Comparing Outreach, Salesloft and Salesforce High Velocity Sales
7 min
Sales Engagement Tools for B2B Sales Deep Dive
It’s no secret that a Sales Engagement Platform is a must in every modern Sales team’s tech stack.
Sales engagement software is critical to shortening sales cycles by integrating with the communication channels and tools sellers use most. With this, Sales leaders ensure tight management of sales messaging and automation of essential tasks, messages, and workflows.
A worthy Sales Engagement Platform allows businesses to unify their Sales and Marketing efforts to create personalized and automated sales journeys that include emails, calls, social posts, and meetings.
When Sales can standardize messaging throughout the entire sales experience, teams can optimize based on the effectiveness of specific messaging and tactics while also reducing administrative tasks for their sellers.
Where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce are the system of record for your business, Sales Engagement platforms are your System of Action. Integrating heavily into every channel of communication where you win and lose business is where Sales Engagement is at its best.
While two players have taken up their fair share of the market, Outreach and Salesloft, it’s usually an eyebrow-raiser to see Salesforce offer up a competing solution: High Velocity Sales. Their solution certainly raised mine.
So today we’ll have a look at my experience with the three different platforms, their features, and the key differences to consider when selecting the right platform for your teams.
In-depth Feature Comparison
| Outreach | Salesloft | High Velocity Sales | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto-Dialing |  |
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Requires telephony integration |
| Call Lists | |
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Requires telephony integration |
| Call Recording | |
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Requires telephony integration |
| Campaign Mgmt |  |
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| Dashboard | |
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| Data Management | |
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| Lead Capture | |
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| Lead Distribution | |
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| Perf Mgmt | |
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Outreach
I’ll admit I’m a fan.
I’ve paid on my own dime to attend their conventions in the past to learn more about how they use their own product internally and to mind-share with other businesses that use their platform and value a systematic approach to their messaging and sales processes.
With more than enough features to empower the largest Sales and Demand Gen teams, Outreach has been a stalwart in this market for businesses to consider.
What I’ve found most useful about their platform is their overall stability, reliable data integration with Salesforce, and the accompanying tools that are slickly folded into the UI/UX.
I used Outreach at the previous two organizations where I led revenue efforts and felt like it scaled with our fast-growing RevOps efforts without breaking a sweat. If you find yourself leading RevOps or Sales/Demand Gen efforts for a fast-growing company, Outreach is a “safe bet” that’ll have you sleeping well over your decision.
Would I recommend them for the earlier-staged startup that has a focus on capital efficiency and in search of flexible terms? Likely not.
However, one thing remains, Outreach is a juggernaut in the market for a reason and worthy of evaluation for businesses poised for growth or in search of a platform to assist in augmenting their pipeline generation.
Salesloft
Salesloft has been a product held near and dear since my very first encounter with their SDR team. First, my experience is that they’ll run as “textbook” an SDR prospecting play and Sales process as you’ll encounter in the SaaS world.
At my last org, I would’ve awarded them the business of salesmanship alone; however, as we all know, that isn’t enough anymore.
Three years ago, I gave the nod to Outreach on its breadth of features that seemed more battle-tested and stable; though I was so impressed with the speed of innovation Salesloft was showcasing at the time. My assessment was that it needed some time to solidify but would be a capable alternative to Outreach in no time.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m looking for the best-suited platform for our early-stage startup.
Goodness, if “feeling wanted” is a sentiment you need systematized and delivered consistently to your prospects, they nailed it.
This gave me a good indication of the amount of growth and its capabilities to enable that same sentiment in attracting prospects to our business.
When having a deeper dive into our trial account, I could tell quickly that any issues I might have had regarding stability and seamless integration of their innovative features were out the window; they’d checked a lot of boxes in a short amount of time since our previous conversation.
This time around, Salesloft offered me the peace of mind in knowing I was selecting a platform that could suit the needs of an early-stage startup and beyond. Saleloft has impressively engineered an innovative, formidable alternative for consideration.
High Velocity Sales
Just as Salesforce has done with many other accompanying technologies, they’ve released their own Sales Engagement Platform, High Velocity Sales (HVS).
The first thing you’ll notice out of the box is that they’ve taken a very unique approach to cadences by offering both linear and horizontal progressions allowing you to branch into different paths based on response and timing.
If you’re a Salesforce Admin, your mind is probably spinning from the seemingly endless number of options for automated workflows you can orchestrate in the platform with which you are most familiar.
Not to say triggers and workflow automation isn’t possible with Outreach or Salesloft; however, if you’ve spent a career automating processes in Salesforce, you’ll appreciate the native integration.
Salesforce has also taken a stance of allowing its users to leverage their preferred voice platform integrated with HVS. Because of their unique approach to task management, they’ve left a mechanism that creates swim lanes for Voice, Video, and SMS providers to fold their solution into its workflow.
From dialer solutions like Salesforce’s Lightning Dialer to full Contact Center solutions from Natterbox and PhoneIQ, you can select the platform that fits your workflow best or, in many cases, leave uninterrupted a solution that currently works well for your teams.
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Outside of a unique approach to cadences and task management, the perhaps single, clear advantage of HVS is in its data integrity. Managing data synchronization between platforms can be a nightmare when something breaks; I’ve had more than my fair share. Because the solution lives in Salesforce, they’ve taken the need for data synchronization out of the equation.
Having clean data moving between your Sales Engagement Platform and Salesforce is a critical component of business intelligence and to avoid ever having to deal with a synchronization issue ever again is a moment for pause and consideration alone. I’d shun no one making a selection based on this factor alone. If you know, you know.
HVS is missing some of the bells and whistles that Outreach and Salesloft have, and I’ll be following along closely to see if their speed to market is fast enough to shorten the gap in feature parity or if they’ll continue to approach the market with a more unique and defensibly differentiated feature set.
Conclusion
The ever-expanding marketplace of Sales Engagement has enabled businesses to even the playing field by optimizing their messaging, unifying their Sales and Marketing teams, and increasing the output of their reps by automating manual tasks as well as any operationally efficient revenue business. It is a must-have tool for every business’ sales stack.
I hope my “my neck on the line” experience in evaluating, selecting, implementing, and using Outreach, Salesloft, and HVS help you if you find yourself in a similar position.
In closing, my opinion is that the choice between the three comes down to which platform best suits the needs of your particular stage of business, how closely it aligns to and improves your team’s workflow, and the ability to scale at your pace.
More information about how our Salesforce Phone System works with HVS and a free trial of the solution can be found by visiting phoneiq.co/high-velocity-sales.
