Outreach vs. Salesloft: How to Make the Right Choice

Salesloft and Outreach are both sales acceleration and engagement platforms. Both aim to help sales reps speed up the sales cycle by automating and streamlining the way they reach out to prospects. This includes setting up email and voice outreach sequences, tracking engagement activity,  and reporting on sales performance. 

In other words, some important stuff. Which makes choosing the right platform just as crucial. 

​​The good news is you’ve come to the right place to figure it out. We’ve put together this detailed comparison to help you decide which tool is the best fit for your business.

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Outreach vs. Salesloft at a glance

What is Outreach?

Outreach is a sales engagement tool that empowers teams to better manage workflows, gain actionable insights, and navigate the increasingly complex buying process.

It does all this by helping you efficiently find people who need your product or service and enabling you to engage with them in meaningful ways. All while giving you the visibility to grow your business predictably.

The platform also offers a variety of functionality aimed at simplifying outreach efforts, including deal acceleration tools, buyer sentiment analysis, and real-time coaching powered by AI, and helpful playbooks and messaging guides.

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What is Salesloft?

Salesloft is a sales engagement tool that gives teams everything they need to execute their digital selling tasks through all stages of the pipeline, communicate with buyers, understand what to do next, and continuously improve through coaching. 

Like Outreach, Salesloft offers a variety of features to simplify outreach efforts, including cadence automation, one-click dialing, deal forecasting, and the ability to understand the impact of sales conversations and replicate the success of top-performing agents.

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How to choose between Outreach and Salesloft

Both Outreach and Salesloft offer an easy way to create personalized outreach cadences based on customers’ buying patterns and behavior so they can close more deals, faster. 

But which one’s better?

Below we’ve evaluated Outreach and Salesloft on four criteria: Ease of use, product functionality, email features, and pricing.

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1. Ease of use

What better place to get the inside scoop on how easy a piece of software is to use than customer reviews? From our research, the general consensus seems to be that Salesloft is easier to use than Outreach. 

According to G2, reviewers assessing the two solutions found Salesloft easier to use, set up, and administer. It also seems to have an overall good rep for customer service. However, some customers mention technical difficulties around cadences, like steps being missed and contacts on the “do not contact” list still receiving outreach. There’s also some chatter about dialer issues.

Outreach might be the more complex of the two options, but this could be because it’s also the more robust platform in features. It’s great for email, is a reliable phone dialer, and offers powerful analytics. There are complaints, however, about poor support—especially for the lower price tier customers.

2. Product functionality

Like we mentioned above, Outreach is the more feature-rich of the two platforms. While this can mean Outreach isn’t as easy to use, it also means it has more possibilities as far as product functionality goes. 

This Reddit comment pretty much sums it up:

For one thing, Outreach offers a super useful scheduler that lets you see your email drafts and scheduled times in one place. You can even link up your other Gmail addresses and see all your emails from different accounts. So no email ever gets missed or forgotten about.

Outreach also offers more advanced reporting, letting you see detailed analytics about each email you send for better campaign management. This includes open rate, CTR, reply rate, and if someone opened or downloaded an attachment within the email. With this information, you’ll easily be able to see which messages are working and which ones aren’t so much.

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This isn’t to say that Salesloft doesn’t have its own set of awesome features, of course. One of the key differences between Outreach and Salesloft is that with Salesloft, you create campaigns collaboratively (versus one person creating them alone). This is great for making sure nothing slips through the cracks, since there’ll be so many eyes on it.

Both Outreach and Salesloft also integrate with Salesforce, so you can map communications between you and your leads with contact information in your CRM and associate each touch with a single opportunity.

Pro-tip: While Outreach or Salesloft provide revenue intelligence for Salesforce, Weflow can improve Salesforce productivity by helping update records faster and organizing all your notes and to-dos in a modern workspace. 

When it comes to product features, you need to know what your business actually needs before making a buying decision. For example, Outreach lets you pause cadences while Salesloft doesn’t. But is that important enough to you to care? Everyone’s answer will be different.

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3. Email features

At first glance, the email features on these two platforms can look pretty similar. But when you take a closer look, you’ll see there are some key differences.

Outreach email has some incredible features that aren’t available in Salesloft, like the option to send personalized emails to everyone on your contact list, even if you have more than one email address for that contact. This makes it possible to connect with contacts on the service they use most often, whether it’s Gmail or Outlook.

Outreach can also pull information from LinkedIn profiles and use it in the email to make a more personalized connection—automatically. Other cool features include the ability to send scripted emails with fields for inserting data, HTML and  CSS customizable templates, and tracking of individual links within a campaign.

Salesloft has quite a few features that enable you to send targeted emails and easily track their performance and even add contacts to workflows when they engage with your content. For example, leads who open up an email or visit specific pages on your website can be automatically added to a follow-up campaign.

Building a customizable email campaign is easy with Salesloft’s drag-and-drop interface and their extensive library of email templates including welcome messages, product updates, surveys, and more.  

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In summary, Outreach is really focused on customer outreach and acquisition, which has the advantage of making it a useful platform not only for sales teams but marketing or recruiting teams as well. Salesloft, on the other hand, is more of a direct sales tool focused on generating qualified leads from your website, social media, and emails already in your inbox.

Are the features of one of these platforms better than the other? Again, like product functionality, it depends on what your business actually needs. So we’ll call this one a tie.

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4. Pricing

Both Outreach and Salesloft have a subscription pricing model and different levels of plans available, but neither has specific pricing information on their website. To find out, you’ll need to request a quote from their sales team. 

Here’s what we found out from other users on the interwebs though:

• Outreach costs upwards of $100/user/month
• Salesloft costs between $75 and $125/user/month 

Final verdict

Outreach and Salesloft are both excellent candidates for sales acceleration and engagement platforms with many of the same functionalities, like email, dialer, and analytics. 

Outreach is the more expensive option but offers more robust functionality, reporting, and integrations. The downside? These extra features make it more complicated to use than Salesloft, especially when you’re just starting out. Salesloft, on the other hand, is easier to use and costs less.

Our advice? If you’re looking for the best of the best and money isn’t an issue, choose Outreach. But if you’re looking for a no-frills option and have a tighter budget, Salesloft is a solid alternative.