Outreach and Snowflake have been customers of each other for a while. Now they are taking that relationship further by offering their customers the ability to share data from Outreach to Snowflake.
Why is that a big deal? Because there’s a lot of important sales information stored in Outreach and this new offer will enable companies to combine it with other data eliminating silos and giving them a complete picture of what’s happening in their sales organization.
Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach, told me that most of the questions sales have are causal. For example, what created a meeting or prevented one from happening? What engaged a persona or prevented them from engaging? These questions require companies to dig into activity and then correlate that activity with results. But that’s hard to do when dealing with data silos that aren’t talking to each other.
To help answer some of these questions and many more, this data needs to integrate with other data (like product usage or customer intelligence). Medina said that Outreach is the workflow of record for sales reps and managers. He said companies start using Outreach to create a “reliable programmatic approach” to sales. Then, they begin to see improvements in activities, conversions, and opportunity creation, and they start asking questions.
But those questions become too sophisticated at some point and require an analytics platform. Composite questions like “what deals retain better based on what sequences?” need more data than Outreach provides. By flowing Outreach data into Snowflake, companies can run these deeper analytics to get answers to their questions.
What’s good about this partnership is that it’s a free integration. Customers of both Snowflake and Outreach do not have to pay for API calls or data loads into Snowflake.
Visions of create-to-close
Outreach’s Sales Confidence Index Report for the Winter 2023 found that 82% of sales leaders expect to increase revenue in 2023. That’s a slight decrease from the Fall 2022 report but still very strong. But the job of a salesperson isn’t easy. A lot of effort goes into building a relationship that ends in a sale and requires a new approach to how salespeople work. Medina said that in the past, companies often segmented the jobs of the seller (e.g., closing inbound leads). The market has changed, though; reps need to get more efficient, and organizations need to think of sales reps as a unit of production.
If you think this way, the goal is to determine how much output you can get from this “unit of production” and how to maximize it. Medina described the sales rep’s role today as the “owner and CEO of their book of business (or territory or patch).” The rep owns their number, and they must make it produce: carry the pipeline, forecast their number, and hit it. To do that, he said they need a different construct or platform for the rep to live in.
Today, there are a number of sales technologies to support these efforts. Unfortunately, the result is a lot of silos, and some wrong assumptions, such as the number one reason deals are lost is due to price. Managers know that this isn’t true, Medina said. That something else happened in the deal cycle. However, deconstructing the deal after the fact is often impossible because of these silos. The answer is a platform that supports the salesperson from create-to-close:
Because in a single platform, now you can optimize your how much pipeline are you carrying. Are you carrying the pipeline efficiently? Are you converting it efficiently? Are you running the playbook? Is the playbook really helping you? In answering those questions and running the playbook, running the workflows in one platform, it really allows you to capture the most out of that rep and make that rep more efficient and make the manager more efficient by doing so.
This is Outreach’s ultimate goal, and the company continues to evolve its platform to both create and close pipeline at scale in a repeatable way.
My take
Salestech faces the same struggles as martech. Too many options are built into a stack that should connect nicely, but more often results in data silos. It’s why we are seeing the re-emergence of marketing platforms that do more than one thing.
But there is also the understanding that a single platform can’t be everything to everyone. That’s why Outreach is pushing data to Snowflake. The more data a company has, the more data clouds like Snowflake are needed to bring everything together to analyze.
