AE Workflows for Opportunity Management

Overview

As an AE, one of your primary focuses is opportunity management, and with Outreach, you have access to the metrics, actionable insights, and features you need to achieve this goal. To do this, we’ve rounded up the key workflows every AE needs to predict deal performance accurately and improve close rates by up to 13%.

Table of contents

Use the links below to jump to a relevant section

• Workflows for using Kaia
• Workflows for managing Success Plans
• Workflows for deal health

Workflows

Workflows for using Kaia

Use these workflows when using Kaia to facilitate meetings to keep deals on track by gaining deep insight into buyer reactions and sentiment, monitoring trends, eliminating obstacles, and automating your follow-ups.

Use content cards in meetings to eliminate obstacles and keep deals moving forward

Kaia will join calendar meetings when your calendar is connected to Outreach, you have been assigned a Kaia subscription, auto-join is enabled, or you choose to join a meeting with Kaia. Additionally, all calls recorded in Outreach Voice will also have Kaia. 

1. After you have entered a prospect meeting and Outreach Kaia has joined the meeting, you can initiate the Kaia Live Experience with one of the following methods:
   • Auto start: Kaia Live Experience automatically opens for you when the Outreach Kaia Assistant joins as a participant in your Zoom meetings with Prospects. 
   • Zoom private chat: Outreach provides a live Kaia experience start link in the Zoom private chat for your Kaia-enabled meetings. 
   • Start link in Outreach calendar: Users can start the Outreach Kaia experience from the Outreach calendar meeting invite. Access the calendar placeholder and click the Join meeting button to start the Live Experience. 
2. Launching Outreach Kaia produces a side panel where you can see the meeting details such as title and participants and access content cards and live transcription. Content cards automatically pop up in the Kaia live meeting assistant when key moments are detected in the conversations. Use these cards to address questions, concerns, or provide additional information to improve the success of a conversation. Note that the Kaia assistant is only visible to you, not the prospects.

Have Kaia automatically capture action items using notes and bookmarks

1. After you have entered a prospect meeting and Outreach Kaia has joined the meeting, you can initiate the Kaia Live Experience.
2. Starting Outreach Kaia produces a panel where you can see the meeting details such as title, participants, notes, and bookmarks. Kaia automatically captures key moments in the meeting by auto-capturing action items.
3. Users can also bookmark comments in the transcription by using the “ icon.
4. Users can manually add notes in the notes section of the Kaia live meeting assistant.

Use live call analytics for real-time visibility into buyer engagement

1. After you have entered a prospect meeting and Outreach Kaia has joined the meeting, you can initiate the Kaia Live Experience. 
2. Starting Outreach Kaia produces a panel where you can see the meeting details, such as title and participants, and access live call analytics.
3. Review talk time analytics by locating the hamburger menu in the bottom right corner of the Kaia live meeting assistant. Click the button and select Talk Times.
4. Review current user stats and ensure you’re hitting your best practices and benchmarks, and self-correct if you’re talking more than listening. You will see:
   • The % of time the user has talked in the call
   • The user's longest monologue
   • Pause length, which is the amount of time between when another speaker stops talking and the user begins talking
   • The number of questions the user has asked
5. Below your user stats, you will see the percentage of talk time for the participants who have spoken the most. Review this to gauge participant engagement.
6. Below are more talk time percentages; the percentages for the remainder of the participants will be shown below. This information can be used as a reminder to engage with the participants who have not spoken.

Quickly follow up after a call with meeting summaries

1. Shortly after you’ve completed a call with Kaia, you will get a meeting summary from Kaia. Within this email you will find:
   • Meeting recording: A link to the recording of your meeting in Outreach
   • Content card moments: A recap of content cards that popped up during the meeting with associated timestamps
   • Action items: Notes, bookmarks, and action items saved during the meeting
   • Meeting transcript: The transcript of your meeting
2. Review the meeting summary and leverage it to craft your meeting recap email by:
   • Providing a recap of the meeting
   • Following up on any open questions or action items
   • Sharing any resources or next steps
   • Scheduling any follow-up meetings or sequences
   • Sharing Kaia clips or recordings 

Workflows for managing Success Plans

Use these workflows to improve deal execution with Success Plans by de-risking deals and engaging stakeholders at the right time, building buyer trust, confidence, and alignment, and fostering collaboration across the deal cycle.

