer. Managers with Outreach can now just jump into a sequence and see what types of prospects are being reached out to in what way.

Poor prioritization will lower an SDR’s call conversion to meeting set, meeting hold rate, and meeting conversion to accepted lead. If you can’t measure prioritization, the SDR and their manager may get a false understanding of an SDR's underlying issues. This causes more problems with prioritization.

Here’s a simple framework for how to prioritize called the Agoge playbook. This framework makes it easy to know who should be prospected and how from day one and SDR managers can easily and consistently communicate inevitable changes to their SDR strategy instantly by adjusting this matrix.

Tiny improvements here can dramatically increase overall productivity.

Sequence for High Priority Prospects

We reach out to our highest priority prospects using The Agoge Sequence. I would have never thought this sequence would continue to work so well considering how widely it has been adopted across our customer base, but it still works like magic. The major reason our Agoge team nearly doubled production in the first 90 days was because they were getting nearly twice as many responses through this sequence. Here's my Livestream about The Agoge Sequence

Sequence for Lower Priority Prospects

The lower priority prospects (you can see who we define as lower priority here) are put into fully automated sequences. SDRs can usually reach out to a relatively high volume of these prospects. We don’t call prospects in these sequences unless an individual email is opened 2+ times. Our current sequence and strategy can be found here. 

Post-Engagement

Outreach has a simple playbook of how we deal with common responses. Here's an example of what one might look like:

The vast majority of our sequences can be dealt with using a custom message and attaching an appropriate “FUP” to it. However, there are some unique cases like referrals that justify their own sequence. Our referral sequence gets a shocking 47% reply rate. Introducing a referral sequence relatively easy and has a massive return if you don't currently have a defined process for referrals

Here's a guide of some of the most common sequences we use at this stage of the funnel

Meeting Set

We give our SDRs a checklist of everything they need to do right after they set a meeting. Emotions are high at this moment and you want to make sure that no steps are skipped.

We also have certain strategies and sequences to increase the likelihood of the meeting holding and automatically follow up with no shows.

Ping me if you have any questions :)

If you are interested in participating, please shoot me a message!