Outreach Opportunities: Comprehensive Setup Guide

Outreach Opportunities allows users to manage and track opportunities through the entire sales pipeline, enabling them to engage in more meaningful ways and measure revenue attribution down to the activity.

We suggest having an Outreach Admin follow our comprehensive setup guide to use Outreach Opportunities effectively. The setup guide will walk you through the following topics:

1. Creating the opportunity stages in Outreach
2. Adding custom fields for opportunities in Outreach
3. Creating a picklist field for Contact Roles
4. Updating your CRM plugin
5. Updating governance profiles to permit or deny access and actions on Opportunities
6. Import historic opportunities
   

Create Opportunity Stages in Outreach

• Click on the initials on the bottom left hand side of the Outreach platform.

• On the settings panel, find the system labeled “System Config” and select “Opportunity”.

• On the top of the page, Select "Stages".
  

• Remove any stages that are not needed and add stages as they appear in your CRM. The name of the stage needs to be mapped 1:1, including spacing and capitalization to ensure proper sync between Outreach and your CRM. For example, if you have the stage 'Redlines' in Outreach, you need to have the same status ''Redlines” in your CRM.

• Make sure you’re using stage names that are useful to your business and workflow. For example, you may need Opportunity stages for your new business pipeline, but might not find them necessary for account renewals.

Add Opportunity Custom Fields

With custom fields, you can create exactly the fields you need to hold the information that's most important about your Opportunities. In essence, custom fields help accommodate non-standard fields in your CRM that you want to use in Outreach.

Naming your custom fields is helpful to keep everything linear across the whole org and ensure people are importing the correct information into the correct custom fields. This also allows them to show up as a named field on the Opportunity level within the plugin field mappings for your CRM.

Outreach defaults every user to 35 custom fields, but more can be added to your account if requested.

• Click on the initials on the bottom left hand corner of Outreach

• Under "System Config" select "Opportunity"

• You'll see a list of custom fields where you can create labels, which will help you identify what information is being pulled into Outreach from your CRM.

Once a custom field label has been entered and saved, that field will be available in the Opportunity settings. You can also apply picklist validations to your custom fields. See the next section for more info.

Note: Outreach Custom fields are limited to 30k characters.

Create your Contact Role Validation Picklist

Picklist support allows Outreach admins to define specific values for a prospect or account field. By creating a picklist in Outreach, Admins can mirror your CRM picklist validations in Outreach, ensuring data remains accurate and consistent for new values added to prospects and account fields.

For sales reps, picklists help you remember correct field names, and ensure they're logged correctly to match the one in SFDC (i.e. Entering “health-care” vs “healthcare”) - increasing efficiency and accuracy.

Note: Picklist support can be used even if you don’t use a CRM! It’s a great way to ensure that data entry from your team is pristine and consistent.

To set up picklist validation in Outreach, admins will need to create a picklist in Outreach that matches the field names in your CRM.

• Click on your initials on the bottom left hand corner of the Outreach platform
• On the settings panel, find the section labeled “System Config” and select “Validations”
  
• On the top right corner of the page, click the “Add” button to create a new picklist.
• Select “Prospect Roles” from the “Type” dropdown menu. Under “Field”, select “Role”. (To apply picklist validation to a custom field, select "Opportunity" from the "Type" dropdown menu. Under "Field", select the desired custom field.)
  
  
• On the next page, start adding the picklist values that exist in your CRM, if your company uses one. If these fields are syncing to a CRM, the Outreach picklist values must match the corresponding CRM values 1:1, including spacing and capitalization, to sync correctly. You can quickly add additional values by clicking “enter” after each entry. If you make a mistake, click on the trash can symbol to remove the incorrect picklist value.
• Once you’ve completed adding the picklist values, select “create”.
  
  

• Once a picklist is created, the contact role will appear as a dropdown option when assigning a prospect to an Opportunity.
  

Setup the Plugin for your CRM

With your CRMs plugin, you have the option to bring Opportunities into Outreach automatically from your CRM.

We recommend keeping outbound create and update off. Opportunities can have many validation rules that must be met to create new Opportunities or update existing Opportunities. Because there is no visibility into those validation rules from within Outreach, the creation and updating of Opportunities should remain in your CRM.

If you use Salesforce, a comprehensive step-by-step guide to the Salesforce plugin can be found here. If you have been working with your Customer Success Manager or the support team to enable Advanced Task Mappings on your account, please review the Salesforce setup steps found in this article.

Assign Governance Profile Settings

Each profile is configured to allow and deny certain permissions. By default, non-admins will not be able to create, edit or see the Opportunities dropdown option (more details below).

Some individuals may need to have access to certain actions. For example, the SDR team may be in charge of creating an Opportunity once they have a confirmed SAL/MQL, but only the AE should be permitted to make edits to the Opportunity as the deal moves through the pipeline.

To permit or deny certain actions, Outreach Admins can update the different Governance Profile Settings.

