I was looking for a tool to better standardize our team’s workflows and processes—mostly with inbound leads, but also with the vision of expanding our team into the world of outbound, where I dreamed of predictable revenue and infinite scalability (thank you, Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin)
It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to micro-manage our team. They knew follow-up better than I did—they’d been calling on our gated pricing requests for almost two years.
But I understood that without a standardized process we couldn’t run any experiments. And if we couldn’t experiment, we weren’t going to find anything that could help us improve. Well, we wouldn’t find anything concrete. We wouldn’t find anything outside of the anecdotal.
Admittedly, I was also sick and tired of trying to hack together Sasleforce automation processes to do this for us.
I heard of a lot of SDR friends at other SaaS companies using a tool called Outreach.io. That’s where the story started for us.
We did a thorough evaluation of these types of tools (called sales engagement platforms) and ended up purchasing Outreach for our small team of five. It’s been a great fit for us.
We now build processes for the following:
- Standardized followup on inbound pricing requests. We gate our pricing which is a huge source of lead gen for us. We’re always looking for better ways to convert these requests into qualified demos on the calendar.
- We do a re-engage campaign (all about it on page 57 of this eBook, Product Demos That Sell. We’re a startup. Our product becomes almost unrecognizable after six months, so we re-engage every failed demo at six months). It’s been wildly successful.
- Processes that promote our affiliate program (one of our most powerful growth engines).
So just like any software program that I’ve had success with, I was eager to figure out the story behind Outreach.io.
Outreach.io was building the wrong thing—but had a great process for selling it
Manny Medina and the rest of the cofounding team originally came together with the idea of a recruitment platform. It wasn’t called Outreach. It was supposed to create perfect matches between headhunters and job seekers.
Manny explains why it failed in an interview with Dan Reich:
What we ultimately found out the hard way is you can’t solve a marketplace problem with a product.
The product wasn’t working, but one thing was working—they were able to set plenty of meetings which lead to plenty of “no’s”.
They had a secret weapon, an internal workflow, which allowed their reps to 10x the amount of appointments they were setting. This tool created easy-to- follow sequences that automated their sales process without losing the personal touch.
From one of the better interviews with Manny:
2013 when we were running out of cash. Then at the end of 2013, we decided to give it one more go and we decided to build a workflow internally that would make our sales reps book 10x more meetings. The reason we came up with a number was that we figured that if they were able to book 10x more meetings, we would sell our way out of the problem…
…As our salespeople and myself were going to these meetings, the conversation quickly turned about the tool that they were using that got into that meeting. We were selling to recruiters or recruiting agencies and the recruiters were saying, I love what you guys can provide but I’d rather buy the tools so I can book my own meetings.
So there it is, a classic pivot and Outreach was born.
Bringing Out The Skeletons
Heading sounds a little dramatic—there are no dead bodies in Outreach’s past.
I just like to do digging on what their product was in those initial days. Once companies find their voice, clean up their social media pages, delete the old Youtube videos… it’s hard to see through the millions of dollars in success to find that old, scrappy company that made it happen.
That’s why the wayback machine is so great.
Some snapshots I dug up:
Compare with their website today, touting the market segment that they created (Sales Engagement Platform, vs. Sales Automation in the early days) and having achieved Unicorn status:
Finding that 80% feature
One thing that has impressed me looking back in Outreach’s past is that the core feature is still the same. It’s the 80% feature—that one thing your product does that keeps the sales machine rolling.
For Outreach, this 80% feature is called sequences: templated sales processes that are partially manual, partially automated and are smart enough to know when to stop.
“We decided to give it one more go and we decided to build a workflow internally that would make our sales reps book 10x more meetings.”
Outreach’s product from 2014 doesn’t appear all that different from what it is today. It really seems to me that they’ve mainly focussed on building air-tight integrations with all kinds of other CRMs and data platforms that make this one core feature extremely usable.
Once they found that 80% feature, it was off to the races.
Outreach Found a Unicorn VP Sales
Outreach found this guy in 2014. Or rather, he found them:
In Outreach’s book, Sales Engagement (yes, Outreach wrote the book on their own market niche. I love when SaaS companies create their own segment)
Mark tells the story about how he came to Outreach.
He talks about how in his youth he sold 10X as many shoes as his counterparts at the mall—simply because he stood outside of the shop, actively engaging prospects.
Later in his life, he was looking for the software equivalent of that. He found Manny (the founder) and was so impressed that he not only purchased, but came back a few months later to ask him if he could sell Outreach.
Manny said he couldn’t afford it.
Mark said he would work on 100% commission.
That worked.
The rest was history. The dudes still VP Sales today, and he definitely seems like that unicorn VP Sales that Jason Lemkin is always talking about.
Very cool story—and illustrates the importance (magic) of finding people who believe in your product as much as you do.
And the coolest thing of all…
There’s nothing cooler than when a company can use its own product to sell that product. I’m jealous of that. Everything they do perfects their product.
Outreach uses Outreach to sell more Outreach.
Outbound is at the heart and soul of the company. They used it to save their failing company and it worked because it did everything it was supposed to.
I think Manny’s story, one of an immigrant who:
- spent his childhood summers working his guts out on a shrimp farm
- moved to the U.S. to study idolizing language in The Economist and mirroring it and improve his communication skills
- pivoting a company, going door-to-door at top Silicon Valley offices to sell it
- then hiring the guy that sold more shoes than anybody else at a mall and seems like a perfect first VP of sales
Well, it all goes to explain why Outreach has been so successful.
Outreach didn’t just write the book on outbound sales engagement. They are outbound sales engagement.
