What Is Outreach.io? Breakdown of Features, Pricing & More

Is Outreach the sales engagement platform your team needs?

If this question has led you here, look no further.

Here, we’re going to discuss all things Outreach—its features, use cases, pricing, advantages, disadvantages, and alternatives—to help you make the best decision for your sales team. 

Let’s get to it.

What Is Outreach.io?

Outreach is a sales engagement platform that automates your prospecting workflow and enables you to have personalized conversations with prospects at every stage of their buying journey. 

Founded in 2014, Outreach is one of the leading sales engagement platform categories in the market, with over 6,000 customers worldwide. In addition to sales engagement, the platform also provides revenue intelligence and revenue operations functionalities.

Why Should You Use Outreach.io?

You can use Outreach if you’re looking to:

• Build qualified pipeline that converts to revenue
• Sync engagement data across email, LinkedIn, and calls with your CRM
• Provide personalized touches across multiple channels
• Optimize and scale your selling based on AI-driven customized insights

Who Can Use Outreach.io?

Given its advanced capabilities, Outreach is well-suited for enterprise sales teams. From sales reps to the execs, the platform empowers everyone in the sales organization to boost their productivity, win more deals, and leverage predictable performance.    

Let’s delve into how Outreach serves the needs of different personas in the organization:

Sales Representatives: With Outreach, sales reps can:

• Move deals forward with automated multi-channel, multi-touch sequences.
• Access your tools and tasks in one place, including voice, email, and calendar.
• Track buyer insights to identify risks and opportunities 
• Automate low-value tasks like scheduling meetings, entering activity data, and setting reminders so you can focus more time on your accounts.

Sales Managers: Outreach equips sales managers to:

• Track the entire team’s activity to see if there’s enough engagement to turn prospects into opportunities.
• Automate metrics tracking and quickly create accurate forecast reports.
• Coach and onboard new reps better with shared workflows, messaging, and content.

Sales Leadership: Outreach enables the sales leadership to:

• Gain visibility into the entire funnel and individual deals.
• Track crucial deal elements like how many prospects are activated in each account, sufficient rep activity, and buyer sentiment.
• Improve hand-offs across your revenue team by bringing together your tech stack and workflows in one place.

Features of Outreach.io

Let’s take a look at some of the sales engagement features that set Outreach apart from the rest of the tools:

• Multichannel sequences: Outreach enables sales teams to carry out different kinds of touches to connect with buyers on the channels they prefer at any stage of the buyer's journey.
  
  When reps create a sequence, they have the option to choose from 5 step types: Auto Email (emails automatically sent out to prospects based on the defined time interval), Manual Email (for sending personalized emails), Phone Call (place calls using Outreach Dialer), Generic Task (reminders to complete an action outside of Outreach), and LinkedIn (for LinkedIn-specific activities).

• Advanced email sequence capabilities: The platform lets reps manage multiple stakeholders within the same email sequence by consolidating responses across multiple emails into a single thread. Another example of its advanced email outreach capabilities is the automated follow-up sequences to prevent contacts from stagnating and help reps book more meetings.

• Out-of-office detection: To improve your email response rates, Outreach identifies when prospects are out of office, and automatically pauses your sequence until they return.

• Automated data sync: Outreach seamlessly syncs your prospect engagement data across email, LinkedIn, and calls with your CRM contacts and opportunities. Through this, reps can save time by avoiding manual CRM entry and ensuring data accuracy in their entries.

• AI-powered sentiment analysis: The platform’s machine learning model understands buyer sentiment and intent in your email replies. Once a prospect replies to you in your email sequence, it automatically classifies the email reply into one of these 5 categories: Positive, Objection, Referral, Unsubscribe, and Other. This helps sales teams successfully handle objections and increase reply rates.

• Integrated call and meeting scheduler: Outreach Meetings provides an easy workflow for prospects to book meetings with you instantly. It integrates with Google Calendar and Microsoft Office 365 and automatically syncs with Salesforce to give you complete control of your schedule.

• AI-powered team analytics: Outreach visualizes crucial insights through its dashboards to help managers understand what content, workflows, and rep behaviors lead to meetings and opportunities.

Pricing

Outreach does not have transparent pricing. So, you have to contact their sales team to request pricing for different tiers.

