Best Practices for Outreach Triggers

Overview

This is a comprehensive guide and instructions for recommended trigger automation based on Outreach best practices.

Table Of Contents

Auto Sequence an Inbound Lead

Closed Lost Opp Follow Up

Meeting No Show Follow Up

Upcoming Renewal Notification

Assign a Persona

Change a Prospect Stage based on a Call Disposition

Disqualified or Nurture Reasons

Auto Sequence an Inbound Lead

Arguably the most impactful trigger that a customer can build, having Outreach automatically drop an inbound lead into sequence can reduce time-to-first touch down to as little as 5 minutes, increase the number of over-all touches, and generally increase conversion rates for a team’s most high-priority prospects.

Problem

Without Outreach, reps often have to monitor a queue in Salesforce that is filtered for any leads that fall into the category of “inbound.” They must refresh it consistently to see when www.outreach.io new leads come inbound, they typically have to “accept” them, and then they have to manually reach out to  schedule time and log that activity back to SFDC. The process is incredibly inefficient, with a lot of manual work for the reps, and there is no guaranteed consistency. What happens if the rep goes to the  bathroom? Takes a lunch break? What about after-hours inquiries? These all will end up with much slower SLAs, therefore drastically reducing the likelihood of converting this lead. On top of this, the typical rep only reaches out a handful of times before giving up on a lead; if there are any leads that are important to have consistent follow up with, it is the hand raisers.

Solution

With Outreach, we can eliminate the inefficiencies in the inbound process, which leads to quicker SLAs, more consistent follow up, increased capacity for reps to handle more inquiries, and therefore more  closed-won inbound revenue. We do this through the use of Inbound Triggers, which can look at the specific criteria on a lead record that designates it as “inbound”, and then automatically dropping it into a sequence on behalf of the rep.

Setup

First, you need to determine which leads should be automatically sequenced, by
considering the following:

• What criteria in SFDC designates a lead as “inbound?”
  • Typically, we see “source” or “last interesting moment” being utilized. In our example, we will use “Source = Demo Request.”
  • Keep in mind that you can create multiple inbound triggers for the various inbound sources that  our team has (e.g., chat, white paper download, webinar, form fills, events, etc.).
• What designates a lead as a “new” inbound inquiry?
  
  • Typically, the “lead source” field is not cleared out after the lead has been contacted and/or qualified -- this means you could have a lead in SFDC that came in 6 months ago but still has the lead source of “demo request”. With an inbound trigger, you only want to target net new inbound inquiries, as these are the ones you want reps to start contacting.
  • Often times, we will see the “Stage/Status” of the lead get set to “open” or “new” when they come inbound. This is the example we will use below.

Now that we have considered what fields in SFDC are used to determine that the lead is a new inbound inquiry, we need to make sure that these fields are mapped in our SFDC plugin for Leads and/or Contacts.

Next, you want to create the sequence that the prospect should drop into. Depending on the source, you will have different strategies within the sequence (such as what content to send, how frequently you want to reach out, how manual the sequence is, etc.). For our example of a “demo request” sequence, the best practices would be:

• Have the first step be an automatic email with a step-specific schedule that allows it to be sent 24 hours a day. This will ensure that the time-to-first-touch is only a handful of minutes, whether they submit their inquiry at 11am or 11pm. This can be a generic email, thanking them for their interest, giving them an idea of what questions they will be asked, and letting them know that the rep will be reaching out via phone as soon as possible.
• The next step should be an Urgent phone call step -- as this is an “interrupting task” and will notify the rep when it becomes due. This means that if the rep is in the middle of task flow when the lead comes inbound, they will get a pop-up letting them know that an urgent phone call task just became due. Alternatively, if the request comes in after business hours, then this urgent phone call task will be the first task at the top of the rep’s queue when they come into work the next morning.
• From there, we would suggest having at least 12 touchpoints and having a frequency of at least one touch per day.
• Utilize the Sequence Blueprint and customize it with your own messaging.