There are a few reasons organizations would want to enable or disable profile settings for Outreach Opportunities:

• The Outreach and CRM Admins want to limit manual updates to opportunities.
• The Outreach and CRM Admins want to adjust the plugin and Opportunity Stages before allowing access to Opportunities for their Outreach users
• One team needs access to the Opportunities in Outreach (eg. AE), while other teams do not (eg. SDRs)

Adjusting the Outreach Opportunities Governance Profile Settings

• Click on the initials on the bottom left hand side of the Outreach platform and under "User Admin" select "Profiles".
• Select the profile that needs adjustment. You'll be brought into an overview page of every setting that has associated changes.
  

• Scroll down the page until you see the section labeled "Opportunities". From the dropdown menu, select "Permitted" or "Denied" for each of the following options:

Can Use Opportunities

• Permitted - Individuals that are assigned to this governance profile are allowed to use Outreach Opportunities.
• Denied - Individuals that are assigned to this governance profile are cannot use Outreach Opportunities.

Create

• Permitted - Individuals that are assigned to this governance profile are allowed to create opportunities.
• Denied - Individuals that are assigned to this governance profile are cannot create opportunities.

Edit

• Any opportunity- Users can make changes to opportunities owned by anyone in their instance.
• Opportunity owned by user or its subordinates - Users can make changes to opportunities they own and team leaders can also make changes to opportunities owned by members of their team.
• Opportunity owned by user -Users can only make changes to opportunities that they own.
• Disabled -Users are unable to edit any opportunities.

Activities Get Associated with Opportunities

• Permitted - Activities completed by the user will be associated with the prospect’s opportunities.
• Denied - Activities completed by the user will not be associated with the prospect’s opportunities.

Association dropdown

• Permitted - Individuals that are assigned to this governance profile are allowed to manually associate activities with opportunities, via a drop-down when completing an activity.
• Denied - Individuals that are assigned to this governance profile are unable to manually associate activities with opportunities. Instead, activities will be automatically associated with the prospect’s most recently created or updated open opportunity depending on the setting selected in Opportunities settings.
  

Import Historic Opportunities

There are two options for importing historic opportunities into Outreach: CSV File or Salesforce report. We’ll walk through both options.

Import an Opportunity Salesforce Report

If you use Salesforce, follow these steps to import an Opportunity Salesforce Report into Outreach:

• Click the "Quick Action" or the lighting icon in the upper right hand corner and choose "Bulk Create"
• On the import page, click on the dropdown and select “Opportunity Salesforce Report”. Note: Your Salesforce report must be saved in the “Unfiled Public Reports” folder to successfully import into Outreach.
• Select the appropriate report and click “Next” on the top right hand side of the page.
  
• Map the columns of your Salesforce Report to corresponding fields in Outreach. For example: "Opportunity ID" field in Outreach is mapped to the "Opportunity Name" column in the Salesforce report. If there are fields that aren't needed in Outreach, you can leave the mapping blank and they will not be imported into Outreach.
  
• Click next and on the third import screen select an owner for all the records in the Salesforce report. You will have have the following options:
  • The owner will default to the individual importing the Opportunity. You can select a new owner from the dropdown menu or select "use owner from data", found at the top of the dropdown menu.
  • Decide what to do with duplicates. Update Missing Fields will update only fields on the prospect that are not already present. Overwrite Existing Fields will replace existing information on the prospect with the information contained in the spreadsheet (overwritten fields only apply to fields  mapped in the second step of the import). Skip will skip updating information on prospects that already exist in Outreach.
  • Add tags to the list of records to easily find and group them together (optional)
  • Load additional data from Salesforce to sync the Opportunities with their corresponding Accounts, prospects, and Opportunity Roles with the corresponding lead/contact in Salesforce.

• Click "Next" and "Start Import" when you're ready. 

Import an Opportunity CSV File into Outreach

CSV files are a reliable way to import a list of Opportunities into Outreach. A CSV is a "comma separated values" file, which allows data to be saved in a table structured format, similar to Excel files (.xls).

Note: The Closed Date field must be in MM/DD/YYYY (Month/Day/Year) format.

• Click the "Quick Action" or the lighting icon in the upper right hand corner and choose "Bulk Create"
• On the import page, click on the dropdown and select “Opportunities comma-separated values file (.csv)”. Select your file and click the Next button on the top right corner.
  
• Map the columns of your CSV to corresponding fields in Outreach. For example: "Name" field in Outreach is mapped to the "Opportunity Name" column in the CSV file. If your CSV file contains data that is not relevant for Outreach, you can leave them unmapped and they will not be imported into Outreach.
  
• Click next and on the third import screen select an owner for all the records in the CSV. You will have have the following options:
  • The owner will default to the individual importing the Opportunities. You can select a new owner from the dropdown menu or select "use owner from data", found at the top of the dropdown menu.
  • Decide what to do with duplicates. Update Missing Fields will update only fields on the Opportunities that are not already present. Overwrite Existing Fields will replace existing information on the Opportunities with the information contained in the spreadsheet (overwritten fields only apply to fields mapped in the second step of the import). Skip will skip updating information on prospects that already exist in Outreach.
  • Add tags to the list of records to easily find and group Opportunities together (optional)
  • Load additional data from your CRM to sync the Opportunities with the corresponding data in that CRM.

• Click "Next" and "Start Import" when you're ready.