Multi-User Assignment Overview

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to provide information to Outreach Admins and Users regarding Multi-User Assignment.

Intended Audience:

• Outreach Admins
• Outreach Users

Multi-User Assignment Overview

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

A typical example of a team-based selling strategy can be CSM, TAM, and SDRs who can now collaborate on the same Opportunity by sharing the assignment. Two teams can also share common resources between them for the most efficient, and effective, sales execution.

Benefits of Multi-User Assignment

Most B2B purchases involve several decision makers and influencers and follow a complex nonlinear path (Source: Gartner).

In a traditional selling model, this falls on an individual. Success, therefore, depends directly on this individual's ability to coordinate and generally manage a complex collaboration mode. To support more complex sales motions that often involve more team-based selling, Outreach is investing in more capabilities that enhance team-based selling models.

In the example above you can see in traditional selling motions where a team is trying to sell together, that information isn’t shared continuously and seamlessly with the right context. Often when information is shared without context that puts an additional burden on the seller to share the right information at the right time.

With Multi-User assignment for accounts prospects and opportunities, Outreach is helping organizations enable team-based selling with more collaborative selling motions by providing the ability to assign the right users to the record. 

By assigning the right users, users can also easily view records assigned to them – which helps them spend less time searching for records that are relevant to them. 

Lastly, organizations can also integrate with their CRM and use APIs to manage multiple users assigned to a prospect, account, or opportunity.

Multi-user assignments

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

Multi-User Assignment enables multiple users, with diverse skill sets, to come together in the same collaboration space. This could lead to some confusion around an individual Assignee’s responsibility to the record. 

Multi-Assignment will introduce the new concept of Job Roles which will help distinguish an individual user’s function within the collaborative team-based selling model.

Any user in Outreach can be assigned a job role and it will be displayed inside Multi-User experiences. It is advisable to keep job role names relatively broad, such as “SDR”, rather than “Senior SDR” or “SDR for SMB”.

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

Outreach will ship with four default roles: AE, BDR, CSM, SDR. New roles can be added and the existing roles can be renamed by going to Settings > Job Roles.

Through a future update, only Admin users will be able to change the list of job roles and update the job role assigned to a specific user.

Once created, job roles can be assigned to individual users.

Job roles are optional, assignments work without them and they have no bearing on governance. In that way, job roles mainly have informational value and cannot yet be used in search or in filtering.

Note: The new job role concept is different from the existing role in the governance role hierarchy. The job role does not rely on the governance hierarchy; it is used to describe the business responsibilities of a given user. Job roles cannot be deleted but can be renamed.

New ‘Assigned to me’ Smart View

Smart Views now understand the concept of Assigned. This simplifies users' ability to find records owned by them or by other users. This will be available as a filter for users.

In addition to filters, as part of Multi-Assignment, we’re also adding a new ‘Assigned to me’ Smart View to Prospects, Accounts, and Opportunities that will only show the records that are assigned or owned by the user.

This intends to replace the need for users to create and maintain complicated views with Owner and Custom fields (indicating other Owners) which are one of the most used views when it comes to Accounts-based selling.

Users will still have the ability to create and save custom Smart Views with ‘Assigned’ or other filters and custom-build the views for their personal use.

With Multi-User Assignment, an Assigned column will be added to the records list view and will show all the users assigned to each record.

Users will also be able to multi-edit record Assignees directly from the list view.

About the new Ownership Model

From a governance standpoint, Assigned users are equivalent to being record Owners. In that way, Multi-User Assignment is a co-ownership model. For all other features in the product that are not Multi-User aware, the existing Outreach security model based on record ownership does not change. 

This also means that when more than one user is added as an Assignee of a record, it is equivalent to all of those users having ownership of that record. As an example, one Account or Opportunity record can have an AE and SDR associated and both these users will see it under ‘My records’.

When users are assigned to a record, the underlying ownership structure does not change, additional users simply get access to the record.

