Outreach nabs $2.4M so sales people can get ‘super powers’

Outreach, a company that suggests it can give a sales person “super powers,” announced today a seed round of $2.4 million.

Those powers, CEO Manny Medina told me via email, allow the fortified sales person to “manage more prospects with less time.”

Communicating and following up, he pointed out, is the life of a salesperson. A never-ending process, it begs for automation but also needs the human touch. Outreach’s solution is to provide both.

Instead of a salesperson’s manually set reminders about when to follow up, the tool tracks which emails have been replied to and when phone calls have been made. It creates sequences that include the next most-appropriate step. Followups are crucial for getting a response from a prospect, but there’s such a thing as badgering someone. So, Outreach also knows when to cancel any pending, automated response.

Here’s how cofounder Andrew Kinzer describes Outreach’s cadences of emails and calls, called sequences.

Although the founders are all engineers, they said they’ve spent a lot of time talking to sales.

“Most people couldn’t stick to a process” of following up with contacts, Medina said, “because they have a thousand things flying at them that make them miss their tasks and drop the ball.”

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Founded last year in Seattle, Outreach says nearly 250 client companies are using its platform. It claims that predictive lead scoring firm Fliptop, for instance, had its sales activity double in the first few weeks of using the tool.

The new funding will be used to “continue to remove crud from a sales person’s workday, and give them back time to make more money,” Medina said.

More specifically, it will be used for product development, increasing staff, and growing the client base. Funders for this round are MHS Capital and Floodgate Capital.

Of course, crud-removal is a booming field. Medina points to competitors ToutApp as being “great for managing templates and [tracking] email opens,” and Salesloft for offering manual workflows.

By contrast, he said, Outreach is the choice for salespeople who want to scale up by employing automated processes with manual ones. He added that Outreach is the only such solution that can both retrieve and update Salesforce data.