Build the trigger

• The name should let you know what the source is and what the action is, such as “Inbound Demo  Request, automatically sequence.”
• The event should be “prospect created or updated” (since you will have net new leads as well as  current leads who will come inbound).
• The prospect conditions should be the values you found in step 1 → in our example, we will set these to “Source is Demo Request” and “Stage is New,” with the “all” option selected on the left  and side (since we want both conditions to be met).
• The action would be to “Add to Sequence,” then select the sequence created in Step 3, then from the mailbox of “Prospect owner’s default mailbox.”

Testing the trigger

Last, create a lead in SFDC that matches the criteria in the “conditions” section, and ensure that they drop into the sequence.

Contingencies/Considerations

What other Outreach system updates do I need to implement to ensure this trigger is working properly?

You would need to have inbound create, inbound update, and polling ON for Leads & Contacts in the SFDC plugin. If inbound create is currently off, then you would want to consider turning it on with the  conditions that match the trigger condition (therefore, only net new leads that are inbound requests will flow into Outreach automatically).

The Polling Frequency is set to 10 minutes out-of-the-box, which means Outreach will bring in updates  from SFDC every 10 minutes. If you have SLAs that require a faster response time, then we would suggest lowering this, with the lowest recommended setting being 2 minutes.

Please keep in mind that you could see an increase in overall API calls used, so please monitor
this for a few weeks.

What if my reps don’t “own” the leads they are working?

In order to implement this solution, you must have a process in SFDC to automatically assign an inbound lead to an “owner”. The trigger in Outreach will sequence the prospect on behalf of the rep that “owns” the prospect; therefore, you need to ensure that the rep that should be reaching out to follow up on the inbound inquiry is also the “owner” of the record. If you do not yet have this process, Outreach does have some great partners -- like LeanData -- that can assist with auto-routing leads. Alternatively, if there is one rep that follows up on all inbound inquiries, then you can sequence on behalf of that one user, regardless of the prospect’s owner.

What if we designate “new” inbound leads in a different way (i.e. we do not use status/stage)?

If you use an MQL date or other date field in order to signify that an Inbound Lead is a new inquiry, please keep in mind that triggers do not have the functionality to fire on a condition like “MQL date is today”. You would likely need to build a checkmark box on the lead/contact record in SFDC that looks to the MQL Date field and checks true/false based on whether or not the date is “today”. Then, the trigger condition can look to that field being “true” in order to automatically put the lead/contact into a sequence.

If there is no field on the Lead/Contact record in SFDC that implies that the record is a “new” Inbound Inquiry, then you may want to check the “fire only once per prospect” option in the trigger. This will keep the trigger from “looping” (i.e. firing multiple times on the same prospect). This will also, however, keep a prospect that “re-inbounded” from being automatically put into a sequence.

What if our Salesforce system is not super clean?

Outreach de-duplicates based on email address → if you have a SFDC instance that will create a duplicate lead record when a lead/contact comes inbound, then there will likely already be a prospect record in Outreach that has the same email address. In this scenario, the new lead record will not come into Outreach. We would suggest having these records merged in SFDC, as a best practice.

Closed Lost Opp Follow Up

At Outreach, most of our customers think about how they can utilize sequences and automation to increase initial prospecting, but many miss out on a large opportunity to increase the efficiency and consistency in other workflows that can produce high returns. One example is following up with contacts from a Closed Lost Opportunity.

Problem

For many customers, the follow up process on past opportunities is a black box -- they are unsure how (or if) reps are following up with their champions, they aren’t sure if a nurture-focused or aggressive approach is better, and they don’t know how likely they are to convert a previously closed lost opp to closed won at a later date. In the end, there is a lot of room for improvement to ensure that absolutely no money is left on the table, and that we are chasing down every possible revenue stream (but efficiently!).

