Outreach

1. You are here:
2. Handbook
3. Marketing
4. Marketing Operations
5. Outreach

Maintained by:

On this page

• About Outreach
• Set-Up
• Learning Pathways
• Sequences
• Sequence Settings
• Collections
• Rulesets
• Tips and Tricks
• Outreach Meetings
  • Outreach Meetings for SDR Team
• Outreach Engagement Panel
• Sending Email Using Outreach
  • Sending Limits
• Importing SFDC Reports
• Outreach Stages
• Outreach Automation
• Outreach Merge and Delete
• Keeping Outreach Tidy

About Outreach

Outreach is a sales engagement platform helps efficiently and effectively engage prospects to drive more pipeline and close more deals.

Set-Up

User set-up instructions can be found here.

Learning Pathways

Outreach provides educational courses via their Outreach University Pathways programs that are updated frequently with new content. While GitLab does not require the SDR team to pursue completion of Outreach University Pathways, it's recommended for longterm users to pursue mastery of any marketing tools we use.

Sequences

Sequences are one of the main features of Outreach. Users can create a series of touchpoints in order to communicate and automate their workflows. We currently have two types of sequences. Primary and personal. Primary sequences are created to be shared and used across teams. Personal are for your own use.

Naming convention for primary sequences include the following:

• REGION (WW, AMER, EMEA, APAC)
• PRIMARY or PERSONAL
• Language
• Name of campaign
• HIGH or LOW touch

When creating a new primary sequence or shared event sequence, please tag marketing ops on the issue for QA review prior to enabling it. The sequence is reviewed to ensure it has the correct rulesets, tags, collections, throttles, variables and other settings. Personal sequences do not need to be reviewed unless you wish to have an additional pair of eyes on it.

Sequence Settings

You may choose the best delivery schedule and ruleset applicable to your goals. You may choose whether or not others can see and use your sequence or if you would like to keep it private. All sequence must have Throttle's enabled. This helps to stagger the volume of prospects moving through a sequence at one time. It is necessary to help prevent users from hitting the email provider's mailing limits. If you have too much volume this may result in you being kicked out of your email inbox by our provider. Max adds per user every 24 hours are to be set up to 75. If you need to request special sequence settings please reach out to Marketing Operations with your use case.

Collections

Collections are an easy way to group sequences, snippets, and templates that get assigned to user groups for easier access. Examples associated to our SDR groups include our SDR Inbound 2020 and 2020 Events collections. You may request new collections by opening an issue in the Marketing Operations Project.

Rulesets

• Default - Does not make tasks on your behalf. Prospects can be added to these sequences more than once, if not already active. prospects are not able to be added to other exclusive sequences, but can be added to a non-exclusive sequence. Updates prospoects to appropriate stages. Resumes out of office prospects after 5 days.
• Campaign - Follows the same rules as the default settings except out of office are resumed 1 day after.
• Create Call Task - Follows same rules as the default except it will create call tasks on opened emails. Minimum email opens needed: 2
• Event - Prospects can only be added to this sequence once. They are not exclusive to this sequence. Out of office are resumed 1 day after.

Tips and Tricks

• Snippets are an easy way to save time when constructing emails. If there are frequent statements or phrases being sent to prospects, check if any team members have created a snippet related to that topic. If creating new, universally helpful snippets, remember to set permissions to Others can see and use and apply a Collection, where applicable.
• Many of the Master sequences have been set to work in specific timezones. Those in AMER should not be using sequences set to APAC timezones.
• Variables allow Outreach to auto-populate prospect data and sender data, increasing productivity via automation. Pay close attention to what variables are available when composing emails and what information the variables will populate. If a prospect in Salesforce says "No Company" in the Company field, the Outreach variable for company will populate "No Company" in the sent email.
• If the name within the company field of Salesforce and Outreach does not flow naturally in conversation, check to see if a Company Natural Name can be added. For example, "Mr Bob's Company Incorporated" sounds less natural in conversation than "Mr Bob's". When using a natural name, use the variable {{company_natural}} in the email template instead of {{company}}.
• Variables can also be used for setting manual tasks within an email template. However, these manual tasks function differently than a normal variable. After the brackets at the beginning of the variable, a "!" needs to be added or Outreach will attempt to populate the phrase inside the brackets. For example, a manual task should read {{! Edit this email before sending}}. If the "!" is not added, the sequence will fail with a "Template Syntax Error" message.
• The Accounts tab is a useful way of browsing Outreach prospects + accounts where the SDR's name appears in the SFDC Account field SDR Assigned. This won't filter for every prospect under your ownership (limitations with leads or unassigned accounts may apply), but it will show many relevant prospects. This view won't be available at your first login to Outreach, so you'll need to create it. To create the view,
  • Select the Accounts section of Outreach
  • Next to the search box there is a purple label that reads Owner is you. Remove this filter for now
  • Select Add filter and type SDR Assigned. Type in your name and hit enter. Change the Sorted by option, if you wish
  • From there, select Save view. From this window, you can edit the view name and privacy settings
  • It's best to set this view as your default view. Without this filter in place, the Accounts section's usefulness is primarily steered away from SDRs and moreso to Sales team members.

Outreach Meetings

The current meeting templates will sync to an SFDC event. Please be aware that Outreach will only create SFDC events for meetings Booked from Outreach. Per Outreach's support documentation, Booked from Outreach is defined as "The meeting was booked using the Outreach Public Calendar Link, insert availability, or by sending an invite through Outreach." This is important for SDRs to keep in mind to ensure any Initial Qualified Meetings (IQMs) are tracked appropriately.

