Four Common Mistakes to Avoid in Outreach as a Sales Rep

There’s nothing like opening Outreach in the morning and finding out you sent 250 cold emails at 11:06 pm because you didn’t throttle your sequence. This adrenaline rush always pairs well with the realization that you may have wasted hundreds of leads. It’s not a great feeling.

As a longtime Outreach user, I’ve run the gauntlet of mishaps on the platform. And as a longstanding Outreach partner, our team has witnessed numerous Outreach oversights, both in implementation, as well as sequence setup. We’ve seen just about everything from guidance around researching prospects and how to sequence them to proper mapping and task settings.

In a series of blogs, we’ll be highlighting a few of the most common mistakes that first-time Outreach users run into. From sales reps to administrators to managers, we’re going to outline the best ways not to use Outreach and how to migrate your team onto better and more efficient tactics. 

To kick things off, let’s talk about how to use outreach and the four common mistakes that sales reps make when they first start with Outreach.

Mistake #1: Sending Cold Emails Like It’s an Email Marketing Platform

Many sales reps hop into Outreach after implementation and start plugging as many prospects into their sequences as possible, especially at startups when the necessary processes haven’t been set in stone yet. 

And, who can blame them? New tools are exciting! Most likely, they’ve been contacting prospects using one-off emails manually via their inbox and manually dialing while keeping track of follow-up tasks on their own (if at all).

It’s like getting the keys to a Ferrari with no one around to teach you how to drive it. It’s exciting but dangerous.

But, no matter how badly we want to hit those activity goals, Outreach isn’t designed to send thousands of emails at a time. It’s not an email marketing platform; it’s a sales engagement tool. And the rigidity of its platform is one of the reasons sales teams flock to it: it offers structure in tandem with effective outbound performance.

So, what happens if you send to hundreds of people in every sequence? Nothing.

• • First, you can’t personalize all of those messages, so the likelihood of your message resonating with those prospects is pretty slim. 
  • Secondly, more than likely, those emails are hitting the inbox cold. If a certain amount of your emails get marked as spam or go out to unconfirmed email addresses, Google will freeze your account before the sequence even finishes. Even worse, it damages your domain. 
  • Third, even with proper throttling (i.e., when emails are sent and restricted on how many can be sent at a time), if you have too many emails going out, Outreach schedules them in increments. In other words, your prospects will probably be getting mail at 11 pm, especially if you don’t have proper scheduling set up on the backend.

There’s no better way to burn through your leads than by sending shoddy, generic emails to 600 of them at once. Luckily, this first mistake is easy to avoid.

• • Divvy up your leads into different sequences and only prospect max 10-20 new prospects per rep. This will differ from team to team. But, it’ll give the reps a good flow of new leads coming in and others being finished out of sequences to keep activity up but not too high, as mentioned above. Your reps will also be able to avoid the spam label while having the time to personalize their messaging.
  • Keep your emailing list clean. No one likes dirty data, but bad email addresses might be Google’s biggest pet peeve.
  • Check your throttling before starting a sequence. Throttling is enabled by default, but depending on how many sales reps you have, how many prospects they’re sending to, and your timeline, there are a few things to keep an eye on.
    • Auto-Activate Prospects: Outreach has stringent limits on the number of prospects that are activated/added to a sequence. Those numbers are based on setting each user’s max active/added prospects every 24 hours. 
    • Max Active Prospects per User: Using the example above, let’s say you have a max for active prospects in a given sequence of 25 per user. You are more than welcome to add 100 prospects to that sequence, but only 25 will be active in the sequence. As prospects finish or are marked as finished, the other prospects will then be activated.
    • Max Adds Per User every 24 Hours: This is a good one to note, as it’ll ensure that all sales reps hit their daily goal for email activities. In tandem with the Max Active Prospects, this setting determines the number of prospects that can be added or activated in the first step of a sequence within a 24-hour window. 