Solution

With Outreach Triggers, we can enable automation that helps reps remember to follow up
with past Closed Lost opportunities, that suggests messaging to them, and that can even
automatically follow up on their behalf, if desired.

Setup

Determine which opportunities you would like this trigger to impact as these will be
your trigger conditions:

• Do you want this to be only new revenue opportunities? Or also expansion or renewal opportunities? You could also choose to have different triggers and sequences for different types of opportunities.
• Do you want to distinguish by Closed Lost Reason?
  • If so, you can have specific and automated messaging within the sequence that alludes to the reason for why the deal was lost. With this, you would need as many triggers and sequences as Closed Lost Reasons.
  • Otherwise, you may want the sequence to start with a manual email for the rep to research and personalize the template with details from the previous opportunity. This would only require one trigger and sequence.
• Are there any opportunities that should be excluded? Perhaps in situations where there is already another open opportunity for the account? Determine what opportunities you do not want this trigger to fire for.

Build the sequence(s)

The trigger will add the prospect to the sequence __ days/weeks/months after the close date, so your first step should be set to happen on Day 1. We would suggest the first step be an email step:

• • If you are building granular triggers for the granular Closed Lost Reasons or Opportunity Types, then you should create multiple sequences where the first step is specific to that reason/type. The first step, in this scenario, could be automated.
  • If your team works a very high volume of opportunities and needs to build an efficient process, then you would likely want to start with an automated email that is generic.
  • If you want the rep to research and personalize the messaging before sending the email, then this should be a Manual Email step.

Next, determine follow up strategy:

• In some scenarios, you may want the follow up to be a bit “softer” where the rep sends an email with resources or touching base 1 time per month. In this scenario, you would want to create one manual email step with the interval of 1 month between steps.
• In other scenarios, you may want a more aggressive approach. We often see this with the Closed Lost Reason of "selected a competitor," since a rep knows that they may be open to re-evaluating once their contract hits the mid-term mark. For this sequence, you may want the touch points to be more closely clustered, and you would want to have a more multi-channel approach (calls, direct marketing, LinkedIn, etc.)

Build the trigger

1. The name should detail out what type of Closed Lost opportunities this is impacting and what the action is. Examples:
   • “Closed Lost - Bad Timing - Auto Sequence after 120 Days”
   • “Closed Lost - Renewal - Create Task after 3 months”
2. Choose the event of “opportunity close date.”
3. You will see “Trigger Date Offset” appear → this is where you will fill in how long after the opportunity is marked as closed lost you would like the trigger to fire.
4. Next, you will have the option of which “target” you would like this trigger to fire for. If you are auto-sequencing, we would suggest using the “primary prospect” which is based on the primary contact role on the opportunity.
   • Another option would be to target a specific Opportunity Contact Role by selecting “prospect roles” and then finding the role in the “prospects with role” dropdown. This may be good if your champion for the opportunity is not always the primary role on the opportunity.
5. Now you need to add the conditions that you outlined in step 1 under the “opportunity
   conditions” section of the trigger.
   • You can also add account level conditions, if there are certain accounts that you do or do not want to target (for example, we typically see regions outlined here if you want different processes for different regional teams).
6. Lastly, select the trigger action of “add prospect to sequence.”
   • Find the correct sequence that matches the trigger conditions and select the mailbox option “prospect owner’s default mailbox” which will sequence on behalf of whichever user owns that prospect record in Outreach.

Contingencies/Considerations

Have you synced Opportunities into Outreach?

This is a required step. Learn how here.

How are you associating Contacts to Opportunities in SFDC?

Outreach requires that you use Contact Roles in order to associate a contact to the opportunity, so this is the only setup that will allow Outreach to auto-sequence. If you do not use contact roles, you could instead have the trigger add an opportunity or account-level task as a reminder for the rep to manually sequence or follow up with the correct contact.

The “close date” trigger event will fire at Midnight UTC, so you should ensure the sequence schedule has the correct windows for when you would want the first email to go out.

