Helping sales teams create and close more deals faster
Increase in team productivity
Lower operational costs
Focused on delivering value across the entire sales lifecycle, the Outreach Sales Execution Platform gives sales teams the ability to achieve their potential using data, analytics and AI to optimize sales cycles for conversion. With terabytes of data generated daily from customer behavior, sales activities and deal information stored in the CRM, the company’s previous ETL pipelines and cloud data warehouse needed improvements to handle the scale and velocity required to produce results in a timely, cost-effective manner. With Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Outreach has simplified its infrastructure into a single source of truth while simultaneously lowering operational costs. Now Outreach can easily analyze structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across the sales funnel, helping its customers improve seller productivity and providing sales managers with insights and intelligence reports to understand and identify opportunities to improve team performance, grow pipelines and reduce time to sale.
Rigid data warehouse and disjointed architecture leads to slower sales innovations
Many sales teams can draw a direct line between efficiency in their day-to-day operations and increased revenue. And since sales teams don’t want multiple tools to do their job, having a single platform for the entire sales lifecycle is the best way to achieve efficiency. Helping them work smarter with the support of data-driven insights and recommendations is at the core of Outreach’s mission. Its targeted sequences, deal insights, real-time conversation intelligence, and revenue forecasting and planning spell out creative solutions for improving all levels of the sales workflow.
A challenge Outreach faced was the bottleneck in reproducing data science results. Simply reproducing an experiment that someone already ran could take up to a week due to manual processes and the inability to track and monitor model versions and experiments. This slowed down the speed at which the data science team could release new innovations to its customers. There was a need to democratize data for all forms of analytics and machine learning, and Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and MLflow helped achieve that goal.
Using the lakehouse to power more actionable sales insights
One of the top goals Outreach set out to achieve with Databricks Data Intelligence Platform was developing a single source of truth for its data, which included customer behavior throughout the sales process and seller activity in everything from meeting schedules to capturing notes in their CRM. A team of close to 100 technical users is now using Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to manage a range of use cases across the business. Data engineers are able to easily build data pipelines to support both analysts and data scientists. They are also able to combine activity data with machine learning-generated inferences and deliver insights to sales leaders to better understand how their teams are performing and strategies to optimize sales efforts for conversion. For example, gaining visibility into the response sentiments of prospects throughout the sales process helps sellers understand which actions and messages may be performing better than others.
Automation is also an area where the data science team is making a huge impact by using Databicks. One of the most common issues sales teams face is out-of-office messages. This is a prospecting killer and can reduce the odds of scheduling a meeting by as much as 50%. By using ML, they can now automatically extract the return date from out-of-office email messages and automatically pause the sequence until that return date.
Another ML-based solution that has gained traction is the deal health score. Through the analysis of every single activity of a particular deal, and by comparing it to similar completed deals, an ML model is able to assign a health score and provide details on what is driving this score.
“Our use of Databricks has given us unprecedented visibility into factors that impact the health of a potential deal,” explained Pavel Dmitriev, VP of Data Science at Outreach. “With this score and underlying explanations, a seller will know where to shift their focus to win the deal.”
Databricks drives more closed deals for sales teams
With an acute focus on using data, analytics and AI to help sales teams do their jobs better, the Outreach team has seen excellent results with Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. From a cost management standpoint, they have been able to realize a 40% reduction in overall costs due to the platform’s ability to decouple compute resources from storage. At the same time, the team has seen a 20%-30% increase in data scientist productivity, helping to make onboarding of new data scientists easier, improve collaboration, and iterate on new data pipelines and ML models faster.
All of these internal benefits have positive outcomes for Outreach’s customers. The increased productivity has allowed its team to focus more on innovations that bring value to sales organizations, rather than wasting valuable time on infrastructure maintenance.
“Databricks provides elasticity of resources that have made our data scientists and engineers much more productive and flexible,” adds Dmitriev. “And now we can bring better sales solutions to our customers and help them accomplish much more.”
