Objective
The purpose of this article is to provide Outreach Admins information about how to configure teams, users, and goals within Outreach's standalone Commit product.
For guidance on the latest Outreach platform-native Forecasting & Pipeline Management features, click here.
Applies To
- Outreach Admins
Before You Begin
Navigate to The Admin Portal
To access the admin portal, first login at https://commit.outreach.io using either your GSuite credentials or your Salesforce credentials.
Once logged in to the main Outreach Commit portal, click on your avatar in the upper right corner to switch to the Admin view.
In this guide, we are focusing on 3 sections: Teams, Users and Goals.
Procedure
Configuring Teams
Understanding the Impact of Your Team Structure
The Teams section in Outreach Commit is where you will establish your organizational hierarchy. Note that each user will need to be assigned to a Team, and they can only be assigned to one Team at any given time.
How to Think About Teams
The Team associations created in Outreach Commit will be reflected throughout all other areas of the platform, and users will be able to drill into the overall performance and forecasts for each team that is below them within the hierarchy. These teams should align with how your sales reps are currently organized.
How to Think About Team Hierarchy
When establishing the Team hierarchy, you should think about how your forecasts currently roll up. Each of your forecasting levels should be reflected accordingly as its own tier within the Team hierarchy.
As an example, if all of your North American AEs submit their forecasts to their direct Sales Leader, and then that leader submits a forecast for each of their teams to the VP of Sales, the corresponding hierarchy looks like this:
Note: All of the eastern corporate sales reps would be associated with the “Corporate Sales Reps - East” team, their leader would be in the “Director of Corporate Sales - East” team, and the VP would be in the “VP of Sales - East” team.
Understanding Licensed Users
Outreach Commit assigns a license to each person in the Team hierarchy. The number of licenses assigned to an org is listed at the top of hierarchy, and will fluctuate as users are added or removed from your organization’s Team structure.
Setting Up Teams in Outreach Commit
When setting up your Teams in Outreach Commit you have the option to either create the teams manually, or to sync in your existing user role hierarchy from CRM.
When to Create Teams Manually
If the group of individuals whose data needs to be reflected in Outreach Commit is much smaller than the size of your overall organization, it may be easier to manually create the Team groupings in Outreach Commit.
Once a team has been created in Outreach Commit, you can choose to then sync that Team to specific user roles in CRM, making it so that all users in the defined roles within CRM will automatically be added to this Team in Outreach Commit moving forward.
Note: This is not a requirement, and if no sync to CRM is established, the team would just need to be managed manually (the same way as Teams are managed within Outreach Engage today).
When to Sync from CRM
If your CRM hierarchy and user role assignment is clean and roughly in line with how you would like to view data and submit forecasts in Outreach Commit, you can choose to do a full sync of your CRM.
Once you have done so, you can make any further adjustments directly within Outreach Commit. For instance, you could choose to combine multiple unique user roles into one Outreach Commit team. This would not have any impact on the role hierarchy in CRM, it would simply tell Outreach Commit that this team should include anyone in any of those CRM roles.
Things to Look Out For
When a change is made to your Team structure or composition it will take some time for those updates to be reflected in the rest of the Outreach Commit platform. The amount of time will depend on your data syncing frequency.
If you move a user from one team to another, or combine multiple user roles into one team, the summary and forecasting tabs should update to reflect these new groupings upon the next data sync.
There is not a way to mark a user as the “Leader” or “Manager” for a Team in Outreach Commit like you can in Outreach Engage. Thus, if a manager is assigned to the same Team as their direct reports, they will not have the ability to review and adjust their employees’ forecasts, nor will they be able to drill into their performance. Instead, managers should be assigned to a Team that is one tier above that of their direct reports so that they have the appropriate visibility & permissions.
To see an individual’s data in Outreach Commit they will need to be assigned to a Team. If you are primarily using Outreach Commit for Sales Leaders and above (aka reps will not be logging directly into the tool, but their data needs to be visible), reps must be assigned to a Team within your hierarchy, however, they will not need to be added as an Outreach Commit User (reviewed in the next section).
Note: The Users section should only reflect the individuals that will be logging into the platform directly.
Configuring Users
Adding Users to Outreach Commit
The Users section in Outreach Commit is where you will handle user provisioning for Outreach Commit.
Note: You will only need to add individuals that plan to log into the Outreach Commit platform to look at the data, monitor performance, and review/submit forecasts.
Once your CRM connection is established, you can easily search for the users you would like to add by name and they should come up automatically. If you need to add someone to Outreach Commit who is not a Salesforce user, you can select the “Not in Salesforce?” option in the top right to manually enter their information
You will also want to establish this individual’s role within Outreach Commit. The default roles are Admin, Manager, and Rep.
