How to book more meetings with a multi-channel platform
How can Outplay drive growth?
Sandeep: Outplay is a multichannel sales engagement platform that makes selling much easier. Whether you’re using email, call, or LinkedIn, you can use the platform as if you reach out to prospects more personalized and at scale, essentially helping you make sales much easier.
Best Outplay features
Sandeep: First of all, we’ve got a lead sourcing module. If you are outbounding someone, you can also find their contact details on the platform. One of the big features that we’ve got is called a meeting scheduler. If you have multiple reps working for you, you can set up this meeting scheduler on your website to set up different functionalities, whether you want meetings to get scheduled or based on someone’s geo. That’s the second very interesting feature we’ve launched.
The third thing is something that I always love. It’s something called Magic Chat. If you’re reaching out to a specific prospect, and let’s say you drop a link that we provide, and the prospect clicks that link and comes onto your website, you can have a live chat with that prospect right there on the website. These three are different from the usual stuff that sales and engagement platforms do.
Outplay pricing plans
Sandeep: We have a full free version of the plan. Any user who’d like to go and sign up for the product can do that. We created that for many early-stage startups or founders who want to try something out. We have several plans – Start, Growth, and Enterprise as well. Typically we will start the pricing at upwards of $50, but it totally depends on what you’re looking at. I’ve given you a range of pricing because we also provide data. Usually, if you buy a smaller plan, you’ll get data, but some customers will want to come and pick up a lot more data points. That’s when they might end up paying more.
Outplay best integrations
Sandeep: We integrate well with most CRM players today. Whether you have Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive. Traditionally we sync it all to the CRMs because most of the use cases are around the fact that you will have to use a CRM at some point, right? So, for example, once you have the meeting booked, you want to track actions happening on a CRM.
Outplay use cases
Sandeep: Outplay was built for a very outbound use case. Let’s say you are trying to reach out to new prospects that you like to sign up on the business. You identify either a type of persona that you want to go after in the industry or company. You get the data, and then you, you put it on a sales engagement platform so that you make sure that you follow a series of steps, whether it’s day one, you call them day two, you email them day three, you do LinkedIn connections, and you could build how many other steps you want. That is a typical use case for somebody outbounding.
We’ve also seen over the last year that there’s a very strong inbound use case as well. Let’s say you get inbound leads, people coming in, and signing up on your website, and you want to make sure that your account executives are following up with all of them as well and not missing any leads. What happens is that when a lead comes in, it automatically goes into a sequence of the rep that it’s been assigned to automatically. So when they sign up on the date, they know exactly what they need to follow up with. You want to make sure that nobody drops the ball and forgets. I think it’s becoming a stronger use case nowadays. Many marketers demand gen folks like myself are very keen on ensuring all inbound is focused.
Outplay vs. alternatives
Sandeep: One of the major things we have is that product adoption is extremely high. We also have native integrations with all the key CRMs today. The second big differentiator, especially with some of the bigger players in the market today, is that we also have data. You can buy data from the platform and directly start using it. You don’t need to invest in a large database platform for your outbound prospecting at all. Just use the data available within the system, and buy whatever credits you need because you don’t need to be doing 10,000-odd emails.
I also have to call on the smaller players because many were not built as sales engagement platforms. They were probably started as an email marketing platform. So we were born multichannel, as in we built the product, keeping multichannel because we know you can never just get a meeting by sending only emails. You have to do different types of touchpoints. And it was always the plan in the origin story itself to do something like that. So that’s how I think we largely differentiate from the rest.
What do you actually do as the Director of Demand Generation?
Sandeep: My main role in the company is to ensure that I bring in the right amount of pipeline required for our sales teams to be able to close business, right? At my disposal, I have different types of marketing avenues. I can do inbound marketing, performance, paid and organic, or outbound marketing, webinars, events, email, content syndication, and all of those. Essentially, I have these two wings. It’s on me to figure out the right campaign to run across the board to bring in that amount of pipeline. So, essentially, in one line, my KPI is bringing the right amount of pipeline required for my sales team to close whatever target they’re chasing.
What’s your best piece of advice for a starting marketer?
Sandeep: One thing I could have done earlier is learn from the community. You can read a bunch of articles and figure out all the stuff there, a lot of like very good marketers out there who put some really good content and real problems they’re trying to solve in their organizations. So I feel like it’s a great opportunity for youngsters. Follow them if impossible. If you have a chance, chat with them. Understand how they took their growth. I do it now a lot.
There is no harm in reaching out to people. Talk to as many people as you can, and you will learn so much more than you will learn from online articles and videos. I think the best advice I ever got is never to stop learning. You can become the best marketer, but curiosity will keep your energy, which will keep you also engaged.
What’s your favorite software?
Sandeep: My first job was to build an SDR team, and I really missed a tool like Outplay back then when we started. I feel like Outplay is a great tool to prospect, to go out there to do a bunch of stuff. Apart from Outplay, hands down, it’ll have to be Notion. I absolutely love Notion. I wish to improve how I use Notion, but it already brings me so much value.
