Salesloft and Outreach make prospecting easy by automating outreach. Both of these prospecting tools offer services like sending mass outreach sequences by email and social media, and they simplify cold call outreach with their popular cold call dialer service.
But both of these — and most of their competitors — lack key features to support your sales team once leads are qualified and ready to move down the pipeline.
Specifically, these tools don’t have features that help reps close leads once that lead is deemed qualified. For example, there are limited tools for helping reps improve on their sales calls, like seeing how engaged these leads are during video conferences or how they interact with sales material. They don’t solve the issues related to sharing and managing sales documents on the scale of an enterprise organization. And they don’t provide a way for your sales reps to send the type of personalized sales content they know turns a lead into a customer.
Clearslide, a critical part of the Bigtincan Engagement Hub, is a modern sales engagement platform.
And, it does provide these features that help reps close leads — from finding and delivering the same enablement content reps need to tools that help monitor if a prospect is engaged or distracted during a video call.
In this post, we’ll briefly compare Salesloft and Outreach. Then — for those that are interested in tools that help reps even after a lead is captured — we’ll also go into some of the Bigtincan key features that clients like AstraZeneca and Winnebago use to help turn leads into sales:
- Makes contacting leads easy with its feature-rich video conferencing software.
- Provides metrics on how engaged leads are on sales calls.
- Provides metrics on how leads interact with sales documents.
- Makes sales documents easy to find and maintain with its intelligent search function and administrative controls.
- Allows marketing to own branding and messaging without limiting your sales department’s ability to customize documents.
Want to learn more about Bigtincan and see if it’s the right fit for your organization? Request a demo today. Or skip to the section below on how Bigtincan can help organizations implement a modern sales enablement strategy.
What’s the Difference between Salesloft and Outreach?
Both of these tools are designed for Sales Development Representatives (SDR) and/or Business Development Representatives (BDR) for the purpose of generating new sales leads. They can both send hundreds of emails and/or social media interactions a day. Both Salesloft and Outreach have emerged as leaders in this space.
There are some important differences to consider. In the sections below, we’ll discuss feature differences, pros and cons, and user experience based on thousands of reviews.
Outreach
Outreach has a lot more features than Salesloft and therefore tends to be a better choice for teams that have the bandwidth and desire to build a more customized experience. In addition to the automated outreach cadence, it provides metrics on buyer sentiment and comes with a conference call bot named Kaia that will log onto Zoom calls to provide sales enablement support.
This reviewer and this one both mentioned that the Outreach software requires some training to use correctly. And this reviewer mentions the user interface is clunky and not always intuitive to navigate.
For the team that enjoys controlling every granular aspect of their prospecting process, Outreach is a good option to explore deeper.
Salesloft
Salesloft has fewer features than Outreach, but this helps make it easier to use.
Salesloft offers the same outreach cadence automation. It also provides support and metrics for Zoom calls, like transcript recording and AI analysis of each call. There is an offering for the remainder of the pipeline, but this is limited to dashboards that track progress and analytics based on this.
In a review by G2 tallied by thousands of user reviews and votes, Salesloft won head-to-head for ease of use, ease of setup, ease of admin, quality of support, product direction, and ease of doing business.
Despite the positive reviews, this reviewer mentions that the Salesloft dialer can have spotty performance. This reviewer mentions the occasional quirk or bug, but this isn’t enough to stop those reviewers from praising the product.
Where Salesloft and Outreach End: What to Do at or after Your First Call?
While Salesloft and Outreach are great at generating leads from automated cold outbound outreach, they both offer a limited solution in areas crucial to closing deals.
After you get a lead, there’s still a lot of steps for your reps to actually close the deal. They’ll need to provide a great product demo (likely over a video conference call). They need to follow up on these calls with any requested sales and marketing materials. And they need to establish a good rapport by personalizing their communication to each individual lead.
Bigtincan Engagement Hub is made specifically for this stage of the sales pipeline, ensuring these sales needs are supported, specifically:
Helping Reps Improve the Quality of Video Demos and Video Calls
Bigtincan Engagement Hub’s integrated video conferencing software can actually tell your sales rep if anyone on the call is losing focus — specifically clicking into other windows, web browsing, or checking email instead of paying attention.
