8 powerful ways custom objects can transform your sales process

Crafting a sales process that truly works for you and gets results requires flexibility. And when it comes to a data model that supports your sales process, there’s nothing more flexible than Outreach Custom Objects.With Custom Objects, all your critical sales data can be easily synced and integrated into a sales platform you already trust to unlock stronger sales workflows. 

With that level of flexibility, Custom Objects unlocks  an almost unlimited amount of use cases. To help you make the most of them, we’ve compiled a list of the top 8 ways to integrate Custom Objects in your sales process and create new automations that drive revenue for your team. Let’s take a look.

#1 Timely follow ups

Custom Objects used: Campaign and Campaign Member

Never miss another opportunity, especially when you can automatically sequence a prospect when they join a specific campaign in CRM. Simply map your Campaign and Campaign Member object from CRM into Outreach. Now, every time someone joins a campaign, it automatically updates in Outreach, triggering an email sequence when a prospect is associated with a specific campaign. Say goodbye to manual tagging and slow followups – Outreach ensures the right prospects are put into the right sequences.

See how Michaela McMenamin, a Sr. Client Account Executive at Outreach, follows up with clients after events by using campaign data in Outreach.

#2 Mitigate churn risk

Custom Object used: Case

Customer support cases can be an important indicator of potential churn risk. If you’re using the Case object in CRM, now you can use Outreach Custom Objects to provide your sales team visibility into customer support cases within the context of an account. By leveraging case insights directly in Outreach, your sellers can quickly see if a customer has any open issues that might affect retention so they can begin mitigating churn earlier. If you’re using the Case object to track feature requests, you can also set up Outreach Triggers for new product launches – anytime a new feature gets launched, customers that have made a request for that feature will be added to a product launch email sequence. Now customers will receive personalized, timely product launch updates to ensure they feel valued and to encourage further adoption of your product.

#3 Address competitive threats 

Custom Object used: Opportunity Competitor

Closing a deal without competitors in the mix would make selling much easier. But, the reality is most new deals are evaluating a competitor. To help sellers manage competitive pressure, use an Opportunity Competitor object to track competitors linked to your opportunities. Now you can bring that data into Outreach to help sellers stay on top of market intel and edge out the competition. For example, when a competitor is added to an opportunity record, it triggers a task for the sales rep to review competitive intelligence or propose a special discount. Similarly, if a new competitor record is created, a trigger could generate tasks for the marketing team to create fresh competitive assets. 

#4 Efficient onboarding

Custom Object used: Product and Purchases

No matter the size of your product portfolio, you’re likely tracking customer purchases with a Product and Purchases object. And when a customer buys a new product, onboarding is crucial to help your customers see product value quickly. By bringing your product and purchase data into Outreach, you can automate tasks based on recent purchase activity. That means your sellers can stay on top of new product purchases and ensure a seamless onboarding experience –whether it’s sharing how-to resources, providing guided product tours, or sending reminders to attend a training. 

#5 Increase retention 

Custom Object used: Product Usage Metric

Any successful retain and expand workflow should rely on product usage metrics to evaluate customer health. Often this product usage data is not stored in CRM, but rather a cloud data warehouse like Snowflake. So, how do you integrate that data into Outreach? Using our Snowflake Connector (now in a private beta) and Custom Objects, you can map your product usage data directly into Outreach. That means your reps can see churn risks like low product usage and even get automated tasks assigned to them when product usage falls below a certain threshold. Alternatively, high product usage can signal expansion potential – enabling you to set up Triggers that initiate upsell and cross-sell motions. 

#6 Improve demo flows

Custom Object used: Demo

There’s nothing more powerful than a demo to really let your prospects see and feel the impact of your product. But, with the complexity of buying committees and large enterprise deals, you’re likely performing numerous demos throughout a sales cycle. Using a Demo Custom Object, you can track each demo and link it to the relevant Prospect or Opportunity Record. You might include fields like demo date, demo sentiment (positive or negative), demo duration, and feedback or notes. By bringing this data directly into Outreach, your reps get visibility into historical demo activity and gain valuable insight that can guide successful revisions to your next demo script. 

#7 Plan post-visit activities

Custom Object used: Storefront

For companies highly dependent on field sellers who frequently visit storefronts, a Storefront object can help track important details about each visit. By integrating the storefront object into Outreach, customers can now create Triggers based on updates to your storefront data. For example, when a field seller logs a visit to a storefront and updates the "Visit Status" field to "Visited" on the Storefront object, it would trigger a follow-up task for the field seller to schedule the next visit. 

#8 Track complex contact relationships 

Custom Object used: Account Contact Relationship

The more the merrier, and more to keep track of. For example, a business owner might own several businesses or a consultant might work with several organizations. In  both cases, the best practice is to associate a contact with multiple accounts. This can easily be done in SFDC using the standard Account Contact Relationship object. Using this object, you’ll be able to see a contact’s direct relationship with their primary account, in addition to indirect relationships with additional accounts. 

And with Outreach Custom Objects, you can now bring these relationships from SFDC directly into Outreach. Simply create an Account Contact Relationship Custom Object in Outreach and map your SFDC Account Contact Relationship object to the one you created in Outreach. Next time you’re viewing an account record in Outreach, you’ll see all related contacts appear. And when you’re viewing a Prospect record in Outreach, you’ll see all related accounts appear. No more creating duplicate records or trying to keep track of complex relationships.

Get started with custom objects

With Outreach Custom Objects, you have the flexibility to shape your sales process around what truly matters to your team. From streamlining workflows to unlocking new sales automations, ultimately you’re helping your teams stay on top of deals and capture more revenue. Start exploring Custom Objects by checking out this demo, or take the next step towards maximizing your sales process by learning how to create Custom Objects in Outreach.