Note: It is important to note that because Multi-User will move Prospects, Accounts, and Opportunities to a co-ownership model, the governance model will follow. Going forward, governance for Prospects, Accounts, and Opportunities will be enforced through the list of  ‘Assigned’ users instead of the current model where only a single ‘Owner’ owns the record.

The set of profile permissions associated with a user continues to define what that user can and cannot do with a record. User profiles can specify the visibility of the record as All records or Owned records depending on the level of visibility the user should have.

Owner <> Assignee auto-synchronization

Since the governance model will be enforced on the basis of ‘Assignees’, it is vital that existing governance implementations using ‘Owners’ continue to work.
To do this, Outreach will migrate the existing Owners to the new Assigned field and maintain synchronization between them automatically. This will ensure backwards compatibility for components that aren’t Multi-User aware.

CRM as the source of truth

Customers have the option to disable the Assignee <> Owner auto-synchronization and instead rely on their CRMs as the source of truth. In such a case, the Owner and Assigned fields will need to be mapped to equivalent fields in CRM.

CRM systems typically have records with a named custom field that describes the role, such as SDR or AE. The value stored in that field is the specific user. This allows putting any user name under an SDR field, for example. 

By contrast, in Outreach, a user is assigned to a specific record without having a dedicated custom field. The role of the user is attached to the user (and not to the record). While this approach prevents assigning the same user to multiple records as having different roles, it simplifies the assignment and does not require the creation of custom fields.

Note: While we understand that some customers might choose to maintain user assignments directly in their CRMs, there might be some implications you need to be aware of. If you choose to not use this auto-synchronization feature, please reach out to your Outreach partner.

FAQ

Who is this feature for?

This is for customers who want a more flexible record-sharing model and Salesforce customers who currently sync multiple Outreach custom fields <> Salesforce Custom Lookup fields to denote ownership and support team-based selling.

What is the value of this feature? 

A. Previously, visibility was limited to a single assigned owner or made visible to the entire org. With this release, customers can now create a more flexible model by allowing records (Prospects, Accounts, Opportunities) to be assigned to multiple users. 

What other features are planned for enabling multi-user assignment beyond Prospects, Accounts and Opportunities? 

Currently, this feature only supports assignments to Prospects, Accounts and Opportunities.

Support for other features like Sequences, Triggers etc. will be considered for the future roadmap. In this release, they will continue to function with the current concept of Owner, including any Triggers set up for automation.

What is the purpose of a Job Role and what are the limitations of Job Role

Multi-User Assignment is introducing a new concept of job role, which should help differentiate between multiple assigned users. This new concept simplifies the understanding of the responsibilities of assigned users within the company. 

For this release, Job Roles are not designed to be used for sequencing, triggers, and filtering based on job roles. 

Can you automatically assign a Job Role to a user?

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

Will this feature allow customers to sync Accounts Teams or Opportunity Teams from Salesforce to Outreach to automatically assign users?

We currently do not support syncing Account Teams or Opportunity Teams into Outreach.

Can I sync Outreach Assigned fields from my CRM system?

Yes, you can map Outreach Assigned fields to custom lookup fields in Salesforce and sync multi-assignments into Outreach. To learn more about setting up multi-user assignment sync, refer to How to Map Outreach Assigned Fields to Custom Lookup Fields in Salesforce.

I use SFDC to sync Owner information, will that continue to work with this feature?

Yes, the current ownership model and plugin sync mappings will continue to work. To keep consistency of Owner vs. Assigned our recommendation is to map Owner Id to Owner.

For customers using Multi-User Assignment SFDC Sync please check How to Map Outreach Assigned Fields to Custom Lookup Fields in Salesforce for more information on how to set up the sync configuration.

Will my existing Triggers and Rulesets be impacted? 

Your existing Triggers and Rulesets configuration will not change with this release and will remain with the single Owner that was mapped already. As stated above, this will be considered in a future release based on customer demand.

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 either manually, through APIs or through SFDC sync.

Additional Information

• How to Set Up Multi-User Assignment
• Multi-User Assignment APIs
• How to Map Outreach Assigned Fields to Custom Lookup Fields in Salesforce

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