The modern sales professional is constantly looking for new ways to improve his productivity and efficiency.
One of the most important factors in this search is finding a CRM that can seamlessly integrate with other essential business tools like email, scheduling, and reporting.
In this Outreach vs Salesloft post, we’ll look at the differences between Outreach and Salesloft.
In short, they are both great tools for your business. But there are a few key features that set them apart from one another. We hope you find it helpful.
What is Outreach?
Outreach is a tool that allows marketers to track top prospects and send them personalized emails.
The company is headed by Manny Medina and was founded in 2013.
Medina has a history of success, having started Lyris and then selling it to Attachmate for $160 million.
It is used for lead generation, but it can also be helpful in the early stages of customer development or even content marketing research.
The platform offers a variety of functionality aimed at simplifying outreach efforts, including email templates, automation features, real-time data insights into your outreach efforts, and detailed reports.
Outreach is an immensely popular tool for marketers looking to generate more leads through email outreach programs or PR initiatives.
What is Salesloft?
Salesloft is the only sales engagement platform that gives marketers and salespeople visibility into what’s actually happening in their pipelines, at each stage of development.
They offer a simple way to create highly personalized outreach campaigns aimed at closing more deals faster for companies selling to businesses.
Salesloft can be used to create custom campaigns and automate them based on the customer’s buying patterns and behavior.
It empowers members of your sales team to connect with more prospects, generate more leads, and learn about the market so they can build stronger relationships with their clients.
Many companies looking for a solution like this often consider using an email marketing platform, but there are some important differences between those two types of tools:
Email campaign platforms send out pre-written emails or let you create templates for messages you can reuse.
For Salesloft, it captures email content from those emails but provides a much more robust experience, as it’s designed to be used by an individual on your team rather than replace them.
This is why some companies find they already have the expertise and resources needed to implement these platforms, which makes it easier to choose one that matches their existing workflow.
Email Features
Outreach
Outreach email has some amazing features that are not available in Salesloft.
It has the option to send personalized emails to each person on your list, even if you have more than one email address for that contact.
With this feature, it is possible to connect with people who use different services like Gmail or Outlook.
Outreach automatically pulls information from LinkedIn profiles and uses it in the email to make a personalized connection.
The other great Outreach email features include:
- Ability to send scripted emails, which are prewritten messages with fields for inserting data
- Templates can be customized in HTML and CSS. This is great for when you need an email that looks more personal than the default templates available.
- Tracking of individual links within a campaign allows users to see how many times a link was clicked, who is clicking the most, and where it’s being shared
- Ability to track when an email has been viewed or opened by a user
- The ability to send emails with personalized messages over either plain text or template HTML format is useful, but also can be abused in some cases. It may not always be a good idea to add too much personalization when sending out outreach emails.
- Able to track conversion rates when someone opens an email and takes action, what was their result: did they click on something or complete a form submission? This is another great way Salesloft has helped many businesses.
- The ability to share emails in various ways via social media, email, or other means is a great feature that Salesloft provides its users with. You can even track when an email was shared and how it was sent out.
Salesloft
Salesloft has a number of features that allow you to send targeted emails and easily track their effectiveness. Some of the key email marketing functions include:
- Workflows that automatically add contacts when they engage with your content, such as opening an email or visiting specific pages on your website
- Customizable follow up campaigns for sales teams who need to stay in touch with leads
- Automated email campaigns that are customizable via Salesloft’s drag and drop interface
- Templates for different types of emails, including welcome messages, product updates, surveys, etc.
Verdict
Whether Salesloft or Outreach, I consider both tools to be very different. Because they offer such a wide range of emails, it might appear as if they are similar at first glance.
However, when you dig deeper the differences become clear and more apparent which is why we will call this a tie.
Outreach has more of a focus on outreach and customer acquisition.
Salesloft is more of a direct sales tool that helps you to generate qualified leads from your website analytics, social media data, as well as emails already in existence.
Deployment
Outreach
Deployment on Outreach is a breeze. You can either do it manually or create a custom script using the API to automate your deployments on both platforms.
Deployments are instant and don’t require any work from you after setup, unlike Salesloft.
You can also deploy Outreach on web applications, mobile web apps, and Chrome Apps.
Salesloft
Deploying Salesloft can be done in two ways:
You can either use the Deployment Console to do it manually, or you can use your own custom scripts using our API.
The process is very similar to Outreach’s deployment, so there should be no problems with adapting from one platform to another.
The deployments take around 15 minutes and can be done in an instant. The Salesloft team works very hard to make sure the process is smooth and simple for you, so all you have to do after setup is write your content.