Who owns the contacts that are associated with the Opportunities in SFDC/Outreach?

In order to automatically drop the prospect into sequence for reps, your reps would need to own the prospects associated with the opportunities.

If they do not own those prospects, you could instead have the trigger add an opportunity or account-level task as a reminder for the rep to manually sequence or follow up.

Please keep in mind that these tasks will also be assigned to the owner of the account or owner of the opportunity, so the rep you want following up on the Closed Lost opportunity would need to own whichever record type you choose to create the task on.

Meeting No Show Follow Up

Sales Development Reps work very hard to get an initial meeting set, but what happens when that meeting no shows? Is it all that hard work for nothing? With Meeting No Show Follow Up triggers, prospects who missed a meeting can be automatically added into a re-booking sequence to ensure the meeting gets rescheduled and the SDR still receives credit.

Problem

Often times customers have no insight into meeting no show rates, and also have no process built around rebooking these meetings. Without a defined process, managers are often trusting reps to follow up with the prospect to get the meeting back on the books -- however, how many times is that rep reaching out? How are they ensuring that those rebookings do not fall through the cracks?

Solution

With Outreach, reps can mark a meeting as “no show” which can kick off an automated process through  triggers to automatically sequence the prospect on that meeting. This ensures that there is multiple follow up attempts and that these warm leads are not forgotten.

Setup

Determine which meetings you would like this trigger to impact as these will be your trigger conditions:

• Are there specific “meeting types” that would have different rebooking processes? For example, a missed demo call may have different messaging than a missed renewal call.
• Will you need different follow up strategies per product/industry/persona? If you want to remind the customer of your value prop as to why they should rebook the meeting, then you would want to think through how to segment out these groups into separate triggers/sequences.
• Are there any meeting that should be excluded? For example, if the meeting
  type is a “support call.”
• Are there accounts that should be excluded? For example, if they are customer
  accounts or partner accounts.

Build the “No Show Follow Up” sequence(s)

• Consider how many sequences you will need → you will need to create a sequence per situation you outlined above.
• The trigger will add the prospect to the sequence once the meeting is marked as no show, so your first step should be set to happen on Day 1 with a short interval (for example, 5 minutes).
  • We would suggest the first step be an email step alluding to the missed
    meeting.
    • This should be an automated email if it can be generic, as this reduced work for the rep and ensure the email is sent promptly after the meeting is missed.
    • If there are specific details about the meeting, then consider making the email an urgent manual email so that reps are alerted to personalize and send the email.
  • We would suggest adding the sender calendar URL into the email template, so that it is easy for the prospect to rebook the meeting.
  • We would recommend a multi-channel approach for 8 steps in order to ensure the meeting gets rebooked. The steps can be in quick succession, since the prospect already showed interest in a meeting.
  • If you would like an example sequence, go to our Sequence Blueprints and
    search for “Meeting No Show.”

Build the trigger

1. Create a name that details what the trigger is meant to do. For example: “Demo Call No Show - Auto Sequence to Rebook”
2. Select the event of “Meeting No Show” and the target of “Prospect”
3. Create the Meeting, Prospect and Account Conditions around what you outlined in Step 1.
4. Lastly, select the trigger action of “add prospect to sequence.”
   
   • Find the correct sequence that matches the trigger conditions and select the mailbox option “prospect owner’s default mailbox” which will sequence on behalf of whichever user owns that prospect record in Outreach.

Contingencies/Considerations

Do your reps know how to indicate a no show?

In order for the trigger to fire, Reps need to go into Outreach to mark a meeting as “no show” when a prospect does not attend. Reps will likely need to be trained on this click path -- learn more here.

This has the added benefit of allowing you to push no show data into CRM to get insight into
meeting no show rates.

If you are creating triggers to drop prospects into an automated meeting rebooking sequence, then train reps to not do their own follow up, otherwise the prospect may get multiple streams of communication.

Who owns the prospects that are on the meeting invite?

