Cleaning Up Your Outreach Sequences – Outreach Support

Overview

When an instance of Outreach has a large volume of sequences, the insights that admins receive in regards to how their content strategy is working and where it needs to be tweaked are limited. This is because prospects get skewed across hundreds of sequences, rather than focused into a few specific sequences that are created and maintained by a central person or team. In order to drive more statistically significant data, admins need to clean up the amount of content that reps can see and use within their instance. Streamlining your sequences in this manner has the added benefits of enabling reps to easily find the correct content, ensuring that reps are using approved messaging that represents the company’s brand well, and decreasing the amount of manual time reps are spending creating content.

Applies To

Outreach Admins

Before You Get Started

Relevant Definitions

Considerations

Permissions

In order to maintain a clean system after following the below instructions, permissions likely need to be updated to deny reps permission to create and/or enable sequences. Otherwise, the risk of having sequence numbers getting reinflated is high.

Rep permissions can be very granular, and the way that an admin determines to set permissions up for their team will vary; however, there are 4 best practice scenarios:

Completely lock down the reps’ permissions to create content. In this case, customers may want to consider having a content owner on the team who creates and maintains sales content. Ideally, this person will live somewhere between sales and marketing, and will be able to speak to the value of the product(s) while keeping a “sales tone.”
Have reps be able to create but not enable content, so that reps are able to create a sequence that they feel is a value add, but a manager or admin needs to approve that sequence in order to make it “active.” This can reduce overall content and ensure the data associated is statistically significant, but could create a bottleneck if there are not enough “content approvers."
Create a “tiger team” approach, where senior reps get together to create content together, on behalf of the team at large. (See our Content Committee best practices.)
Have a “promotion” path with permissions, where new reps cannot create sequences until they understand the value proposition(s) and can be trusted to create meaningful content that is not duplicative. Admins would then want to monitor these rep-created sequences to ensure that they are performing at or above their benchmarks for success.

Operations

You can restore (unarchive) a sequence and make it re-accessible to reps.
Admins should go through a content clean-up process regularly (for example, quarterly or bi-annually) to ensure all content is up-to-date and performing well.

Procedure

As a quick way to clean up old and unused sequences, the best practice is to archive the sequences that fall into the following categories (admin instructions are included for each type):

Sequences that are “paused” (i.e., they are inactive)

Go to the Sequences tab and remove the filter Owner is you.
Add a new Filter: State is Paused.
Consider excluding sequences that have been recently created, since sequences upon creation are automatically in the paused state. To do this, add a filter of Created at, then select is before, then choose a date (for example a month prior to the date of the clean up).
Bulk select the resulting sequences, click the Manage (padlock) icon, select archive, and click Confirm.

Sequences that have not been used in 3 months or greater

Go to to the Sequences tab and remove the filter Owner is you.
To find any sequence that has not been used within a 3-month timeframe, in the search bar, add this search query: -last_used_at:[YYYY-MM-DD TO YYYY-MM-DD]
Note: The first date should be the starting date 3 months ago, while the second date should be today.
Consider excluding sequences that are in a Content Collection, as these are likely sequences that an admin wants reps to be using. To do so, add this condition to your search query in addition to the date range above: AND content_category_id:"" (meaning, the content collection is blank).
Bulk select the resulting sequences, click the Manage (padlock) icon, select archive, and click Confirm.

Sequences that have less than __ deliveries

Go to to the Sequences tab and remove the filter Owner is you.
To the upper right of the sequence list, click Sort by and select Delivery Count. Ensure the list is organized in ascending order (up arrow).
Consider excluding sequences that have been recently created, since new sequences will have less deliveries. To do so, add a filter of Created at, and selecting is before, then choose a date (e.g., a month prior to the date of the clean up).
Consider excluding sequences that are in a Content Collection, as these are likely sequences that an admin wants reps to be using. To do so, in the search bar, add this search query: content_category_id:"" (meaning, the content collection is blank).
From here, admins can one-off select the sequences they wish to archive. There is not currently a filter to search for a specific number of deliveries, so admins need to spot check as they archive the sequences.

A Note on Call-Only Sequences: The Delivery count sort option does not take into account "call-only" sequences, so admins should also check the total number contacted within the sequence to ensure they are not archiving call-only sequences. To do this, skip the selection box if a sequence has a higher contacted number than the delivery threshold.

Additional sequence types to target

Once the bulk of sequences are archived with the above, you can further clean up sequences as needed by archiving:

Sequences that are “private” (i.e., only the user who created them can use it). These can be found by adding the filter Sharing is: Private to Owner.
Sequences that contain the name of previous events, webinars, or other dated content. These can be found by using the search name:"*____*" with the appropriate event name information (which searches for Sequence Name contains ___).
Sequences that have below a certain percentage for Open or Reply rate, by using the Sort by option for Open Rate or Reply Rate, ensuring the results are ascending (up arrow). Please keep in mind that this will not filter by delivery count, so admins will want to cross-reference delivery count before archiving the sequence to make sure it is statistically significant.

Next Steps

Benchmarking

Admins should look at the remaining sequences and determine what benchmarks they would like to set for Open rates, Reply rate, positive reply rate, number of meetings booked, etc. in order to deem a sequence “successful.” Typically, admins will have different benchmarks for different sequence purposes (such as outbound sequences vs inbound sequences). Admins should then use these benchmarks when creating new sequences to determine if they are performing well, and archive sequences that do not perform to these standards.

A/B Testing

Create A/B Testing steps in sequences that more than 200 prospects will be put into, as this will be the best way to test what is and is not working and improve results.

For how to create A/B testing in sequences, follow our guide here.

Cleaning Up Sequence States

Now that these sequences have been archived, the next step for achieving a tidier Outreach instance is to clean up the prospects that are in a “paused” or “failed” state within a sequence. For more on that, see our guide to Cleaning Up Sequence States.

Additional Information