Mistake #2: Forgoing Organizational Structure for Chaos

Outreach is bursting with excellent features to help sales teams organize and segment their audiences, territories, accounts, campaigns, etc. When it’s all organized correctly with a precise playbook lining out how each campaign is titled, how verticals are segmented, and so on, it’s bliss. 

Setting that up is one of the first things your team should do after implementation. Come up with a plan for how you’ll be tagging accounts, how you’ll be organizing content, and don’t deviate. For example, you should tag every account with a naming convention similar to: “Outbound/Inbound – Purpose – Vertical/Industry/Persona.” As you and your team create new content, it won’t become a hodgepodge of messy templates and snippets that are harder to find than that one sock under the bed.

Tagging and organizing Outreach content is meant to make the experience more streamlined and clean, not rickety and erratic. New sales teams tend to opt for a sort of haywire approach, which confuses not just coworkers and other sellers but also management. 

We recommend that every sales team runs through a post-implementation naming/tagging meeting to nail down exactly how content will be organized. It makes it easier for reps to stay on top of their sequences and share content while frontline managers can follow account development and outbound practices.

Related Content: B2B Sales Tech to Eliminate Constraints and Influence Growth

Mistake #3: Automation & Personalization – The Ratio is Off!

Personalization is the cornerstone of modern selling and a must when you’re sending cold emails in combination with a multi-channel sales strategy. And, if you’re following the tips from the first mistake, you’ll always have an opportunity to personalize everything you send. But there’s some murky water between how much time sales reps should spend personalizing and how much to spend on automating features.

It’s true: there is such a thing as too much personalization. Similarly, there can be too much automation, but the key is finding the balance. Some new Outreach users use too much automation to hit their activity goals and not enough time personalizing the message to truly resonate. On the other hand, other reps spend too much time personalizing and not taking advantage of automation features that save time.

We have a few tips that can help you find the sweet spot:

1. 1. Spend time fully personalizing the first email that goes out. Make it specific to the persona or industry of the prospect, check out their LinkedIn page for more perspective, and then send it out. *CHECK* first message done.
   2. For the next 2-3 emails, reply to that original thread with an automated email that is a bit more general but has a callback to that first email, which you spent so much time personalizing.
   3. Somewhere in the middle of the sequence, repeat that process with a new personalized email you can bump up a couple of times.

This offers a good balance of automation and alleviates the stress of writing every email from scratch. At the same time, you’re also personalizing the email content which increases the likelihood of getting a response, starting a conversation, and booking a meeting.

Related Content: Four Ways to Set More Meetings Like A Top Performer

Mistake #4: Giving Free Rein for Content Creation

Outreach isn’t just your go-to for cold email and outbound workflows, it’s a collection of your sales team’s content. The sequences, templates, scripts, snippets, messaging, value props, etc. — it’s all collected within the confines of your Outreach instance. And just like every other piece of company content, firewalls are needed to ensure consistency and efficiency.

Just like organization structure, the haywire approach to content creation will only slow you down. When everyone on the team is pumping out content without direction, it makes for a very messy instance. 

To avoid it, you can assign a few people on the team (one or two super users and a couple of managers) to be the overarching content producers/editors. With input from the team, of course, they’ll be the ones creating the content, developing new messaging and scripts, and then everyone can convene to see what’s working and what they can do.

Avoid Outreach Oversights and Prospect Like a Pro

Anytime there’s a new shiny toy around, there’s bound to be excitement. But it’s easy to make mistakes when you’re in that headspace. You might think you’re going above and beyond, but overloading your sequences without any organization or tact can compromise how effective you are at engaging with prospects. However, by avoiding common mistakes and following the best practices above, you can dodge many issues that follow a poorly executed sequence strategy.

In Part 2 of Outreach Oversights, our certified Outreach admins will cover popular administrative issues that pop up after implementation. Along with an overview of each mistake, we’ll also offer helpful advice for designing a powerful and efficient Outreach environment.