Outreach Management Tips for New Admins

While frontline sellers set the legacy of prospecting in Outreach, it’s the admins that provide the foundation for those sellers to build well-executed engagements. 

For a new Outreach gatekeeper, there’s a long list of processes and setups you need to learn. Creating clear guidelines for managing data, establishing user parameters, and building the right environment should be at the top of your list.

So, to help put you in the driver seat for your Outreach setup, we’re leaking four of the best tips we have for admins starting to build their Outreach instance.

1. 1. Be the Ruler of Your Domain
   2. Build an Environment Your Users Will Want to Use
   3. Set the Stage(s) for Your Sales Team
   4. Access Isn’t for Everybody

Four Outreach Management Tips for New Admins

Since you’re a new admin, we’re pretty sure we know how you’re feeling right now: super excited. However, regardless of how excited you are, prematurely launching your Outreach platform leads to more work in the long run. Sure, the team gets to mess around with a top-tier sales engagement platform, but the cost is an under-configured environment that triggers an avalanche of reworking and planning. Not ideal.

Fortunately, you’re not going to do that! 

Instead, you’re first going to create the perfect Outreach platform so the sales team can hit the ground running when you launch. 

For the most part, we’ll be looking at the administrative processes and outreach management practices that optimize the backend. You’re more than likely familiar with Outreach’s integrations with CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, as it’s the first step in implementation, so we won’t cover that so much. Conversely, you’re probably new to configuring and customizing Outreach to help the sales team reach new revenue heights. That’s where the good stuff is and where we’re going to start. 

Let’s get into it.

Related Content: Four Common Mistakes to Avoid in Outreach as a Sales Rep

Tip #1: Be the Ruler of Your Domain, Literally

Although frontline sellers set the sequences, admins should be in the control seat. And the first thing to nail down before granting user access is tackling the branded URL.

Your company’s brand isn’t just a tool for industry recognition. When it comes to your sales engagement platform, it provides a firewall for your sales team’s emails by limiting the chances of being marked as SPAM. As we discussed in Outreach Oversights Part 1, there is nothing worse than getting flagged and putting your company’s entire domain at risk. To suppress the chances of flagging, you can personalize the domain of your emails with your brand label.

In addition to keeping your emails safe and sound in your prospects’ inbox, branded URLs also improve your chances of connecting with new customers. Companies with branded URLs can increase the number of emails delivered (and not blocked) and obtain better open rates. 

Our advice: set up your branded URL before your sellers start their first sequences. 

(Don’t know where to start? Outreach Support offers a full explanation of how to configure a branded URL before launching your platform.)

Tip #2: Build an Environment Your Users Will Want to Use

Let’s talk about creating content foundations. 

When we say content here, we’re not talking about building out email templates, scripts, or product messaging. That’s for frontline sellers and sales managers to worry about. Instead, content from the Outreach admin management perspective refers to the various backend automation rulesets and customizations sellers can use to structure their sequences.

The parameters you set up will ultimately be the blueprint for sequence settings like prospect stage settings, call task settings, actions outside of sequences, and more. The way you set these up will contribute heavily to how sellers model their prospecting activities and engagement options.

It’s worth noting that the rulesets, schedules, and collections you build right now may not be your end-all, be-all. Your business is bound to change as you grow — and you’re using Outreach, so you’ll be growing — which means you’ll be changing these in accordance with goals and targets. Once a quarter (or even more), get with the sales team to scrutinize what backend settings enable sellers and which ones don’t. Digest the information and make the appropriate changes.

Setting up your content foundations can be a little daunting, but again, ruleset configuration, scheduling protocol, and building collections are thoroughly explained by Outreach Support.

Tip #3: Set the Stage(s) for Your Sales Team

Every seller is familiar with the tedious woes of manually entering data or updating a prospect. And unfortunately, 45% of sales teams attest that each rep spends roughly 32+ hours a month on non-sales-related tasks such as, you guessed it, updating prospect information. By building out prospect stages and automatic updates for the sales team, you can cut down those non-selling hours.

Outlining the parameters for a prospect’s stage in their outbound journey is an easy way for the sales team to keep tabs on their leads. They can also evaluate where each prospect is in the sales cycle and report on how effective their sequences are. As the admin, your job is to set up how those updates happen and what actions trigger the next steps.

Several events that can trigger an auto-update on your prospect include:

• • Email bounces
  • Email Opt-Outs
  • Replies
  • A prospect is added to a specific sequence
  • Seller completes the first touchpoint, i.e., email or call
  • A prospect finishes in the sequence without a reply

These triggers and auto-updates allow the sales team to activate sequences and watch their prospects cruise through the stages with little-to-no manual interference. And, with the integration to Salesforce, you can map out additional automatic updates to clarify status in the CRM. It’s a win-win.

You might be thinking, “Does Outreach Support provide documentation around stage and status updates as well?” Of course! They have great resources for assigning stages and mapping Salesforce statuses.

Tip #4: Hot Take: Access Isn’t for Everybody

Designing and setting up user profiles is a great way to ensure everyone on the team has the right access to the right information. It’s perfectly fine to draw a line for specific team members and limit their access to specific realms of Outreach.

Frontline sellers should have access to certain record visibility, but should they be able to govern plugins and rulesets? Probably not. On the other hand, is giving them free rein to look into mail tracking and prospect engagement a good idea? Absolutely.

The list of access and permissions is pretty long for Outreach profiles, from admin to frontline sellers to leadership profiles. But diligence and consistency are the names of the game when it comes to access. 

Once your Outreach platform is configured and aligns with the objectives your team has for it, you’re ready to start sending out access.

(For a step-by-step guide to setting up profiles, check out this guide from Outreach.)

Take These Tips And Go Make The Sales Team Proud

Implementing any new technology is never easy. Research has shown that 25% of technology projects end up failing, regardless of where they’re executed in a business. Whether it’s bad management, poor planning, or insufficient setup, introducing new technologies is never a straightforward path.

As a new admin overseeing Outreach management for your organization, a large part of your job is making sure your launch isn’t a part of that 25%. With the tips we’ve given – and the input of your sellers and sales leadership – you’ll be far from that inclusion.