This knowledge can prompt your sales rep to take the opportunity to ask a question to ensure the prospect is paying attention.
The Need to Get the Right Sales Docs to Prospects
Neither Salesloft nor Outreach offer a solution for how to organize, manage, and access sales documents. Anyone in sales knows a massive amount of reps’ time after the first call is spent just finding and sending the right documents to leads.
Not only can these documents be hard to find when they’re needed, but mismanaged sales documents can lead to miscommunication on features, pricing, and inconsistencies in branding and messaging. Bigtincan has been a leader in sales enablement software for years and has a robust solution for this.
Give Reps the Ability to Personalize Sales Material While Still Preserving Core Elements
Sales reps always want to personalize decks and other material to help them close each deal. But giving your sales team 100% editorial control of all sales documents can risk sending out an inconsistent message and branding — so marketing typically is resistant to customizing sales decks.
What normally happens is sales reps just make their own copies of decks and other material and personalize it themselves. The downside of this is that as an organization you lose control of the message as hundreds of reps could each be sending out hundreds of slightly different versions of your sales material.
Salesloft and Outreach lack any functionality to manage these documents in a way that maintains brand and messaging while allowing your sales reps to personalize pre-authorized segments of the design, Bigtincan does.
How Bigtincan Engagement Hub Supports Your Team in Turning Qualified Sales Leads into Buyers
Bigtincan Engagement Hub offers your sales team integrated video conferencing software that helps your sales reps keep leads engaged and thus close more deals, a search-based platform to surface sales content right when it’s needed, and a marketing and sales documentation system that allows administrators and document owners to limit which parts of a sales document can be edited by your sales reps.
Web Conferencing Software Provides Metrics and Sales Enablement in Real Time
Video conferencing is now critical for your sales team to provide product demos and interact with leads. Software like Zoom and Microsoft Teams can work, but they’re not designed specifically for sales calls. This means they miss out on some amazing opportunities to improve the sales experience.
Bigtincan’s conferencing software is made specifically for sales calls. By providing sales enablement features right in the call, we’re ensuring your reps have everything they need to provide the types of experience that turn leads into sales.
While Outreach and Salesloft both have a Zoom widget for conference calls, these are limited in functionality because they don’t control the source code. For instance, they can’t provide engagement metrics in the same way Bigtincan can.
Keeps Your Audience Engaged
For instance, the web conferencing software alerts your sales reps when a meeting participant loses focus and begins scrolling through their emails or another browser. This real-time insight allows your reps to pause and ask a question, bringing that distracted participant back into the conversation. This knowledge also helps your sales reps hone their presentation skills to maintain that engagement in the first place.
Provides Sales Documents Right Now to Cut Down On Follow Up Emails and Close Deals Faster
Another sales-centric SaaS feature is that your sales reps can search for sales documents in an inconspicuous off-screen window using Bigtincan’s powerful search feature.
As soon as a lead asks for more details, your rep can deliver that document right on the spot or screen share that file for immediate review. The reps’ time to find the document is massively reduced due to Bigtincan’s extremely powerful AI-driven search feature that customizes the search result to who the rep is, their group or department, and more so that the right documents are more likely to surface. This drastically reduces the need for your reps to follow up each call by emailing documents.
If your rep can’t answer key questions while they have them on a call because they’ll “have to get back to them with that document,” they very well may have just blown their one chance for a one-call sale — or any sale at all. Getting the information to your lead immediately is a sales acceleration feature that will shorten the time from contact to sale.
Maintains a Record of Your Call
Additionally, conversation audio, video, attendee contact information like phone numbers, and metrics are stored in that lead’s profile for future access, as well. This profile is where every call, shared piece of content, email outreach, conference call, and the corresponding insights from the entire sales cycle are visible in one place. All of this information can easily transfer into your CRM integration to common CRM platforms like Salesforce.
This saves your sales reps hours of scanning through old emails to get caught up on past interactions. Old recordings can be accessed for training purposes or as a reference. These customer relationship profiles provide metrics on things like how many follow up emails per lead, for example, helping sales managers hone in on areas for improvement and task management. Engagement outlook metrics provide insights that begin forecasting which leads are most likely to convert and which are at risk of going stale.
