Multi-User Assignment Overview

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to provide information to Outreach Admins and Users regarding Multi-User Assignment. Multi-User Assignment is part of Outreach's overall Team Selling capabilities.

Intended Audience:

• Outreach Admins
• Outreach Users

Multi-User Assignment Overview

Multi-User Assignment enables team-based selling workflows in Outreach by allowing multiple users to be assigned directly to any record of Prospects, Accounts, and Opportunities to collaborate.

A typical example of a team-based selling strategy can be CSMs, TAMs, and SDRs coming together to collaborate on the same Opportunity by sharing the assignment. Similarly, two different users from two different teams in the organization can share common resources between them for the most efficient, and effective, sales execution. Team Selling breaks down silos in Sales motions.

Benefits of Multi-User Assignment

Most B2B purchases involve several decision makers and influencers and follow a complex nonlinear path (Source: Gartner). Inside sales teams also, based on our data, we know Multi-Threading is Good!

In a traditional selling model, this falls on an individual. Success, therefore, depends directly on this one individual's ability to coordinate, and generally manage, a complex collaboration model. This is tedious, time consuming, and takes the sellers focus away from what they should be doing - Selling!

In the example above you can see that in traditional selling motions, where a team is trying to sell together, information isn’t shared continuously and seamlessly within the right context of the record or actions. Aside from creating motion silos, even when information is shared, it might be without context appropriate for the receiver to hit the ground running. This additional, undue, burden on the owner of the record to manually manage sharing of actions and information at the right time with the context, can quickly become a revenue process bottleneck for sales teams of all shapes and sized.

In comes Outreach Team Selling, which unblocks and simplifies these complex collaborative motions by focusing on the ability of end users to choose how, and with whom, to collaborate. Multi-User Assignment is a specific aspect of Team Selling, where Outreach allows the owner of the record to make these critical collaboration decisions. Admins or other leaders in the Org can also make these choices.

With Multi-User assignment, users assigned to the records assigned to them can not only access all details about the record, they can also be put their colleagues in Sequences or have Tasks assigned to them through Triggers. For all intents and purposes all assigned users are co owners to the records.

Since Multi-User Assignment allows for direct assignments, users can get their colleagues irrespective of traditional teams structures or organizational hierarchies. That is, users even from different  the company can come together seamlessly to make revenue happen for as long as they are needed.

Lastly, organizations can also integrate with their CRM and/or use APIs to manage multiple users assigned to a Prospect, Account, or Opportunity.

Note that while Multi-User Assignment allows end users to fully control their collaboration experience, Admins still have the option to control this collaboration tighter if their organizational business policies requires so. We'll cover Profiles control in detail in subsequent sections.

Experience

Prospects, Accounts, and Opportunities can now be assigned to multiple users.

Direct assignments

Instead of using Custom Fields to create the team-based selling model, users will be able to directly use the new assignments model.

Job Roles

Having multiple users collaborating within the same space can lead to interesting 'many cooks in the kitchen situation' and revert the benefits - Who's responsible for what? 

Multi-Assignment allows for assignment of Job Roles which will help distinguish an individual user’s function within the collaborative team selling context.

Any user in Outreach can be assigned a job role and it will be displayed inside Multi-User experiences. However note that as opposed to other team selling methods like Account or Opportunity Teams, Multi-User Assignment only allows for one job role per user. It is advisable to keep job role names relatively broad, such as “SDR”, rather than “Senior SDR” or “SDR for SMB” in this team selling model.

Here’s how the job roles will be displayed inside the sidebar experience

Outreach will ship with four default roles: AE, BDR, CSM, SDR. Admins can go to Administration > User Management > Users > Job Roles to manage job roles or add new ones. In the CRM set up documentation we talk about how this entire process can be automated to directly manage them in CRM and bring the set up forward and apply to Outreach.

Once created, job roles can be assigned to individual users by going to Administration > User Management > Users > Select the user > Edit

Job roles are optional, assignments work without them and they have no bearing on access control. In that way, job roles mainly have informational value and cannot yet be used in search or in filtering. However, job role is a critical for team members to understand what they should be working on. Outreach recommends that you use and assign them. Job roles cannot be deleted but can be renamed.

Also note that job roles are different from User Roles and have no overlap. The job role does not rely on the governance hierarchy; it is simply used to describe the business responsibilities of a given user.

‘Assigned to me’ Filter and Smart View

Assigned users are available as a filter for users along with a 'Assigned to me' Smart Views in Prospect, Account and Opportunity list views. This simplifies users' ability to find records assigned to them or to other team members.

Just like any other smart view, users can create and save custom smart views with ‘Assigned’ and other filters best suited for their revenue workflows.

Assigned column

Enabling Multi-User Assignment enables the Assigned column to the records list views and shows all the users assigned to each record. Users can to multi-edit record Assignees directly from the list view.

Record Co-Ownership

From a governance standpoint, Assigned users are equivalent to being record Owners. In that way, Multi-User Assignment is a co-ownership model. For example, if an AE and SDR are both assigned to Acme Account, then both of them will see Acme under their 'Assigned to me' views.

When users are assigned to a record, the underlying ownership structure does not change, additional users simply get access to the record. Owners and Assigned are considered two different fields in governance. Adding a user to either or both of them provides the same level of access.

Profile permissions continue to be the source of access control for both owner and assigned users.

FAQ

Who is this feature for?

This is for customers who want their sellers to manage their own team selling workflows directly in Outreach. Multi-User Assignment affords a more flexible record-sharing model. CRM customers who currently use Salesforce Custom Lookup fields to denote co-ownership can use Assignees instead. We cover CRM setup in details here.

What is the value of this feature? 

Self managed collaborative selling workflows.

What is the purpose of a Job Role?

Job roles help differentiate revenue responsibilities between multiple assigned users.

Can you automatically assign a Job Role to a user?

You can use the existing APIs or CRM to bulk update Job Roles and assign them to users.

Will my existing Triggers and Rulesets be impacted? 

Your existing Triggers and Rulesets configuration will not change just by enabling Multi-User Assignment and will continue to function as-is assuming theirs a single Owner. You will need to update Triggers and Rulesets to take advantage of the new functionality.

Can I use my existing or new Teams with this feature?

In this release, Teams cannot be used directly. Instead, individual users will need to be added to the records individually. You can however use our CRM Sync or APIs to fully automate it.

Additional Information

• Next: How to Set Up Multi-User Assignment
• How to set up Multi-User Assignment with your CRM
• Multi-User Assignment APIs
• How to Map Outreach Assigned Fields to Custom Lookup Fields in Salesforce