The Outreach Trigger will sequence on behalf of the prospect “owner”, and therefore the person rebooking the meeting also needs to own the prospect.

If they do not own those prospects, you could instead have the trigger add an account-level task as a reminder for the rep to manually drop the associated prospect into sequence.

Please keep in mind that these tasks will also be assigned to the owner of the account, so the rep you want reaching out about rebooking the meeting would need to own the associated Account record.

Upcoming Renewal Notification

Outreach’s most sophisticated customers use sequences across their entire funnel, which includes using renewal sequences that help follow up and schedule EBR and renewal conversations. This ensures no customers fall through the cracks, and also allows reps to have enough time to save risky deals or plan for renewal expansion opportunities.

Problem

Post sales teams often have a lot on their plates, since they are in charge of maintaining positive customer relationships while also focusing on driving expansion and renewal dollars. Regardless of book of business size, it is often hard for these teams to stay on top of every single customer or point of contact, especially with upcoming renewals.

Solution

Outreach can be used to automatically drop prospects into sequence or create one-off tasks for accounts when they are coming up for renewal, so post-sales teams can easily stay on top of those important discussions.

Setup

Determine which opportunities you would like this trigger to impact as these will be
your trigger conditions:

• Do your renewal opportunities have a specific “opportunity type”?
• Are therr segments of renewals you would like to handle differently?
  • For example, SMB renewal sequences may be more automated while Enterprise renewal sequences may be manual reminders to the rep
• Are there different product lines that would have different messaging or renewal
  processes?
• Are there any opportunities that should be excluded? Perhaps in situations where there is already another open opportunity for the account? Determine what opportunities you do not want this trigger to fire for.

Build the sequence(s)

The trigger will add the prospect to the sequence __ days/weeks/months before the close date, so your first sequence step should be set to happen on Day 1. We would suggest the first step be an email step:

• If your team works a very high volume of opportunities and needs to build an efficient process, then you would likely want to start with an automated email that is generic.
• If you want the rep to personalize the messaging before sending the email, then
  this should be a Manual Email step.
• If different segments use different approaches, then you may want to have
  multiple sequences and triggers.
• If you sell multiple product lines, you may want to have product-line specific messaging and therefore would want different sequences per line.

Determine follow up strategy:

• What is the intent of the sequence? Are you simply informing the prospect of an upcoming renewal? Or do you need to schedule a call to discuss? This will change the number of steps in the sequence as well as the frequency of touch points.
• Even with a first manual email, typically automated “bump” emails are a best practice to remain efficient and ensure the rep is getting a response.
• After 1-2 bumps, it is best practice to try to use another channel, such as a phone call or a LinkedIn task.
• The last step in the sequence should be a generic task informing the rep that the prospect never replied to the renewal notice, and that they should take the next step in either closing the renewal or escalating the account.

Build the trigger

1. The name should detail out what type of Renewal opportunities this is impacting and what the action is -- For example: “Renewal - SMB - Auto Sequence 90 Days Prior”
2. Choose the event of “opportunity close date”
3. You will see “Trigger Date Offset” appear → this is where you will fill in how long before the opportunity close date you would like the trigger to fire.
4. Next, you will have the option of which “target” you would like this trigger to fire for. If you are auto-sequencing, we would suggest using the “primary prospect” which is based on the primary contact role on the opportunity.
   • Another option would be to target a specific Opportunity Contact Role by selecting “prospect roles” and then finding the role in the “prospects with role” dropdown. This may be good if your champion for the opportunity is not always the primary role on the opportunity.
5. Now you need to add the conditions that you outlined in step 1 under the “opportunity conditions” section of the trigger.
   • You can also add account level conditions, if there are certain accounts that you do or do not want to target (for example, we typically see regions outlined here if you want different processes for different regional teams).
6. Lastly, select the trigger action of “add prospect to sequence”
   • Find the correct sequence that matches the trigger conditions and select the mailbox option “prospect owner’s default mailbox” which will sequence on behalf of whichever user owns that prospect record in Outreach.

