How a Director of Strategy & Analytics leverages data to drive sales

Carrie Leon, the Director of Strategy and Analytics at Outreach, discusses the app's powerful capabilities that enhance the workflow from SDRs to CFOs. Her team utilizes the Snowflake connector to integrate data, enabling them to create triggers that alert account owners about expansion opportunities and potential churn. By defining internal metrics and ensuring the accuracy of signals, they drive actionable insights for sellers and CSMs. Additionally, they assess account health through weekly active user data, validating information against account owners' feedback. This comprehensive approach showcases how data analytics can effectively enhance decision-making within Outreach.

How Analytics Helps Sales Teams Make Smarter Decisions

Hi, my name is Carrie Leon. I'm the Director of Strategy and Analytics here at Outreach. And today I'm going to show you how I get to use our platform. I come from a slightly different world than your traditional Outreach user.

The app has fantastic capabilities that span from our SDR to AE motions all the way up through our CFO. But as an analytics team, we are traditionally an internal resource. And the best way we can do our job is to use data and signaling to proactively help our account owners and our account managers understand where risk might lie in their accounts, where opportunities for growth might lie. And Outreach lets my team bring the insights that we find directly into the program where the sellers live, which is Outreach.

Bringing Usage Data Into Outreach With Custom Objects

So the place I'm going to show you how we do that is using our custom objects. So one of the really cool features that Outreach released this past year had to do with custom objects. And what that means is being able to bring something like a data table or a piece of information directly into Outreach that may not be directly out of something like Salesforce CRM or Dynamics. The way that my team brings data into Outreach is via the Snowflake connector, which allows us to build a custom object like a data table into Outreach.

Creating Smart Triggers to Surface the Right Signals

One of the really cool features that Outreach then allows us to do is take that data and build triggers, single conditions or multi conditions, directly in the product in order to allow our sellers and CSMs to know what's actually happening. For example, if they have an account that had a sudden increase in licensed users and now they're at capacity, we can signal to them that that might be an opportunity for expansion or potentially a better way to align to a new team that might be coming in. If we see a sudden drop in usage, which is a common sight signal for potential churn, we're able to quickly trigger to the owner of that account to say, hey, you might want to go take a look at this account and understand what is causing the drop in usage.

We can stay as high level as a simple data point. We can get even more deeper depending on the type of data table we bring in. So this is an example of a usage metric table that we have. And what this allows us to see is for each account what insights we can derive from the way that they're using the Outreach product.

We have various metrics around usage that are defined internally by my team. And we are then able to provide the results from that data into the AEs or the CSMs and tell them exactly how healthy from a usage perspective their accounts are. Once the data in from the Snowflake Connector, we're able to use our triggers functionality in order to send information directly to the AEs, the CSMs, the managers on what the data is telling us about the account. One of the benefits of our triggers functionality is that you can actually add multiple conditions.

And a great example I would like to say is let's say a customer saw a sudden drop in licensed users. We often look at things as a percentage. My customer might have 500 seats, and they're using 500 of them. If they're fully licensed and then all of a sudden that drops, well, that might be because we had a really great expansion with them.

So now there's even more licenses available. My team wouldn't benefit the sellers if we were triggering inaccurately on our data. So our triggers having multiple conditions allows us to clean out and make sure that the signals we're providing are exactly what the sellers need. And that can be really difficult in some of our other systems out there where a CSM might have 10 or 20 triggers a day.

If we're just flooding them with information that might not be super accurate, they're not going to then trust us as their analytics peers. So this really brings that all into one easy place. Oftentimes, our team is really focused on how do we drive action from insights. As a data analyst at heart, I tend to want all of the data to myself.

Not every role wants that. Sometimes we really need to help from an efficiency perspective, tell our sellers or our CSMs, you need to be in these places at this time. And this functionality allows us to do that.

Using Account Assist to Validate Trends Without Interruptions

As an added bonus, one additional place that my team really likes to use Outreach, which is a little bit more in line with how our traditional sellers use it, is we use the account assist.

I don't know that my team would be as good at their job if they didn't have the access to our accounts and their information via account assist. One way that we're able to use this is we will look at the data set of a particular account to understand something like the health of them. How are we engaging with them? How are they using Outreach?

What use cases do they have? Who's our executive sponsor at that company? And my team in the past would have to go and bother any seller or any CSM or the manager of those accounts to understand if what we are seeing directly reflects what is happening in reality. We don't have to do that anymore.

So a great way that my team is able to come in here and validate information we're seeing is we might look at weekly active user and see a trend for a particular customer. We can then come in here and actually ask our own product based on the data that's being piped into it. And it tells us the most recent usage trend for this account. It tells us, is it considered healthy or unhealthy because we have defined these ourselves.

We look at who are the key people that are using it and what are the most common activities that these users are doing. Now, it's able to do that not only because we are able to pipe data directly into it. It's comparing it against once the account owners are saying on their calls. It's comparing against things like a business review that's being reported via KAIA that we're able to capture all that information in one single question without even having to bother the account team to begin with.

Because as long as they're doing their role right and living in Outreach like most of them love to, then we're able to also benefit. And that's how data analytics uses outreach.