Purpose:
The purpose of this article is to provide information to Outreach Admins regarding reporting with Outreach API.
Outreach offers an open API which will allow you to pull vast amounts of data and run specific analytics in the BI platform of your choice. This guide walks you through the initial steps to get your data out of Outreach and into the hands of your analytics team.
Intended Audience:
- Outreach Admins
Who should access the Outreach API?
The first step in this process is to identify the correct resource within your company that can help you get access to Outreach data. Typically, this is the team that owns your data warehouse, and may run analytics for your business. They could be:
- BI or Analytics team, or any team that owns your data storage and transformation
- Or, in the case of smaller organizations, a single Software engineer may own analytics
Secondly, you will need someone who can assist in the process of correlating the data to actions. Your Salesforce Admin or Sales Manager can play an important role here in helping your data team understand how to interpret Outreach data related to sales performance.
Connect to the Outreach API:
Once you have identified your team, provide them with the Outreach API information to get started. Here a few things to keep in mind when pulling in the data:
- Where will the data be stored? Typically, this is a database solution like mysql, Redshift, or Snowflake. Most likely your team already has a preferred database warehouse.
- How will the data be accessed? This will require some light scripting using Python, Curl, Java, … See a sample here.
- How often will the data be refreshed? We recommend a 24h refresh rate or if you prefer more up to date data you could pull it multiple times per day. We internally pull our data 4 times per day.
- Reporting can also be achieved with third party integrations.
Leverage the Data for Analytics:
Now that you have all the data collected in your database you can connect it to your favorite analytics platform (Tableau, Domo, or PowerBI, for example) to start performing your own custom analytics. Be sure to assist your BI team in the process of correlating the data to actions. To get you started here are a few data points you will have access to and can start to explore:
- Activities: emails, calls, tasks
- Content: sequences, templates, snippets
Template to Get Your Data Team Involved
If you are not sure how to get your data team involved then you can use the template below to get the conversation started.
Hi {{first_name}},
Our sales team uses Outreach.io as part of their core tool stack to build their pipeline and close deals faster. We are able to learn some insights through reports in Outreach and Salesforce. But with your help we would be able to gather much deeper insights and make our sales team even more effective.
Outreach has an open API that allows us to pull in data directly from Outreach and analyze in our BI tool helping us to better coach the team and optimize our process. You can find more info on the Outreach API here.
Let’s find some time next week to walk through this to see how we can get this completed and learn more about the data we are looking for.
Cheers,
{{sender.first_name}}
Additional Resources:
API documentation Request API access