Create and customize a Success Plan to improve win rates by 13%

1. Navigate to the Records tab in Outreach and select the Opportunities page.
2. Click on the opportunity that you want to create a Success Plan for to open up the Opportunity Overview.
3. Find the Plan tab along the top of the page and hit the Create a Plan button.
4. Select an appropriate template, ideally created by your admin team during implementation
5. Give the plan a clear and informative title.
6. You’ve now created the foundation for your Success Plan. Within the Success Plan, you will see the following features:
   • Timeline: Outline the different phases that will take place during the sales cycle as well as the primary tasks and meetings that make up each phase.
   • Success criteria: A collaborative space for Users and Prospects to align on criteria demands required to close the deal.
   • Resources: A central hub where assets, such as links to call recordings, case studies, or security documentation shared throughout the sales cycle, can be stored for access by any collaborators on the plan.
   • Team: Where the plan's owner can invite internal and external stakeholders to collaborate. All plan collaborators can view and edit the timeline, comment on events, view and edit the Success Criteria, access resources, and add team members.
7. Begin customizing the plan by adding:
   • Relevant tasks and subtasks to the timeline
   • Requirements for closing the deal in the success criteria tab
   • Objectives based on previous customer conversations
   • Key milestones to the timeline
   • Relevant assets to resources

Collaborate with prospects using comments, assigning tasks and followers

1. In your Success Plan, collaborate with the customer to boost engagement.
2. To assign tasks to yourself or someone from the buyer’s team, go to the Timeline tab and click the Assign Owner icon beside the task title.
3. Add followers to relevant tasks by clicking the Details > button and selecting + Add or Remove Followers.
4. Communicate using comments and tags within tasks under the Comments tab or using the comment feature by clicking on a specific Success Criteria item.

Maintain your Success Plan by completing items, bulk rescheduling, adding tasks, and more

1. Maintaining your Success Plan is critical to keeping your deals on track. Set aside time to review your plan and ensure that regularly:
   • Tasks are marked as complete on the Timeline
   • New tasks are added following meetings
   • There are no overdue tasks on the Timeline
   • Review Success Criteria for any objections or blockers
   • Review the Up Next section to ensure teams are prepared, meetings are scheduled, and prospects have the resources they need
   • Check in on buyer engagement by seeing when they last logged in using the Teams tab
   • Bulk reschedule by selecting the date shifter clock icon in the upper left of the Timeline tab, selecting the tasks you would like to shift, and indicating how many business days forward or backward you would like to move the dates

Note: You can choose to bulk-select all incomplete tasks or select certain tasks manually.

Workflows for Deal Health

Use these workflows to improve deal management by inspecting deals with insights across the entire opportunity lifecycle while moving deals forward with targeted next steps based on activity across Outreach.

Use smart filters to surface at-risk deals

1. Navigate to the Records tab in Outreach and select Opportunities.
2. Click the Add Filter button next to the search bar in the Opportunities tab
3. Select the applicable filters you want to create a saved view for at risk deals. Be sure to include health score to set a threshold for when you want to review (i.e. Needs Review or At Risk deals). Deals that fall into the selected category will automatically surface for you to review and take action.
4. Click Save View.
5. Input a new name for the view. We suggest something like “At-risk deals” or “Low deal health”
6. Configure the owner and sharing options as applicable.
7. Use the checkbox to select or unselect this view as your default.
8. Click Save.

Review deals to determine next best action

1. Navigate to the Records tab in Outreach and select Opportunities.
2. Apply your saved view to surface at-risk deals.
3. Drill down into opportunities with low health scores by hovering over the red or yellow circle in the Health column to see their Deal Health Card. Here, you can see deeper insights on:
   • Health status: Based on the deal health score, it is classified into three categories:
     • On track: Deals are relatively healthy
     • Needs review: Deals with a moderate amount of risk
     • At-risk: Deals that are relatively unhealthy compared to deals at a similar stage
   • Health trend: The trend indicator in the upper right of the Deal Health card shows which direction the score has moved and how much the health score has changed in the last 7 days.
   • What’s going well: Machine learning evaluates Every deal against many positive factors. This is an overview of some of the positive factors identified for this deal.
   • Where to focus: Machine learning evaluates Every deal against many negative factors. This is an overview of some of the negative factors identified for this deal.
   • Suggested actions: Based on Deal Heath factors identified as impacting the deal negatively, Outreach will suggest actions to take within the Outreach ecosystem to de-risk the deal.
4. Using these findings, determine the next best action to de-risk deals. We suggest:
   
   • Taking the suggested actions recommended in the deal health score
   • Refocus on areas recommended in the “Where to focus” category of the deal health card
   • Reviewing what’s going well and seeing if you can take any actions, insights, or learnings and applying them to focus areas

Review your deals with low health scores by digging into their account

1. Navigate to the Records tab in Outreach and select Opportunities.
2. Apply your saved view to surface at-risk deals.
3. Dig into the details of at-risk deals by selecting the opportunity’s name. This will pull up the Deal Overview page. Here, you’ll find the deeper context to review this specific deal. Review the following sections and metrics in the overview page:
   • Next meeting: Confirm if there is an upcoming meeting scheduled 
   • Engagement: Review the last time a prospect was engaged and how
   • Kaia recordings: Review any Kaia recordings for overall sentiment and ensure you’ve followed up on any action items
   • Health insights: Look at health insights over the last 7 days for an overall deal health score, overview of what’s going well and where to focus, and review suggested actions.
   • Next steps: Confirm that there are next steps in place and ensure you're making progress
   • Plan: Confirm that a Success Plan is in place for the deal and review in-app notifications or flags