Outreach is able to sync some custom information about these meetings into events including:

Outreach Meetings for SDR Team

SDR teams will use the functionality for scheduling to save time and effort, providing the best customer experience.

If a meeting to be scheduled, the SDR will respond with times-lots by following the instructions here.

Outreach Engagement Panel

Custom fields from Outreach that sync into SFDC for understanding engagement status in Outreach.

Sending Email Using Outreach

Outreach is not meant for mass communications nor bulk email sends it is intended for very targeted account and prospect communications. The Outreach platform is directly integrated to the GitLab Gmail account and each users email is linked through OAuth therefore all activity in Outreach has the potential to impact the IP reputation of the GitLab domain with all major email services providers.

As such there are sending limits built into the Outreach platform as well as limits put in place by Gmail itself.

Sending Limits

• Individual users can send up to 2,000 emails combined between Outreach and Gmail inbox in a rolling 24-hour period.
  • This is the maximum across both systems, if you max out in Outreach, you will be maxed out in Gmail.
• Outreach has a hard limit of 5,000 emails in a rolling seven day period.
  • If you max out in Outreach, your emails will be queued to try again in 24 hours, when your account drops below this hard limit.

Importing SFDC Reports

Step 1: Create your SFDC report and save it into the Unfiled Public Reports folder.

• Report can only be a lead or contact report
• Limit to 2000 records per import
• Minimum Required fields:
  • Lead ID
  • Email
  • First Name
  • Last Name
• Note: you may only map fields that already exist within Outreach, but the import is set up to load additional data points during the upload. You do not need to create your report with a bunch of fields to get them into Outreach.

Step 2: Navigate to the ⚡Quick Actions button and choose Bulk Create.

• Select your Import Type as Prospects Salesforce Report
• You will need to enter the report ID or choose the name of your report from the dropdown
• Choose the frequency as Once

Step 3: Next you will review the mapping of the above 4 fields in the Outreach plugin. These usually auto-populate if Outreach can determine the correct field.

• If a field is not mapped please select it from the drop down
  • If you need additional guidance while mapping please contact Marketing Operations
• Please do not try to map fields that do not exist already in Outreach it is ok to the leave these fields as Not mapped
• Outreach will prompt you that there are unmapped fields and you can hit continue

Step 4: On the next screen you will be prompted with more fields. To prevent from overriding important data please select the following:

• Owner - Use owner from data
• Stage - Use stage from data
• Timezone - Leave blank
• Source - Leave blank
• Additional Tags: You may assign tags as you need them
• Load additional data from Salesforce - Prechecked check box
• What to do with duplicates? - Skip

Step 5: Select the Start Import button on the next screen.

Outreach Stages

Outreach stages are a 1:1 match with SFDC Status. The rulesets help push prospects along into the correct stage/status based on their actions. This eliminates the need for triggers to match status to stage.

Outreach Automation

Outreach will make updates based on these scenarios. Triggers fire in order of operation.

Outreach Merge and Delete

Outreach will automatically merge and delete lead, contact, and account information based on those actions taking place in SFDC. Outreach checks for these data changes in SFDC once a day.

If a lead or contact is currently in an active sequence Outreach will let that lead or contact finish the sequence. This allows the SDR to complete their outreach if working on a duplicate prospect. Once a prospect has been marked as finished. The next time Outreach looks for changes in SFDC it will merge or delete the prospect accordingly.

Prospects that get deleted in Outreach live in the recycle bin until permanently deleted. Both Sales Enablement and Marketing Operations have the ability to remove leads from this recycle bin and bring them back into Outreach if there is ever a scenario that requires this action.

Keeping Outreach Tidy

Marketing Ops will be responsible for pausing and locking sequences owned by former team members and for deleting tasks owned by former team members. The MktgOps team will also be responsible for monitoring and cleaning the SAL's and AE's unused sequences and overdue tasks, as necessary. Procedure for the former team members clean up process is as follows:

• During the deprovisioning process, any former team member with an Outreach profile will be added to the Former Team Member Outreach team. This instruction has been added to the deprovisioning template.
• Use the Sort & Filter function of Outreach to track tasks and sequences owned by members of the Former Team Members team. Tasks can be outright deleted, sequences deactivated and locked. Instructions for locking sequences below.
• If there are sequences owned by members of the Former Team Members team that are being used by current GitLab team members, change ownership of the sequence to a current team member. MktgOps users are preferred, but change to a team member using the sequence where appropriate.

SDRs are asked by SDR Leadership to periodically remove their older, unsued and inactive sequences from view and use. To qualify for clean up, a sequence needs to meet these criteria:

• There are no active prospects in the sequence
• If there are active prospects in the sequence, check the date when the prospects were added. If prospects have been stuck on a step or paused for a prolonged period of time, consider those prospects inactive
• The sequence has not been used in 13 months or longer
• The sequences must be marked by corresponding and correct tags and collections for ease of team cooperation, according to their data (market, account size, etc..). If there is a need, new collections and tags are to be created after consulting managers.

Outreach sequences are a useful source of a/b testing data for customer responses, so the best course of action is not to outright delete sequences. Instead, follow these steps:

• Deactivate/pause the sequence. If there are prospects still in the sequence, there will be a warning regarding the outcome of those prospects' path through the sequence. Assuming the prospects have been deemed inactive, proceed in deactivating the sequence
• From the Sort & Filter view, select the checkbox on all applicable sequences
• Proceed to the top of the page and click the padlock icon, which shows the Lock and Restore feature. Select Lock to lock the unneeded sequences

Congrats! You've just helped keep Outreach as a tidy tool for yourself and your teammates. Reward yourself with a tasty treat, if desired.