- Admin users have access to all Outreach Commit modules, including the Admin portal which allows them to define Teams, add/remove Users and establish quotas.
- Manager users have access to all of the Outreach Commit modules including: Summary, Scenario Planner, Analytics, Forecasting (if enabled), and Deal Grid.
- Rep users have access to two Outreach Commit modules: Summary & Deal Grid. They do not have access to the Analytics, Scenario Planner or Forecasting modules.
Note: Customized user profiles are available should you need something more specific.
Adjusting Users in Outreach Commit
Should you need to make changes to your users in Outreach Commit, click on the three vertical dots to the left of a user’s name to edit their access (i.e. change their profile), or deactivate their license.
Users: Applying Player-Coach Access to Individual Contributors
As a baseline, Outreach Commit users are assigned a level within their organization’s Team hierarchy that controls that individual's team or rep level view permissions. Some Outreach Commit customers have managers who also carry an individual contributor quota within a given sales team. Historically, Commit had a hard time handling this situation because users are defined as either a manager or individual contributors. However, now Outreach Commit supports elevating an individual contributor to both carry a quota and manage a team.
The bottom section of the “Edit User” modal now has a section for Team Visibility. Here you can see an organization’s full team hierarchy, and a gray check mark denotes the user’s existing team visibility.
To indicate that an individual contributor is a manager as well, click on the check box next to the hierarchy level above the user and then click “Save”.
This will result in the user gaining access to the Team Summary page. Team Summary is the Manager page where this user sees Team metrics. The Rep Performance page allows this user to see their own performance as well as the performance of the rest of the individual contributors on her team.
To unlock access to the other manager-only pages in Outreach Commit (Forecasting, Scenario Planner, Analytics, etc.), you will need to create a new manager role on the Roles page in the Commit Admin app and assign it to this user. For more information, read the article on how to create and manage roles.
Configuring Goals
Establishing Your Revenue Goals
The Goals section in Outreach Commit is where you will establish the quota goals for your various users and teams for the upcoming sales period.
Download the Quota Excel file that you will use to populate & load in your organization’s quota goals. Once you select Download, choose the time period for which you would like to set goals (i.e. Last Fiscal Year, This Fiscal Year or Next Fiscal Year)
Note: When you are initially getting set up with Outreach Commit, it is best practice to also load in your quota numbers for the previous fiscal year if possible. This will help to improve the historical trends & insights you see within Outreach Commit.
Once your download is complete, open the Excel file and begin populating your quota values. You will see multiple tabs along the bottom of the file that allow you to establish quotas for a variety of time periods—e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.
Determine which time period aligns most closely with how you define your quotas and fill out that tab only.
Note: Only the teams at the lowest tier of your hierarchy will show up in this Excel file with the associated users listed underneath them. Outreach Commit assumes that the teams at the lowest level of the hierarchy are the teams that are made up of reps with individual quota goals.
Any team that is not the lowest level in the hierarchy will only show up on the spreadsheet with the team name; the associated users will not be included. This allows you to set a unique quota goal for any upper-tier team if it does not directly equate to the roll up of the individual teams below it.
If you chose to do a full sync with CRM when configuring your team hierarchy, you may notice that some inactive users are assigned to these teams and subsequently are reflected in your goals spreadsheet. You can simply ignore those users and leave their quota goals at 0. You will not want to remove inactive users from the team section of Outreach Commit unless you do not want their previous pipeline data to contribute to your historical insights.
Do not adjust any areas of the goals file outside of populating the appropriate quota amount in dollars for the reps.
Note: This file does accept formulas, so if you would like to build rep ramping into your quota amounts you can do so.
By default, if the team quota is not set in this file, Outreach Commit will assume that it should be equivalent to the roll up of the quota amounts for each user within that team. However, if you would like to establish a team quota that is independent of the rep roll up, you can set a separate quota value by entering a unique amount in the passion blue cell for that team.
In the example spreadsheet below, the team quota for the “AE - EMEA” team would simply be equal to John Smith’s quota goals. However, the team quota for the “AE - NAM - East” team would reflect the value displayed in the passion blue cell ($3,300 for the first week) rather than the sum of Jenna & Rachel’s quotas.
Once you have saved your completed file, go back into the Goals tab within your Outreach Commit admin portal and hit Upload. Search for your completed file and load it into the platform.
Note: It takes a data sync run to fully update goals after a new spreadsheet has been uploaded.
Adjusting Your Revenue Goals
Should you ever need to make adjustments to your quota goals, or establish quotas for a new hire, you will follow the same process as outlined above. However, when you download your quota file for the desired sales period, the currently established quota values will already be populated. This means that you will not need to re-enter any previous information, instead, simply make the desired adjustments and additions and re-upload the file.