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Outreach is a sales engagement and intelligence platform that improves sales team performance via powerful, automated Sequences. With Outreach, sales teams can easily operationalize and scale playbooks across your entire team. But how do you decide which prospects should go into which sequence, and when?
Gone are the days of only account-based and time-based sequences
Traditionally, sales teams created sequences in Outreach based on three key type of data:
- Firmographic (i.e. company size, industry, location)
- Lead or contact (i.e. title, seniority)
- Lead source (i.e. ebook download, webinar attendance)
Example: sequences for a company with a free trial (without Correlated)
When a customer signs up for a free trial, add customers from large companies to a personalized sequence with a sales rep and send smaller companies to a standard time-based drip campaign. The problem with these sequences is that they are missing a really important input: product usage.
Product usage-based sequences result in 5x increase in response rates
Product usage is a key input into any sequence because it allows you to send the right users a relevant message at the exact time when it matters to them. Not only is this type of outreach more personalized, but it’s also more timely, both of which contribute to higher response rates and conversions.
For example, using the same company with a free trial:
Instead of just looking at company size, you can add a prospect to a sequence after they have invited 3 users. This allows you to then send them information about how to manage users, as well as explain when they’ll hit a user usage cap.
It’s easy to imagine how much more powerful and relevant Sequences can become when you combine product usage data with the firmographic data you are already using.
The two main use cases for using product usage insights to drive Sequences are (1) driving conversion and (2) identifying expansion opportunities.
Our customers have shown incredible increases in conversion rates when reaching out to trial customers and have seen upwards of 20x ROI by using Correlated to proactively identify new expansion opportunities. Here are some examples of the product usage insights that have worked the best for them.
Driving sales conversions with product data
Most B2B SaaS companies these days have some form of free trial or freemium version that they use to show users the value of the product before they commit to a paid version. This is a common “conversion” motion that can be improved significantly by combining product usage insights with tools like Outreach. The goal here is to use automation to identify which users would benefit from a sales-assisted motion, so that sales spends time on the right customers.
One of the most common mistakes SaaS companies make is sending users who aren’t ready to convert a bunch of automated emails. Rather than pushing every customer who signs up for your product into a sequence, you can time your sequences to kick off when the customer has done something that qualifies them for outreach. This is better for the users’ product adoption and to increase revenue. You can also send them information that is directly relevant to what they are doing in your product, so that not only are you reaching out at the right time, you are also reaching out with the right information.
Usage-based conversion playbook examples for Outreach sequences
Example #1
Signal: A user has signed up and used two key features in the last two weeks
Action: Automatically send them an email suggesting “office hours” to learn more about how to be successful with the product
Example #2
Signal: A user was active three days out of the last week but hasn’t used a key feature that is in the paid plan
Action: Automatically send the user an email pointing to documentation for the paid feature directly from the sales rep who will eventually convert them to paid
Example #3
Signal: User PQL went above a certain threshold
Action: Send these users “superuser” drip campaigns that help them become more successful users of the product
Example #4
Signal: No user activity and trial expired
Action: Automatically reach out to suggest an extension to their trial
Example #5
Signal: User from an account with more than five users looked at the pricing page
Action: Automatically reach out offering to schedule a call to share more details
The goal with all these Signals is to help customers be successful with your product, and ultimately to convert into paying users. That means that in certain cases, you might actually want a sales person to explicitly reach out and provide assistance rather than automating everything. Outreach makes it really easy to do this via manual and automated sequences.
Identifying expansion opportunities
Expansion is a crucial source of revenue for B2B SaaS companies, but most revenue leaders find it difficult to uncover and act on expansion opportunities. In recent years, the best SaaS companies with the highest revenue multiples have stellar net dollar retention, which is largely driven by expansion. By working with our customers, we’ve found there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of expansion that customers can farm as long as they put those insights and account lists into the hands of sales teams in a way that they can easily take action.
One of the most common examples is to reach out to customers who are about to reach their usage limit or seats limit which would put them onto a different plan or increase their spend. Companies today leverage BI tools like Looker or Mode or send spreadsheets around to sales reps to identify these customers. However, we all know that it’s a high bar to expect anyone to go through static lists and do anything meaningful. By combining usage with Outreach, you can automatically send emails or remind sales reps to reach out to accounts that are about to reach their usage limits so that sales reps can spend time talking to customers rather than digging through lists.
Usage-based expansion playbook examples for Outreach sequences
Example #1
Signal: Account is about to reach a usage limit
Action: Enter the Account into an Outreach Sequence so that the AE can look through this timely, relevant list and judge how to reach out
Example #2
Signal: User with an executive title signed up and used two key features in the last two weeks in an account that has more than 5 users
Action: Send a 1:1 email from your sales rep requesting time to discuss how to move their team onto a better business plan
Example #3
Signal: User from a paying account viewed documentation for a feature they don’t have access to
Action: Send a 1:1 email from your sales rep to the owner of the account to discuss upsell opportunities
You can use product usage signals to identify accounts in need of human intervention to drive more expansion or to reduce churn. While automation can help to streamline many activities, there are lots of cases where a sales assist helps to show customers how they can expand their usage of your product. With product usage signals, you can identify which accounts haven’t achieved expected milestones within the timeframe that you want them to, so that you can reach out and offer help to get them there.
Using Outreach and Correlated
Outreach and Correlated together is a very powerful combination that allows you to use product usage to reach out to the right customer at the right time with the right message. You can use what customers are doing in your product alongside who they are to figure out which customer to talk to and when. You can then use the information about what they are doing in your product to tailor your message to be jam-packed with relevant and helpful information. Finally, you can leverage Outreach’s features to ensure that you aren’t reaching out to the same person too often, and to bring in a human touch at the right time.
Getting started with Correlated
Correlated combines all of your data into a centralized place where you can build Signals and trigger Workflows. Sales and revenue leaders use Correlated to easily prioritize and filter through account, user, and usage insights all in one place, as well as define what needs to happen before a prospect is entered into an Outreach Sequence. Then, Correlated will automatically enter prospects into Outreach Sequences based on who they are, what company they’re from, and what they’ve done in your product. You can do all of this without writing a single line of code, and it’s incredibly easy to manage all of your Signals and Workflows in Correlated over time. Think of Correlated as your “intelligent control center” where you can send insights to all the downstream tools that you use to execute sales strategy (including Outreach).
If you’re interested in using product usage insights to improve your conversion and expansion rates, you can get started with Correlated for free here, or schedule a demo.
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