Coming to the tiers, there are 2 plans with 2 tiers each. Under ‘Plans for everyone’, there are 2 tiers: ’Standard’ and ‘Professional’. ‘Standard’ is aimed at small sales teams and includes all core sales engagement features. ‘Professional’ comes with additional features powered by AI, like deal scoring and call topics/reactions, and is meant for larger sales teams.

‘Plans for Enterprise’ has 2 different tiers, ’Enterprise’ and ‘Unlimited,’ aimed at large enterprise sales teams. The ‘Enterprise’ plan comes with features including Outreach Data Sharing to accelerate data-driven decisions, advanced technical support, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance for users in the healthcare industry. 

‘Unlimited’ is the top-tier plan for enterprise sales teams and provides no usage restrictions on its platform capabilities.

Pros and Cons of Outreach.io

At this point, you know quite a bit about Outreach, including its features, use cases, and capabilities. Before you arrive at a decision, let’s weigh the pros and cons of this platform.

Pros of Outreach.io:

• Designed for enterprise sales teams. Outreach’s sophisticated capabilities that cover the entire sales cycle, like deal forecasting and pipeline management, in addition to its affordability, are best suited for enterprise organizations. Given the size and complexity of enterprise firms, this platform’s ability to function as a single source of data will enable revenue-generating teams to align their goals, solutions, and tactics better.

• Advanced automation capabilities. Outreach lets sales teams automate a large portion of their sales processes, including automated follow-up sequences, auto-pausing sequences for OOO prospects, auto-syncing of prospect data with CRM, and automated meeting scheduling. This enables reps to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time focusing on selling.

• AI-driven analytics. Sales teams can track their deals better through Outreach’s AI-powered analytics like deal health score, prospect sentiment analysis, automated speech recognition, and deal forecast simulation.

• Strong integrations. Outreach comes with seamless automatic, bi-directional sync with 3 CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Apart from CRMs, the solution also integrates with a plethora of tools found in the tech stacks of reps like DocuSign, Intercom, ZoomInfo, and 6sense. These integrations help reps avoid switching between loads of tabs and focus entirely on prospecting on one unified platform.

Cons of Outreach.io:

The best part about Outreach also becomes its not-so-best part—that it is meant for enterprise teams. 

Growing sales teams, who are ever-mindful of their bottom lines and looking to maximize ROI with every tool they buy, run into several stumbling blocks while evaluating Outreach, like:

• Lack of transparent pricing and free trials. Outreach does not display the pricing for its different tiers on its pricing page and doesn't provide free trials either. This could impact cost-conscious buyers like growing sales teams, as transparent pricing and free trials will empower them to make informed decisions and avoid paying for features they might not need. 

• Steep learning curve. The sophistication of Outreach has a fallout: a non-intuitive interface. With its umpteen integrations, functionalities, and complex analytics reports, even experienced reps would face a steep learning curve when they begin to use Outreach. It might take days to weeks before they attend and get well-acquainted with the platform, during which their selling activities might take a hit. 

• Less-than-ideal customer support. Several customers have expressed dissatisfaction with Outreach’s customer support and responsiveness in addressing queries. On top of this, customer support isn’t free of cost.

• Paid onboarding and implementation. Outreach charges the customer for onboarding implementation, which could be a deal-breaker for growing sales teams looking to cut down on spending. 

• Lacks outbound goal setting. Despite its wide range of features, Outreach doesn’t allow sales teams to set and track specific outbound goals every day to achieve overall targets and keep every sales rep in the team accountable.

• No in-built prospect data curation. Within its platform, Outreach doesn’t enable you to source accurate email and phone data for your ideal customer profiles and target prospects with unique needs based on industry or geography.

• Integrates with only limited CRMs. The platform integrates well with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and not with other CRMs popular in the market.

• No parallel dialer. Outreach’s Dialer doesn’t let sales reps dial more than one number at a time, which could be disadvantageous for high-performance sales teams that depend heavily on outbound calls.

Klenty: The Best Alternative to Outreach.io for Growing Sales Teams

After this deep dive into all aspects of Outreach.io, the writing is on the wall: Growing sales teams need a better alternative to generate pipeline, close more deals, and build a high-performance sales team.

