Account Based Sales Development vendor Outreach has been named a Forbes 100 Cloud Rising Star.  CEO Manuel Medina said that his firm offers a “platform that transforms how sales teams communicate and engage with prospects.  We believe there is a massive opportunity to bring a higher level of sophistication to the sales process so teams can focus on what they do best – close deals.”

Karan Mehandru, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, describes Outreach as a “system of action for sales people.”  Calling sales “the lifeblood of the organization,” Mehandru continued that “salespeople are creating the same level of sophistication as their marketing counterparts” which creates an opportunity for a “massive company” to deliver on the promise of CRM.

Mehandru joined the Outreach board after Trinity led a $17.5 million Series B round this summer.

Noting that almost sixty percent of sales rep time is dedicated to non-sales activity, Medina said, “Our main goal is to provide them with both more analytics about what he’s doing and more insight into what he could be doing to do it better.”

Seattle-based Outreach has grown to 92 employees and has sixteen open positions across Product, Sales, Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Success.  Back in June, they stated plans to double their company to 160 employees over the next year with a trebling of their engineering team to forty headcount.

The firm supports over one thousand sales teams at firms of all sizes.  Customers include AdRoll, Adobe, Glassdoor, Cloudera, Zillow, and Docusign.

The firm provides a cadence tool for email and phone, analytics, mobile apps, and connectors with Salesforce, Gmail, Exchange, DiscoverOrg, and Datanyze.

Over the next year, the company is looking to add additional intelligence and insights into the sales workflow.  The firm lists many insight and workflow capabilities as coming soon:

• Plays and Playbooks – “Create a master plan to engage your accounts with Plays and Playbooks designed to optimize your approach.”
• Play-by-Play – “Engage multiple personas within an account simultaneously with Plays designed to accomplish a specific goal at every step.”
• Insights Tiles – “Learn more about the person you’re communicating with for the most personalized conversation possible.”
• Colleague Replies – “Determine how connecting with one prospect in an account affects the engagement of other colleagues in the playbook.”
• Persona Optimized – “Outreach gives you analytics to determine when the best times are to call, all by persona.”
• Voicemail Drop – “When reaching your recipient’s voicemail, let Outreach leave a pre-recorded message, so you can move on to the next activity.”
• VM Drop A/B Testing – “Let Outreach test which voicemails produce higher call-back rates by A/B testing the drop of a selection of recordings.”
• Calling within Playbooks – “Call each role persona in succession for an opportunity to communicate your value.”
• Conversation Transcription – “Read transcripts of conversations, broken down by who said what, for coaching opportunities.”
• Transcription Search – “Search conversation histories for specific mentions of objections, competitors, and more.”
• Whisper – “Managers can speak to their reps on a call without the end recipient hearing them.”

An MS Dynamics connector is also in development.