Purpose:
The purpose of this article is to provide information to Outreach Users regarding Outreach Best Practices for managing and implementing Outreach Success Plans into your workflow.
Intended Audience:
- Outreach Users
Outreach Success Plans Best Practices:
Outreach Success Plans are a shared space for Users to stay aligned with Prospects during complex deals and onboardings. Success Plans eliminate the need for sales teams to rely on fragmented email threads or shared spreadsheets to manage opportunities and provide a centralized hub for all the information exchanged throughout the process.
Sharing Best Practices:
Sharing an Outreach Success Plan will vary for each company and use-case, but generally speaking, a Success Plan should be introduced once the Prospect has agreed to commit time and resources towards the evaluation and you need to talk through what’s ahead.
This typically takes place at the tail end of the second or third call with a Prospect, but can also be an incredibly valuable realignment tool later in a deal if there’s no plan in place already.
Outreach recommends sharing a Success Plan with your Prospects prior to kicking off any of the following:
- Formal scoping / requirements gathering
- Proof of Concept (Trial)
- Security / Legal Review
- Prospect Onboarding
Sharing Do’s:
- Spend 2 minutes before the call to spin up a plan with the Prospect’s name on it, and check off the events that have already occurred to show progress.
- Sharing a Success Plan with a Prospect should initially be done over a screen share. When it comes time to discuss next steps, access the applicable Success Plan and share via the Customer Preview button and follow through by explaining to your Prospect why this useful.
Example Verbiage:In an effort to be as transparent as possible, to save us time, and to help you keep your colleagues up to speed on our progress, I’d like to share a Success Plan with you. This plan outlines our typical evaluation process, your team’s business objectives, and will act as a hub for all of the resources Outreach pass back and forth over the next few weeks.
Now, I’d love to get your feedback, I want to make sure this plan fits your needs. I know everyone has slightly different processes internally. - Add Prospects to the Success Plan while on the call. Outreach highly recommends that you invite the Prospect to join the plan while you have them on the call and ask them to check their email to confirm that they got the invite. This will drastically increase Prospect adoption of the plan and will hold everyone accountable to timelines and success criteria.
- AddTeam Members. A person can be added to the plan on either the User or Prospect side. Only when a person is added to a plan will they have the ability to add people to the plan and collaborate on the plan by adding events to a timeline, comment, and add resources. Note: Prospects and Team members can be added to a Plan via the Teams tab in a Success Plan. For more information regarding adding team members, refer to the How To Manage Outreach Success Plan Teams article.
- Add Prospects to the Outreach Platform. Sharing a link with your Prospect is not an equal alternative to adding them to the Prospect team and sending them an invitation to collaborate. These links are best used AFTER stakeholders have already accepted their plan invites and simply need easy access back to the plan down the road. If a Prospect is already added as a collaborator, has accepted their invite (clicked the authentication link via email), then clicking a shared link with grant them immediate access to the plan.
If a Prospect is not a collaborator on the plan and clicks on a shared link, they’ll be taken down 1 of 2 possible user paths depending on your Link Sharing mode.
Sharing Don’ts:
Outreach recommends Users avoid the following missteps when introducing Success Plans into your workflow:
- Avoid sending over a Success Plan invite without first walking the Prospect through the Plan’s details.
- Avoid focusing on why the Plan is helpful to you, the User -- Outreach Success Plans are designed to make the Prospect’s experience less stressful.
- Avoid feeling the need to get a commitment on every single step between today and a deal getting signed. Just align on the next steps and the end target date. The dates in between may shift, and that’s fine.
Additional Resource:
Outreach University - Outreach Success Plans
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