Powerful Document Management and Search So Sales Reps Can Get Leads the Right Files at the Right Time
If the conference call didn’t satisfy the lead’s needs, your rep is going to follow up by email or phone. They’re likely going to send over some product specs. Eventually they’ll send pricing details after some more back and forth.
The sales department likely has a shared repository for sales documents, but most cloud storage options require you to know the folder location and file name to find the right document. Beyond this basic support, your sales reps are generally on their own here.
They may have to search through old emails to find that one relevant document that came from a different department. And sales reps are going to move their go-to documents onto their laptops and phones for ease of access. It’s an understandable workflow, but it leaves your organization at risk of presenting information that’s out of date.
Integrate with Existing Cloud Repositories, Making Data Migration Easy
Let’s say your marketing team uses Dropbox. Your design team uses SharePoint. Bigtincan Engagement Hub syncs with these repositories using real-time API integrations, making the content available to your reps. And since the file lives in the marketing or design team’s repository, their file serves as the source of truth. Bigtincan can pull data from as many repositories as you need.
Having a single hub for all sales content makes it so much more efficient for your sales team to support their leads through the sales process. They’ll always know where to go for any information the lead wants. And thanks to Bigtincan’s advanced version control system, they are guaranteed to always have the latest version of sales and marketing content because they’ll receive notifications and version history. And as you’ll learn below, Bigtincan is designed to make finding these files easy.
Intelligent Search Makes Finding the Right Content Easy
When you consider the statistic we shared earlier that sales reps spend on average 440 hours per year searching for the right content, the benefit and value of making their search faster is obvious.
With Bigtincan’s intelligent search function, it’s easy to find the file you need — right when you need it. Instead of memorizing folder names and navigating from folder to folder to find a specific file, Bigtincan is search oriented, meaning your reps type in what they need and the search algorithm scans file names and the contents of each file in order to surface the right sales materials quickly.
For reps that have their favorite materials, they can have a personal folder within the repository to keep their favorite files grouped together. And when they save a file to their folder, it's a link to the original. So whoever owns the official version knows that if they make changes, they won’t have mismatched duplicates in the wild.
Administrators and any account manager can always easily control access and editing authority to any documents in the Bigtincan Engagement Hub repository.
Engagement Metrics Help Your Reps Anticipate the Needs of Each Lead
Your sales reps spend a lot of effort sending content over to their leads. Email tracking that reports how this content is accessed and who interacts with it will help your team know how to approach the lead moving into follow up conversations.
For example, if a lead immediately opens the pricing sheet, they are most likely a price sensitive buyer. So your sales rep, armed with this information ahead of time, knows to discuss pricing options the next time they meet.
This engagement data will increase efficiency elsewhere in your organization, too. If your marketing team has insight into which types of documents leads interact with the most, they can focus their efforts on producing only the materials that actually help your sales department close deals.
To learn more about Bigtincan Engagement Hub’s content repository visit the links below:
- The Best Sales Asset Management Software Helps You Find Assets Faster: An Overview of Bigtincan
- What Most Enterprise Content Management Strategies Are Missing (And How to Fix It)
Allows Sales Reps to Personalize Sales Materials without Risking the Brand Identity and Messaging
Sales reps love the ability to personalize sales decks in a way that makes their leads feel seen. Sometimes they might add their lead’s logo to a sales deck or add in some regional references. This is great, but there’s always risk if you give your sales team too much editorial control of the source files. They could change the brand messaging. They could add a photo of an obsolete model. They could even include outdated pricing or specification information which could result in legal complications.
With Bigtincan Engagement Hub, your marketing team can provide editorial control over certain sections of each document.
So let’s say your sales rep wants to add a lead’s logo to a sales deck. They open the sales deck and will see segments of the document where they’re allowed to edit. So these areas are where they would add in the logo. So they have the freedom they need without risking legal issues related to misrepresenting data.
When the sales deck is ready, your reps simply share a URL with the lead. This way of sharing information bypasses the data limitations inherent with sending emails and allows Bigtincan to track engagement metrics that help you personalize the sales experience to the needs of each lead.
See If Bigtincan Engagement Hub Can Help Your Sales Organization with a Demo
Want to learn more about Bigtincan and see if it’s the right fit for your organization? Request a demo today. We'll talk through your current prospecting needs, the Bigtincan product, and show you exactly how it can be custom-tailored for your organization.