Contingencies/Considerations

Have you synced Opportunities into Outreach?

This is a required step. Learn how here.

How are you associating Contacts to Opportunities in SFDC?

Outreach requires that you use Contact Roles in order to associate a contact to the opportunity, so this is the only setup that will allow Outreach to auto-sequence. If you do not use contact roles, you could instead have the trigger add an opportunity or account-level task as a reminder for the rep to manually reach out to the relevant contact about the renewal.

The “close date” trigger event will fire at Midnight UTC, so you should ensure the sequence schedule has the correct windows for when you would want the first email to go out or when you want the task to be created.

Who owns the contacts that are associated with the Opportunities in SFDC/Outreach?

In order to automatically drop the prospect into sequence for reps, your reps would need to own the prospects associated with the opportunities.

If they do not own those prospects, you could instead have the trigger add an opportunity or account-level task as a reminder for the rep to manually reach out. Please keep in mind that these tasks will also be assigned to the owner of the account or owner of the opportunity, so the rep you want reaching out about the renewal would need to own whichever record type you choose to create the task on.

Assign a Persona

Persona triggers are a true “quick win” -- they are one of the simplest triggers to set up, yet they can have a huge impact on rep workflow. They enable reps to easily segment out their prospect lists, and they make it simple for reps to know which sequences are appropriate for each prospect they are contacting.

Problem

Working from a CRM, Reps can easily get overwhelmed with information & data, and may have a difficult time finding the records they are looking for. On top of this, it is often hard for them to prioritize prospects and determine what content will be the most relevant.

Solution

In Outreach, Personas can be automatically assigned to prospects based on their title. This allows reps to easily filter their prospect lists by persona so that they can prioritize Decision Makers and ensure they are always sending the most relevant content.

Setup

Determine who your buyer personas are:

• Who is typically buying your solution? Who is helping in the decision? Who gets looped
  into the final stages of a deal?
• Does your product help multiple departments in a business? (i.e. Marketing, IT, Sales,
  Engineering, Product, etc.),
• Are their levels within your personas (e.g., C-Level, Director, Management, etc.)?
• As you are segmenting, ask yourself if each of these groups has a different pain point that your solution can solve. If they do, then they should be their own persona (even if they are in the same general department or job function).
  • For example, a solution that sells only into Marketing departments may have a different value proposition for Demand Generation versus Product Marketing.
• Determine which titles fit into each persona group, as this will be your trigger’s conditions.
  • Triggers allow for “any” and “all” logic as well as for “contains” filtering, this means you can be very specific about which titles fall into each persona.
  • Comb through a list of prospects currently in sequence, and think about each title and where it would fit into your persona matrix. Start collecting titles per persona, and determining the logic that would put a prospect into the correct persona.

Next, create the personas in Outreach.

Build the trigger

1. The name should detail out what Persona this is impacting and what the action is. For example: “Assign Persona - Marketing - VP/Director Level”
2. Select the Event of “Prospect Created of Update” and the target of “Prospect.”
3. Under the “prospect conditions”, build out the logic for which titles should be included in this persona assignment. You will want at least two groupings of conditions:
   • First for the title level (such as Director, VP, Vice President, etc.)
   • Second for the department or function (such as Marketing, Demand Generation, Growth, etc.)
4. These should have ANY logic between them (i.e. VP OR Vice President OR Director), but ALL logic overarching (must meet level AND job function).
5. Also consider what you do not want to fall into this persona. For example, if customer marketing was its own persona, we would want to have a condition for “title does not contain customer.” These do not need to be grouped (but can be), and should have ALL logic, since they are negations.
6. Lastly, in order to keep the trigger from “looping”, we want a condition for “persona is empty” or “persona is not (the persona we are assigning in this trigger).”
7. Set the Trigger Action to “Set Field” of “Persona” to the corresponding Persona.
8. Create one trigger per persona by cloning the first trigger and updating the conditions with the new title options.

