Salesloft vs Outreach : Which one is the best sales engagement platform?

What is a sales engagement platform?

A Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) is a software solution designed to help your sales teams manage interactions with prospects and customers throughout the sales process. A sales engagement platform comes with many features that help salespersons be more efficient in their work and increase their performance.

Salesloft vs Outreach in a nutshell

If you’re here, I guess you’re looking for a sales engagement platform or searching for a way to improve your sales team’s performance (Hello Claap). In either case, considering Salesloft and Outreach is a wise move, as both platforms are very strong options. But which one is right for your business?

Before delving into detail, let’s have a look at a table comparing the main features of Salesloft and Outreach :

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With this table only, it’s hard to make a choice. Let’s explore each option more thoroughly to help you make your decision.

What is Salesloft?

Salesloft is a comprehensive sales engagement platform. I mean look at the table above. All the main features you might want to manage prospect/customer relationships are there :  email automation, engagement tracking, analytics, reporting, etc…

Additionally, Salesloft offers detailed visibility into every sales pipeline opportunity and each stage of the sales cycle, giving your team a very clear picture of the situation at any time. This means you can track and optimize your sales processes more effectively. Salesloft is also equipped with advanced post-sales data and can help customer success teams build stronger relationships, cover more accounts, and boost renewal rates. 

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Salesloft’s main advantages

I’ve already mention some of them, but let’s summarize Salesloft’s main advantages:

• Mastering the tool is easy : Salesloft is very easy to use. The UX is very fluid, and the tool manages to display every useful information on a general dashboard. Onboarding and training events are also very useful to learn to use the tool in no time.

• Post-sales data : I already mentioned this one but I think it’s worth mentioning again: Salesloft comes with post-sales data so it can be used by customer success teams as well.

• Multi-step sales cadence: Multi-step sales cadence is a great way to improve your conversion rate. Well, Salesloft assists you with it: You can create detailed multi-step sales cadences, define each step (email, phone call, LinkedIn message…) and schedule them in advance.

• Collaboration: Salesloft facilitates collaboration on campaigns. Different people can virtually onboard a campaign on the platform to work together and obtain better results.

• iOS mobile app: One of the main advantages of Salesloft compared to Outreach is that it is accessible via mobile app, allowing your sales team to manage their tasks, track engagement, and access crucial data on the go.

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Salesloft’s limitations

• Lack of features compared to Outreach: Salesloft is a comprehensive tool, but can still be considered as limited compared to Outreach. But I’ll explain that later

• Issues with specific functions: Some users have reported having bugs when using some functions, especially the Gmail extension and the Dialer.

• Spam calls: Salesloft doesn’t help with spam calls as it’s unable to block or silence them.

Salesloft’s price

Salesloft doesn’t give pricing information.

You can expect to pay between $125 to $165 per user per month to use Salesloft. You’ll also certainly have to pay an onboarding fee between $500 and $1000. There is no minimum seat requirement which makes it adapted to any business size. 

What is Outreach?

Outreach is another sales engagement platform, or rather a “sales execution platform” as it defines itself. Just like Salesloft, it comes with many useful features to help salespeople improve lead generation, deal management, and predictive analytics processes.

Outreach has many advantages worth mentioning. Let’s see them together.

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Outreach’s main advantages

• Adapted to many use cases: I told you Outreach was a comprehensive tool. And I meant it. Outreach comes with sales engagement features, but also revenue intelligence and revenue operations features, which is very uncommon for such a tool.

• Linkedin integration: Salesloft also has a Linkedin integration but I think what offers Outreach is more interesting. For instance, Outreach can automatically extract prospect data from Linkedin and use the data to send personalized cold outreach emails.

• Advanced reporting capabilities : Another thing Outreach does well: reporting. Using Outreach, you can get a detailed analysis of email performance, including open rates, click-through rates, and reply rates. This allows you to test and refine outreach strategies for campaigns.

• Outreach cadence pause feature: Outreach offers the possibility to pause outreach cadences which might be very useful. Imagine you are out of office and want to pause your automated emails… It looks basic but Salesloft doesn’t have this kind of feature.

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Outreach’s limitations

• Not very intuitive UI: Some users mentioned issues about Outreach interface, mainly due to the tool having so many capabilities that it's easy to be overwhelmed.

• Limited support : Customer service for small and medium businesses is reportedly lacking, with many users experiencing minimal assistance and long response times

• Limited CRM integration : Outreach only integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce CRM. If your sales team uses any other CRM, Outreach might not be the right solution…

Outreach’s price

Just like Salesloft, Outreach doesn’t give any pricing  information. But you can expect to pay around $130 per user per month. In addition to that, you’ll also certainly have to pay an onboarding fee between $500 and $1000 and an implementation fee ranging between $1000 to $8000. There is also a minimum number of seats required (20).

All these conditions make Outreach more suited for large companies, while we’ve seen Salesloft is more adapted to SMEs. But you should really make your choice looking at the pros and cons of both tools compared to your needs. And before concluding on which tool is the best, there is another tool I want to talk about : Claap.

Claap is the best tool to improve your sales team’s efficiency

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What is Claap?

Claap is not a sales engagement platform. But it’s certainly as valuable when it comes to improving the efficiency of your sales team. Let me show why.

Claap is an audio and video transcription tool. Instead of taking notes during calls with prospects/clients, you can listen and focus on your interaction. Claap even summarizes your notes . And if it’s not enough, it also has a recording feature. But this is not even the best part. Actually Salesloft and Outreach also offer this kind of feature (even though they are strongly sales focused). Let’s see the HUGE difference of Claap.

Claap increases your conversion rate

Claap is an asynchronous meeting tool. It introduces a new way of communicating. Using its interface, you can record your screen while having your camera on. This is what we call a claap : a 2 to 5-minute video in which you present your findings/remarks efficiently. Our clients send claaps to their prospects, and it works very well. Look at these testimonial from Guillaume De Nacquard (Surfe)

“Every time I was doing that I had like 40% conversion rates compared to like 3, 4, or 5% with normal approaches.”  

Keep in mind that your prospects, like most people, are more likely to open a video than a plain text email. And this automatically increases your conversion rate.

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Claap reduces the length of your sales cycle 

With asynchronous communication, you avoid many issues associated with synchronous communication. No need to coordinate schedules or spend 30 minutes in a meeting, you can just record your claap and send it to your prospect. Or even easier, your interlocutors can directly go to your Claap workspaces and watch your claaps. Then, they can react to them, ask questions, and even do it in a video.

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And if you think it’s too good to be true, look at this testimonial

"I've managed to shorten my sales cycle because I replace 30-minute meetings with prospects with three five-minute videos. I've literally seen ten days just fall off of that process and allow me to go quicker. " (Alejandro Salinas, from Surfe)

The final verdict

Salesloft and Outreach are 2 strong options if you’re looking to improve your sales team’s efficiency. I would say that if you’re a large company and use Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365, Outreach might be the ideal option. Otherwise, Salesloft might be more adapted to your situation. But you should also consider Claap. You’ve seen how it can be beneficial for your company. And while Salesloft and Outreach don’t offer free trials, Claap do. So start now, and see the difference. (Free plan with no credit card required)