Meet Klenty, a sales engagement platform built to unleash the potential of growing sales teams.

Why is Klenty the best Outreach.io alternative for growing sales teams?

Klenty helps you deliver on your pipeline goals by enabling reps to plan, execute, and track their outreach across multiple channels and persistently follow up—all at scale. Plus, its affordable pricing plans, coupled with excellent customer support that’s always free of cost, will ensure the continued success of all kinds of sales teams, not just the enterprise ones. 

Features of Klenty

• Deep integrations with 5 CRMs. While Outreach.io integrates with only 3 CRMs, Klenty integrates deeply with the 5 best CRMs in the market—Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics Sales 365, Pipedrive, and Zoho CRM—to ensure automated workflows and seamless sync. With Klenty, reps can focus only on building relationships and not on manual non-selling activities, no matter what CRM they use.

• Better for goal-driven sales teams. With Klenty’s Goals and Reports, managers can set daily, weekly, and monthly targets for the sales team, get them to commit towards targets for activity, prospect coverage, and conversion, and spot gaps as they happen (not after) to ensure timely interventions.

• Better for call-heavy sales teams. Klenty’s powerful Sales Dialer enables parallel dialing, where you can place up to 5 calls simultaneously in one click to help you place 5x more calls. The dialer also logs all notes to your CRM, allows you to send voicemails in a click, and batch prospects according to their time zone.

• Helps sales teams consolidate their tech stack. Apart from its sales engagement platform, Klenty also offers platforms to source accurate contact data of ideal buyers (Prospect IQ), schedule meetings automatically with prospects (Schedule IQ), and analyze your calls using AI (Call IQ). With Klenty, you can effortlessly consolidate your tech stack to work with a unified data foundation for all the sales cycle stages.

Klenty’s Customer Experience for Growing Sales Teams

For Klenty’s customers, the only time they open their wallets is while purchasing the solution. Unlike Outreach.io, Klenty provides end-to-end customer support free of charge, making it ideal for growing sales teams. 

Here’s a closer look at the customer support you’ll get from Klenty:

• Free onboarding. Klenty’s extensive onboarding process is free of cost to all of its customers. The support is customized depending on your sales team’s size and goals. What’s more, the support team will have as many onboarding calls as you need till every member of your team becomes comfortable using the platform.

• Free systematic implementation program. Not just onboarding, Klenty’s implementation is also free of cost. Here, the support team provides strategic suggestions on the best way you can use the platform to achieve your goals. 

• Free 24x5 customer support. Klenty’s customer support is impressively responsive—a response time of only 2.5 minutes—and remains free of cost for the entirety of your customer lifespan.

• Free deliverability consultancy. If sales teams who use Klenty encounter any email deliverability issues (like emails going to spam or having a high bounce rate), the customer support team will analyze their deliverability and provide actionable suggestions to ensure their emails land on prospect’s primary inbox. This, too, is free of cost. 

• Free quarterly reviews. Klenty takes a proactive approach in improving its customers’ performances. Every quarter, the customer support team analyzes how customers use the platform, and prepares a deck that includes customized insights like overall performance review, recommendations, and product roadmap.

Usability

• Easy-to-use interface with no bloatware. In sharp contrast to Outreach’s complex interface that can be difficult to navigate even for experienced sellers, Klenty’s intuitive and clutter-free interface makes reps take to the platform almost instantly and see results rapidly.

• Transparent pricing. Unlike Outreach, Klenty’s pricing is available for everyone to see to help you know exactly what you’re paying for.

• 14-day free trial. You’ll get a 14-day free trial to explore all of Klenty’s features with a dedicated account manager, so that you can make a well-informed decision. 

• Affordability. With its basic plan starting at just $50 per user per month, Klenty remains a powerful yet affordable sales engagement platform for growing sales teams.

• Pay for what you need. Outreach’s plans can force sales teams to pay for features that they have no use for in their everyday workflow. On the other hand, Klenty has tailored pricing plans for email-only sales teams and multi-channel teams. You don't have to pay for features you don't use.

Klenty empowers you to build a high-performance sales team and provides premium customer service, all while being super easy on your pocket. 

Want to see in action why Klenty is the best Outreach.io alternative? Schedule a demo today!