Contingencies/Considerations

Triggers fire at random, so ensure that there is no overlap in logic where a prospect could meet multiple persona trigger conditions.

When adding the condition to keep the triggers from “looping” -- e.g., “Persona is not empty” OR “Persona is not (the persona we are assigning in this trigger)” -- consider which condition makes sense for your business.

• “Persona is not empty” means that the prospect will only go through one persona trigger ever.
  If they change titles or job functions, their persona will not update because they will already
  have a persona and therefore will not meet the condition of “persona is empty.”
• “Persona is not (the persona we are assigning in this trigger)” means that when a prospect gets a new title, they can change personas. However, this also means that you need really tight trigger conditions logic so that no prospect meets the conditions of multiple persona triggers, otherwise the prospect will “loop” between multiple triggers.

Change a Prospect Stage based on a Call Disposition

Problem

Reps have enough on their plates when it comes to generating new pipeline, and the last thing they need added is data management in the CRM. When reps are in the flow of making dials within Outreach, it breaks their concentration when they need to manually update stages in order for that information to appropriately update the CRM status.

Solution

Admins can set up call disposition triggers in Outreach, so that when a rep completes and dispositions a dial within task flow, the prospect’s stage and CRM status also get automatically updated to match.

Setup

• Consider how you want dispositions to map to Stages/Statuses.
• Consider whether your dispositions match your stages/statuses fairly one-to-one, or if your stages/statuses more pipeline focused? I.e. Meeting booked disposition and “Meeting Booked” stage/status versus having “qualified” or “SQL” as the Stage/Status.
• Write out which disposition would match with which stage/status.
  • It is okay if some dispositions do not map to any stage/status update. For example, a call dispositioned as “left voicemail” likely does not need to update the prospect’s stage, as they are still moving through the sequence waiting for a response.
  • It is okay for more than one disposition to map to the same stage update. For example, many objection dispositions may map to “nurture” or “disqualified.” In this scenario, the trigger’s call conditions will be set to ANY for the call dispositions that map to the same stage/status.
• If one disposition could map to more than one stage/status, then think through if there are additional conditions that could be put in place to correctly update the stage/status.
• If this is not possible, then some updates may still need to be manual for the rep, and you would want to document which updates these are in order to train the reps.

Create the triggers (1 per stage update)

1. Name each trigger to detail out what the specific call disposition and stage update are. For example: “Call Disposition = Not Interested, update stage to Nurture”
2. Select the event of Call Logged and the target of prospect.
3. Set the Call Conditions to be “Call Disposition Name is (insert value).”
   • If there are more than one disposition that maps to the same stage update, then click “add” and create the same condition for the other Call Disposition values.
   • Ensure the logic for this is “ANY” so that a call logged with any of those dispositions will cause the trigger to fire.
4. Consider which prospect and account conditions you may also need to add. Should these updates only happen for prospects in sequence? Should they happen for customer prospects? Should they  happen in the same way for inbound versus outbound prospects (or other workflows)?
   • For example, if these automatic stage updates should only happen when prospects are in sequence, then add “actively being sequenced is true” to the prospect conditions.
5. Set the trigger action to “Set field” of “Stage” to “(cooresponding stage value).”

Contingencies/Considerations

Ensure your Call Dispositions are granular enough to support these triggers. For example, having a call disposition for common “successes” like meeting booked, nurture reasons like “not interested”, and disqualified reasons like “incorrect contact.”

Stage in Outreach would need to be mapped directly to the CRM’s “status” on Leads and/or the corresponding field on Contacts. If stage is mapped to a custom field in CRM like “outreach stage”, then automation on the CRM side would also need to be added.

Keep in mind that the “Condition Preview” will show almost all prospects, since technically any prospect would qualify for this trigger if the correct call disposition was logged against their record. This does not mean that all of those prospects will receive this update upon enabling the trigger.

