Two of the hottest sales acceleration platforms on the market right now are Salesloft and Outreach.io. An SDR platform is a great idea but be mindful it is also very powerful. I can share first-hand experience from using these tools:
- False Opens – We experienced a great discrepancy in email opens using both tools. Our SDR manager would remark that his teams’ open rates were 10 times greater than traditional marketing. It turned out that advanced security software would send an open notice even though it was not in fact read by the recipient. As a result, we lost all confidence in open rates. I recommend using your marketing automation platform for bulk sending and use your SDR tool for direct solicitation.
- Co-opting your email server. If you use Microsoft or Gmail for your email server be very careful connecting it to either of these platforms. Microsoft will notice you are using their server as a BULK sender and notify the recipient you are a SPAMMER. I recommend using a sperate IP address very highly.
- No man’s land. After years of using services like Outreach and Salesloft, we started to experience a decline in receptivity. We started to notice that our campaigns not only didn’t get the reception we expected, we didn’t even get Out of Office replies. We weren’t even making it into the Inbox after abusing the system for so long. I recommend keeping email very tailored so as not to alert the security software. Also, use other medians like the phone, personal letters, and social just as heavily as email.
Here are some third party reviews of these systems:
Trust Radius: https://www.trustradius.com/compare-products/outreach-vs-salesloft
The reviewers from Trust Radius give the nod to Outreach.io with 8.8 out of 10 score compared to an 8.1 out of 10 score for Salesloft. That is from a combined 347 reviews.
G2 Crowd: https://www.g2crowd.com/compare/outreach-vs-salesloft
The reviewers from G2 Crowd both gave Outreach.io and Salesloft a 4.3 out of 5. That is from a combined 1104 reviews. Salesloft did win head-to-head for ease of use, ease of set up, ease of admin, quality of support, and ease of doing business.