Deployments require some work from you before they are made live on the website – there’s no automation here like Outreach provides.
This means that you have to link all of your social media profiles manually, write a custom description for the post and choose which tags it should be posted under.
You can schedule when your content is published using Salesloft’s built-in calendar tool so you don’t have to worry about being online at the right time.
You’ll also be able to see how many views you’re getting per post, which is great for measuring your marketing efforts.
Verdict
This bout is a close call, but I’m tilting towards Salesloft because it has a self-service model and you can scale up as high as your business needs.
This means there is no need to wait for an enterprise license or even convince anyone of anything.
Outreach, on the other hand, only offers email tracking and automated outreach optimization services which are excellent but not very scalable.
Support
Outreach
Outreach has a whole team of reps that will help you get started and answer all your questions.
Outreach has great support for their product. They have an extensive knowledge base on their website and even offer live chat during business hours. (no number)
Salesloft
Salesloft has a great system for dealing with customer issues with a ticketing system that is easy to use.
While the Salesloft support staff is also very helpful, they don’t have the same breadth and depth as an in-house full-time dedicated support person at Outreach.
Verdict
I think it’s safe to say that Outreach is the clear winner when it comes to support.
Training
Outreach
Outreach provides a lot of resources that you can use to train your team. You can send them a link or they can watch videos in the Outreach knowledge base.
They also provide webinars and other training opportunities for new hires, current employees, and they also host monthly Q&A sessions where you ask questions and get feedback from industry experts.
Salesloft
There is an option to do a free demo on the Salesloft website, which helps you get familiar with their system and how it works before making any further investment into this platform.
Salesloft does not offer impersonal ways of customer service so you cannot learn about sales from other customers’ experiences. It’s also very expensive for a small business.
However, Salesloft training is very thorough and provides a lot of information for new hires.
Verdict
I have found that the way Salesloft conducts their training is not the best, especially when compared to Outreach’s personalized approach, so Outreach wins this.
The feature I like most about Outreach is the detailed feedback on how you are doing from your mentor after each call or email sent out.
Key features
Outreach
Outreach.io has a lot of great features for outreach, especially when it comes to scheduling.
They are also known as the “Buffer Killer” because they have a really useful scheduler that allows you to see your email drafts and scheduled times in one place.
You can link up multiple Gmail accounts with this feature which is helpful if you want emails sent from different accounts like your sales and marketing accounts.
One of the other cool features that outreach.io has is a Chrome extension which makes it really easy to schedule emails from Gmail and then create tasks in Asana to connect up with Salesloft automatically as you send those emails off one-by-one.
This helps make sure nothing gets missed or forgotten about when an email lands in a lead’s inbox.
In short, I would say that you need to know exactly what it is that your needs are before making the decision on whether sales software like Salesloft or outreach.io will be best for your team and business type.
Sales cadence for effective lead management
Outreach comes with powerful sequences to help you automate your outreach workflow.
Outreach comes with powerful sequences to help you automate your outreach workflow. They refer to these sequences as sales cadence and they are designed to increase your efficiency and effectiveness.
Each sales cadence can include tons of emails, tasks, and events that are triggered on a certain date or when someone replies to you.
Efficient customer relationship management
You can add sales contacts directly via a CSV or in DataFox.
Using the Dropbox integration you can easily upload your lead list.
The built-in CRM helps track all of your interactions with leads and customers in one place, including email history, phone calls, meetings, and more.
Outreach Detailed email analytics for efficient campaign management
Outreach gives detailed analytics about each email you send for better campaign management.
This includes the open rate, click-through rates, and reply rates of your emails.
The analytics can even show if someone opened or downloaded an attachment that was sent with the email.
By gathering these stats about each individual outreach email, it becomes easy to see which types of messages are working best and which are not.
You can then optimize your outreach efforts to be more efficient and effective.
It’s also simple to see what links in the body of each email were most clicked on so you know which messages are getting attention from your target audience, making it easier for you to refine future emails or use them as inspiration for new ones.
Salesloft
Salesloft has a lot of awesome features that are different from Outreach.
One of the biggest differences between Salesloft and Outreach is that with Salesloft, you create campaigns in a way that allows your team to collaborate on them together.
This feature helps make sure nothing slips through the cracks when it comes time for outreach without having too many people involved at once.
Another big difference between the two is that Salesloft has a much more robust email template system.
With Outreach you’re basically stuck with their pre-made templates, whereas with Salesloft you can build your own based on what works best for your business and use them across all of your campaigns or just individual ones as needed.
