Prospect Timezones

Purpose:

The purpose of this article is to provide information to Outreach Users regarding Prospect time zones.

Contacting prospects is not easy when you don't know where your prospect is located. Our solution is to allow you to apply time zones to your prospect and sync it to or from the list of available fields in Salesforce if that field is in the correct format. If you are not syncing from Salesforce.com, we do allow you to assign timezone on import or in bulk once prospects already exist in the platform.

Intended Audience: 

• Outreach Users 

Sync Time Zones from Salesforce:

If you are syncing timezone information from Salesforce, it will need to be in an accepted format. We still prefer IANA Formatted Time zones, which are the only type that reliably include daylight savings time information (e.g. 'America/Los_Angeles'), and so we’ve changed the label the user will see in the Salesforce field mapping to be “Time Zone (IANA)”.

If they do happen to sync a time zone format that we can’t understand, we’ll now just ignore that time zone field and continue to sync the record without error.

If you do sync over a format that is abbreviated: like PST or EST, we will allow that to sync. However, that abbreviation does not account for Daylight savings time, so we do not inherently change the prospects timezone at that time of year. If you are syncing from Salesforce.com but your timezone is in the abbreviated format, we recommend syncing that field into a custom field in Outreach and then creating a trigger to assign the correctly formatted IANA timezone, that will accommodate for daylight savings time. 

Attached is a list of Time zones that are accepted by the Outreach application, make sure to enter the text exactly as it appears in the attached CSV, other formats will not be accepted. 

Assign Prospect Time zones:

One off changes can be made by going into the prospect profile and choosing from the Time Zone picklist. 

If you're uploading in bulk, simply create a new column and include the appropriate IANA

Then map it to the new Time Zone (IANA) field.