Outreach Maintenance Guide: Tips for Smooth Operations

All good things need a little TLC. The Outreach platform serves thousands of customers worldwide and never takes a day off. But to keep your Outreach account running in tip top shape, proactive and regular instance maintenance is essential for Outreach to run smoothly and set your sales teams up for success. Reviewing your Admin Health Dashboard every week gives you a bird’s eye view of your instance’s overall health and a snapshot of sequence and user performance so you can easily course correct in real-time.

We’re outlining in-depth audits (and their recommended frequency) you should routinely conduct for a healthy, robust platform. Paired with your Admin Health Dashboard, these audits will help keep your Outreach instance in mint condition and clutter-free – so you can get more of what you need from Outreach.

01. System Audits

Check for CRM integration issues and review your automation and user settings to fully optimize your instance and keep it free of errors. 

Monthly CRM Error Check

Sync errors occur for many reasons but determining the root cause of the error will ensure you can resolve the error and maintain a stable and accurate CRM connection. Each month resolve any CRM syncing errors to avoid data gaps, orphaned records, and miscommunications.

Quarterly Trigger Review

Ensure your triggers are aligned with your workflows, valid, and working as intended to catch any issues before they affect engagement. Each quarter: 

• Review the last time the trigger fired to identify broken triggers.
• Dig into the activity of triggers that aren’t firing to see if you need to refine conditions.

Quarterly User Review

It’s important to maintain both Profiles and Teams in Outreach to ensure users have the appropriate level of access and your reporting remains accurate. Each quarter:

• Review Profiles to ensure the permission sets within each align with the needs or your organization and users have access to the information they need.
• If you use Teams, review members to ensure they remain accurate.
• Check in on active vs. inactive users and monitor locked seats to ensure licenses are allocated appropriately.

02. Content Audits

Audit content regularly to ensure your Outreach materials stay relevant and aligned with team and customer needs.

Monthly content performance audit

Each quarter, you should use reporting in Outreach to review the performance of your content. This will better enable sellers to perform to their full potential and ensure your message is resonating with customers.

• Use the Sequence Engagement Score to diagnose and fix weak sequence copy by reviewing which sequence steps are positively impacting your business outcomes or detracting from your objectives. You should also identify obsolete or underperforming sequences and deprecate as needed.
• In the Sequence Performance Report, analyze positive email sentiment and review open and reply rates to understand buyers and optimize your prospecting strategies.
• Clean up sequences where prospects are stalled or encountering errors.
• Audit templates and snippets to maintain consistent and accurate messaging related to topics such as product messaging and pricing.
• Monitor spam rates to ensure compliance with bulk send requirements.

Monthly Activity Audits

Each month, use the Activity Report to monitor activity performance and ensure reps are getting the most out of Outreach. Adherence to task execution is important as it will impact the success of a sequence and help you understand the effectiveness and impact of prospecting activity.

• Review overdue tasks to see if there may be workflow issues that need to be addressed or if reps are struggling to execute tasks.
• Review skipped tasks to ensure that reps are completing each step from a sequence consistently.
• Pair findings with a review of Sequence throttles, rulesets, automations, and CRM sync to ensure instance health isn’t impacting rep behavior.

Quarterly Sequence State Cleanup

Review sequence states to ensure prospects are progressing through sequences without issues. Keep your eyes peeled for sequences where a lot of prospects are pending, paused, or failed.

Quarterly Prospect Data and Email Health Review

Each quarter, take time to review prospect, user, and email health in Outreach to maintain optimal instance performance. 

• Remove orphaned records to improve reporting accuracy.
• Review your Outbox performance for bounced emails and analyze bounce rates to enhance email deliverability. 
• Monitor current send volumes to keep reps strategic and compliant with limits.