Salesforce was down? We hardly noticed. #prayforNA14

A moment of silence please...for NA14...and the poor guy whose job it was to keep it running.

NA14 are the Salesforce servers that handle the west coast of North America, if you don't know by now. This includes our SFDC instance, as we are based in Seattle, WA.

Interestingly, my team didn't know anything was wrong for most of the morning, and even after we found out, we merely shrugged our shoulders and kept setting meetings and closing deals.

For companies' whose reps work out of a great tool like SFDC, today was a difficult day. While Outreach allows you to work directly out of SFDC, my team was able to effortlessly continue emailing, calling, "social selling", booking meetings, and closing deals because Outreach is our command center. Our customers living in SFDC were able to move into Outreach as their home base, as well. And, when SFDC comes back online (which I know they are working tirelessly to do and everyone will have stuff happen like this, as we ourselves have had to work through in our own hyper-growth mode), they'll, just as easily, move back into their tried and true workflows.

Our product's automated activity tracking, action-based lead/contact status updates, prospect/account creation, and many other features happen in Outreach before they are posted to Salesforce, enabling my sales team to stay on course today despite Salesforce's challenges. This data will post to SFDC once it's back online. Our customers won't lose any data, insights, or productivity. Salesforce will continue to be the system of record with perfect data integrity.

Let me give you an example:  Our Inside Sales Rep, Tammy, was able to continue processing inbound leads correctly because all our accounts, contacts, and ownership data in SFDC is mirrored in Outreach. It took 5 minutes for her to adjust her workflow and maintain her insane levels of productivity.

Here's what our activity looked like on a day when I'm sure most sales reps on the west coast were playing ping pong and tweeting mean things about the hard-working folks at Salesforce.

Here's what we were able to do today without Salesforce:

• Engage over 184 new customers today
• Send 931 emails with a 20% reply rate - legendary status
• Create 198 new contacts in accounts which will be created and mapped in SFDC when it comes back online
• Book nearly 10 new meetings
• Move several major logo deals forward (and a dozen or so others)

What's my point? Salesforce is a transformative product. It launched the SaaS movement, brought sales out of the Age of the Spreadsheet, and continues to open the market for companies, like ours, moving business to the cloud. I'm biased, but today showed me that Outreach is helping continue this great movement in sales. My team was insulated from mass hysteria and lack of productivity because of our product, which separates workflow from the CRM. Both are needed, but possibly, separating the two might be a best practice.

P.S. This isn't, at all, a slam on Salesforce. They are a great partner for our company, and I feel horribly, yet am full of faith, for the people working day and night to get things back on track..I know they will! It's merely me making a point that we have a great tool that lets us weather any storm and keep our customers' business moving.