Disqualified or Nurture SubStatuses

Problem

Marketing and Sales are two sides of the same coin -- Marketing generates interest and creates leads for sales to follow up on, and Sales closes more revenue that can be attributed to the campaigns Marketing runs. Oftentimes, lead & contact statuses within the CRM are used for Marketing and Sales to  communicate and determine funnel metrics, such as how many people Sales is currently contacting, how many have been converted, and how many were disqualified.

With disqualified or nurture statuses, it is often important to close the feedback loop to marketing as to why a lead or contact has been placed into this bucket -- was it poor timing or lack of budget? Did they not have buying power? Were they in the wrong industry or already engaged with a competitor? These answers can help tailor the approach marketing has when creating new campaigns, and can help them determine nurture strategies for people who may buy in the future. For this reason, CRM setups typically have required substatus values when a lead or contact status is updated to “nurture”, “disqualified” or something similar.

Solution

Since Outreach does not currently support required dependency picklists, Customers use triggers to ensure all data is syncing to the CRM properly to give Marketing the insights they need.

Setup

1. Create a list of all Statuses in your CRM that have required dependency picklists (i.e. “sub-statuses”) and create a list of those sub-status options.
   • For example, "Nurture" could have “Unresponsive,” “Bad Timing,” “Budget,” etc.
2. In Outreach, navigate to the Prospect Settings.
3. Under Stages, create a stage for every master status, as well as a stage that is the combination of “Status - Sub-Status” for every dependency option.
   • Following the example in Step 1, you would create “Nurture” along with “Nurture - Unresponsive,” “Nurture - Bad Timing,” and “Nurture - Budget.”
4. Under General, label one of the available custom fields to match the sub-status field name in the CRM.
5. Navigate to the Plugin. Under Leads and/or Contacts, map the newly labeled sub-status field in Outreach to the corresponding field in CRM.
6. Click on the carrot icon on the right-hand side of the field and set up the advanced option to not skip empty values when sending or loading data from CRM.

Build the trigger

1. Create a strong naming convention, such as “Update Sub-Status: Nurture - Unresponsive.”
2. Select the event of Prospect Created or Updated and the target of prospect.
3. Create the Prospect condition of “stage is,” then select the combined stage value (e.g., “Nurture - Unresponsive”).
4. Select the action of Set Field > Stage > Nurture.
5. Select the action of Set Field > Sub-Status Custom Field > Unresponsive.

Contingencies/Considerations

These best practices are under the assumption that your Outreach Stage maps directly to your Lead Status (and/or Contact Status) in CRM. If you are mapping Outreach Stage to a separate custom field in CRM, then the process of updating Lead/Contact Status and reason will likely have to be done with automation in CRM.

You will want to move the “master” stages to the bottom of the stage values list, as this will decrease the likelihood that a rep will select a Master status without a sub-status option.

(Note: Technically, reps could still select the “master” value without a sub-status as no values
are restricted. It is often best practice to create a View of prospects whose stage = (Master
Stage) but Sub-status = empty and clean this up on a regular basis.)

If your various “master statuses” have their sub-status options in different picklist fields -- e.g., the Nurture status option pulls ups a “nurture reason” field, while the Disqualified status option pulls up a “disqualified reason” field -- then you will need to keep this in mind when creating custom fields, creating the triggers and mapping field back to the CRM.

You must have Polling, Inbound Update, Pushing and Outbound Update enabled for Leads and/or Contacts for the sync of statuses and sub-statuses to work Sub-status values will not automatically clear when a prospect is updated out of a nurture/disqualified status (e.g., when it is moved from Nurture - Unresponsive back to “Open”) and can create sync errors because Outreach is attempting to push Open - Unresponsive. For this reason, we recommend clearing that field in CRM when updating status values out of Nurture/Disqualified. Otherwise, another trigger will need to be created to clear out the sub-status field if the stage is updated to a value without a sub-status.