Another big factor is the ability to track your outreach. With Outreach, you can see who opened and engaged with particular links in an email but that’s about it.
Salesloft has tracked everything, including clicks on specific buttons within emails so you know exactly which content is resonating most with your audience or leads at any given time.
Other features include:
- Salesloft adds tags to cadences that are tied to stages.
- Salesloft automatically assigns the right cadence to each sales rep based on team structure, territories, and manager hierarchy.
- You can automatically remove prospects based on certain criteria.
And the list goes on and on.
But that’s not all there is to Salesloft.
It also allows you to:
- Easily manage your team by seeing who has been assigned what prospect, who needs help, etc. That’s just one way we enable managers with their jobs.
- Track your time better with our built-in timer. Track your team’s performance through quick and easy weekly reports.
- You can easily set stages with either email, phone, and a third option ‘others’.
- Automate email outreach at a specific date and time.
Verdict
I would say that you need to know exactly what it is that your needs are before making the decision on whether sales software like Salesloft or outreach.io will be best for your team and business type.
In my case, I always want to opt for an all-inclusive package rather than trying to piece together a suite of tools that you need. And for me, this means Outreach is the winner.
Pros and Cons
Outreach Pros
- The email templates are really good and easy to use, which makes it easier to write more personalized emails that you can send out at scale.
- You also get great analytics within the tool about who opened your email and clicked on what link (which is especially helpful if someone did open but didn’t click).
- The drop-down menus are really easy to use and I appreciate being able to outline an email quickly.
- The tracking within the tool is great because you can see if someone opened your email, clicked on a link, or didn’t open it at all.
- It’s much cheaper than Salesloft (although this isn’t necessarily one of its selling points) but it has a lot of great features that make it a solid competitor.
Outreach Cons
- In general, the tool doesn’t have a lot of great options for customization.
- Although you can add your own custom fields when creating a template, in order to get more detailed information about contacts you have to use tags or email properties in Gmail and then create segments in Outreach based on those.
Salesloft Pros
- Salesloft is really good when it comes to multiple user accounts.
- It’s really easy to use and get the hang of.
- Salesloft is also great when it comes to reporting tools, such as email tracking and lead scoring
- Salesloft provides detailed analytics about how your emails are performing in terms of opens and click-throughs.
- One really nice thing is that Salesloft will actually email you when there’s a new lead so you don’t have to constantly be checking the dashboard for updates.
Salesloft Cons
- It can get pricey if you send a lot of emails.
- A couple of useful tasks are not included in the free plan.
- Outreach has also been used by many startups to grow their lists, including Buffer, Dropbox, and Evernote.
- Email templates are simple but effective – you can easily create a series of emails that look professional without too much design work.
- With regular use, Outreach will often limit how many emails you can send at once.
Similarities and Differences
Similarities
Outreach and Salesloft share some similar features.
The main similarity is that both software programs allow businesses to manage their existing connections and track relationships with those people.
In addition, companies can create new contacts from within the platform as well as connect with those they already have a relationship with via email or social media.
Beyond this basic functionality, each has unique features worth considering when determining which is best for your business.
Both help you track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. They can also be automated to make things easier for managers or marketers alike.
Differences
The two programs also differ in several areas.
First, Salesloft offers more customization options including the ability to create custom fields and use conditional logic when sending emails or initiating outreach campaigns.
Second, unlike Outreach where a company’s entire database must be imported each time it wants to send an email, Salesloft allows users to import contacts as needed.
Third, the platform’s reporting features are more robust than Outreach which gives you insight into all of your communications with potential customers and shows how they responded to each message.
Finally, Salesloft offers a few additional features such as customizable fields that can be applied across an entire database, better integrations with CRM platforms like Salesforce and SugarCRM, in addition to many other features.
Pricing
Salesloft and Outreach do not have a price on their website, so purchasers must request one. However, both are priced similarly.
However, Outreach has also sparked some controversy due to its pricing model that charges marketers per email sent, which some argue is a more effective pricing model than time-based subscriptions.
Conclusion
Outreach and Salesloft are comparable platforms, making Outreach a viable alternative to Salesloft.
Both solutions provide similar functionalities and characteristics, such as dialers, email formats, and analytics. Outlook and Gmail are both supported by both applications.
Salesloft is better suited for BDRs and SDRs, whereas Outreach is designed to be more user-friendly for people in various jobs. As a result, its workflows are more suitable for positions across the board than Salesloft’s.
Additionally, because Outreach may be used by different roles, it has somewhat a more heavy lifting tool, which makes it a better choice among the two.
