Outreach's Aug 2024 quarterly release recap

It’s a new quarter, and that means there’s something new on the Outreach platform. We’re introducing a number of new additions and improvements to Outreach so you can retain, expand, and customize better than ever before.

Expansion & retention aren’t just perks, they’re necessities for growth in 2024

In Outreach’s latest report, Sales 2024: A revenue data analysis, Outreach found that 30% of organizations expect to drive most of their company’s growth in 2024 by expanding existing customers, while 38% expect a 50/50 split between net new and expansion revenue.

In that same study, nearly half (46%) cite customer retention as a top challenge to revenue growth – underscoring the critical need for robust sales tools and workflows that support retention and expansion efforts. Organizations at all levels of complexity are finding they must meet rising customer expectations if they hope to retain existing accounts and expand customer revenue.

New retain & expand features enhance Outreach's account-based selling workflows by bringing details on products purchased at the point of go-to-market execution, and arming account teams with insight to help them reduce churn and drive expansion. With Outreach's latest release, account teams improve collaboration, gain full lifecycle visibility, and always take timely, relevant action that lead to account growth.

Outreach enterprise customers have also requested ways to deeply customize their Outreach platform. Organizations looking to customize Outreach are in luck, we’ve delivered a handful of new capabilities to make Outreach your own. In addition to running critical retention and expansion workflows with Outreach, Enterprises can now scale their coaching efforts with the power of AI, forecast for their unique needs like multi-quota, or multi-currency deals, improve compliance, and configure their unique sales workflows with custom objects.

Arm account teams with expansion insight using Account Purchases

Tracking what each of your accounts have purchased is crucial, but opportunities alone don’t paint the full picture. With Account Purchases, you can now track which products your accounts have, along with critical details like their value and volume as well as contract start and end dates.

Account Purchases also lets you track not just your own products, but also those of competitors and complementary products. This means you can plan ahead for competitive takeouts, explore integration opportunities, or even strategize co-selling efforts with partners.

More importantly, with filtering, you can now build targeted account lists with this information. Whether you want to stay on top of contracts ending soon, spot cross-sell opportunities, target competitive takeouts, or ensure new customers get the support they need right from their start dates, Account Purchases have got you covered. Account Purchases gives your AMs and CSMs the information they need to make smart, strategic decisions for your accounts.

Deliver timely action to renew and grow accounts with new triggers

Time-Based Triggers allow your teams to trigger tasks at a set date so that they can take timely action with their accounts. Pairing Time-Based Triggers with Account Purchase target lists can help grow and retain accounts:

• Schedule your onboarding sequence to kick off a few days after closing a deal and seamlessly welcome new clients
• Assign your Account Executives or Customer Success Managers to perform health checks at regular intervals, ensuring your clients stay happy and engaged throughout their journey.
• Automate a task to begin renewal discussions 3-5 months before a contract ends to proactively maintain strong relationships and secure renewals with less effort.

Build stronger customer relationships with new sequence blueprints

Communicate efficiently and consistently throughout your customers’ journey with retention and expansion sequence blueprints. Deploy pre-designed sequences for account management, expansion, and retention workflows including onboarding, customer training, NPS detractor management, and expansion.

Unlock new workflows and make Outreach yours with Custom Objects

Configuring your perfect sales process requires customization. Just like with standard objects, you can now build new workflows based on custom objects to prioritize the right actions and never miss another revenue moment. Once you sync your Custom Objects into Outreach, you can create new sales automations triggered by changes in custom objects to help your sales team stay on top of deals and capture more revenue.

For example, you can trigger an email sequence in Outreach when a prospect has been associated with a specific campaign in Salesforce. Everytime someone becomes a Campaign Member in SFDC, it automatically updates in Outreach and they are put into our Campaign Email Sequence. No more manual tagging in Outreach to put the right prospects into the right sequences!

Coach teams at scale with Smart Kaia™ Coach

We’ve heard from customers both large and small that coaching is cumbersome and time-consuming, so we built Smart Kaia Coach to support organizations who want to scale coaching without requiring leaders to put hours in to do so.

Once a Coach Card is applied to a recording, our AI-powered Smart Kaia Coach enables managers to coach at scale by automatically identifying answers to the card and highlighting key moments in conversations. With deep links to specific answers, leaders can quickly pinpoint relevant parts of the meeting and provide targeted feedback. This efficiency allows for more frequent coaching, driving improved team performance and revenue outcomes.

Win business as a team with Account Teams

Sales reps, Account Executives, sales engineers, and customer success reps, collaborate on the same account with the same end goal in mind – to create and nurture relationships with your customers for success. But, this type of collaboration, across that many people, requires structure and the right visibility to ensure everyone involved can access the records they need. The Account Teams functionality in Salesforce delivers this structure and now you can easily import your Salesforce Account Team setup directly into Outreach and start executing on your team selling motions in-app!

Build a global forecast with new forecasting enhancements

Detailed forecasts provide the necessary insights that help organizations make well-informed business decisions. Outreach’s new release is bringing you the ability to build more complex, global forecasts, with our latest forecasting enhancements. To support global organizations with sellers operating in multiple different countries, we’ve delivered multi-currency support to display forecasts in each team’s local currency. Record and track progress against multiple forecasting goals for each area of the business, like renewals, new logos, or expansions.

Arm your team with the right tools to retain, expand, and collaborate to build a stronger customer base and crush your revenue goals. But this is just a sneak peek of the latest updates and features here at Outreach, read the full press release or schedule a demo for up close and personal look at this quarter’s release.