Why (and How) I’m Doubling Down on Sales Engagement...and Think You Should Too

I’m excited to announce that I’ve moved into a new role as the VP of Sales Engagement at Outreach. 

At Outreach, we’ve done a lot of work to create and lead the category of Sales Engagement. The company barely existed a short five years ago. Now we’re over 4,500 customers strong with $289m in funding. We wrote THE book on Sales Engagement, published by Wiley. We continue to invest 40% of revenue back into R&D. And we were recently named a Leader in the Forrester Wave on Sales Engagement.

However, we’re still in the very early stages of Sales Engagement. What you’ve seen from us so far is just merely scratching the surface of what’s possible. We’ve only just completed the first chapter of the 3,400 page/7 novel Harry Potter series, the first inning of the 9 inning ball game, or what Amazon was when it was only selling books. 

The facts remain - 

• Salesforce has about 20% market share of CRM. They have about 200,000 customers. Therefore roughly 1 million companies are immediately ripe for Sales Engagement. 
• Outreach powers revenue for over 4,500 customers. All of the Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs) together, maybe equate to around 8,000 customers. 

That’s not even 1% of the market yet. Plus -

• The CRM market grows significantly every year.
• We’re not even dependant on CRM (just wanted a straightforward exercise that made this super easy to grok)

So, where does this leave us?

Well, from a product standpoint, in a very exciting place. You can see more around the innovation here at our Outreach Explore event, which will be showcasing the next evolution of Sales Engagement, on December 8th. You don’t want to miss that. Next Best Action and Sentiment Reporting. Tracking outcomes, not outputs. Guided selling, not wild guessing! Ok, ok, got too excited.

But, Sales Engagement done right isn’t just some departmental tool you can set and forget. It’s an organization transforming platform, meant to evolve with your org. It’s the advancement of the modern era of revenue. It takes education, continuous learning, sharing what works, and iterating on it as a community. 

We love to say we “drink our own champagne” here at Outreach. We’ve used our product to drive some pretty insane results (can see more here, here, here) on our pathing to becoming a multi-billion dollar company in under 5 years. So with this new effort, we’ll be stepping it up a notch. 

I’m focusing on two things -

1. Supporting the Operational Excellence of our own use of Outreach internally to drive success and efficiency across Go-To-Market teams (Sales, Sales Dev, RevOps, Marketing, Customer Success). 

My immediate questions are - Where can we be using it that we aren’t right now? How can we be using it better than we are currently? How should we be acting on the information we’re receiving from it?

We are pretty good, but can always be better. These areas are especially crucial as we continue to roll out new capabilities and products for expanded use cases like KAIA, Intent Reporting, and much, much more (stay tuned).

2. Working with my long-time sidekick Scott Barker to enable new workflows around scalable ways to source and support Enterprise and Strategic accounts (ones with the most complexity). It's early, but we're already seeing some pretty amazing results.

3. Packaging up this juicy knowledge and sharing it with YOU ALL! (more on this program coming soon)

I’m really excited about the opportunity. 

I took some time on my recent paternity leave to reflect on the past few years and what I personally and professionally, want for the future. When I do this, I think like an investor. The key is to double down on what I believe the trends of the next 5-10 years will look like - and how can I create an “unfair advantage”. 

Looking 5 years into the future,

• I see CMOs with supreme visibility, accountability, and transparency into what happened to their leads from the latest virtual event. They know the right communication is happening to the right personas, in record time, every time.
• The CRO has a confident forecast because they can see layers deeper than just stages in CRM. They understand attribution to conversions throughout the entire funnel and their managers are prepared with data that identifies which levers to pull and when.
• The CCO knows their teams have an accurate pulse on their accounts and are in touch before they need to be. Teams are fully ramped fast, in days not months, even when managed remotely.

If I truly believe that Outreach is the future and that every revenue organization will be run off of it like a “GTM control panel for revenue,” then being the best at all-things-Outreach will become my superpower.

Actually, it will be every CRO, CMO, or CCO’s superpower. I just happen to work at the company that can give me a headstart and training ground that is second to none. And that is my “unfair advantage”.

My 1B goal is to surface the necessary resources so that you can make it yours too :-)

I love working with our internal teams, our customers, our power users, and even those entirely new to Sales Engagement to take revenue teams worldwide to the next level. I’m looking forward to doing it more intimately. 

Please reach out directly if I can be helpful as you scale and implement a Sales Engagement strategy as part of your modern revenue organization at your company.