Outreach vs Salesloft: Which sales engagement tool is best?

Efficiency is key to sales engagement. In modern sales, this means staying ahead of the competition with the help of advanced sales automation software. Two trusted names in this space are Outreach and Salesloft, digital solutions designed to revolutionize the way your team approaches sales.

Many businesses struggle to choose between Outreach and Salesloft. After all, these two solutions share many similar capabilities, such as pipeline management, sales workflow automation, and AI-powered engagement tools. So, how do you determine which sales engagement platform is best for your business?

To help you make that decision, we’ve compiled the must-know information about these two sales automation software options. From pricing to features, you can use this guide to compare the two solutions and choose the one that’s best for your needs. Or, you might discover that there’s a Salesloft or Outreach alternative that offers even greater value.

What is Outreach?

Outreach is an AI-driven sales execution platform that positions itself as the go-to-market solution for teams looking to create efficient and repeatable processes at scale. This sales automation software offers a variety of powerful tools that can help your team improve their sales engagement, including

• Sales communication tools
• Revenue insights and intelligence
• AI-powered features
• Automations
• CRM integrations

With its wide range of available capabilities, Outreach is typically preferred by enterprise-level businesses that can afford to sign up for the tiers they need most. This sales solution is highly scalable, offering large teams the ability to handle a high volume of work with ease.

What is Salesloft?

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that centralizes sales operations, facilitates customer communication, and provides insights into performance. This platform offers a range of powerful features to help businesses optimize their sales efficiency, including

• Automated workflows
• Advanced analytics
• Customer engagement tools
• Lead and pipeline management capabilities
• AI-powered features

Although Salesloft still offers a significant set of features, it’s considered a better fit for smaller businesses looking to improve team performance. This solution is still scalable, but remains focused on driving sales results rather than handling a high volume of work.

Who should use Outreach vs Salesloft?

Both Outreach and Salesloft have a similar customer base. Their tool sets overlap in various ways, and they both provide a similar service. If you’re looking for a general sales tool, either option may be the right fit for your business. However, there are some instances where one may be more appropriate than the other.

Target audience for Outreach

With its focus on scalability and large-team sales operations, Outreach is the preferred choice for teams that anticipate growth. This includes segments such as

1. Enterprise sales teams
2. Sales and revenue leadership
3. Customer success teams

Thanks to its wide-reaching feature list and its focus on data-driven, AI-powered solutions, Outreach may be considered the better choice for enterprise sales teams looking to drive B2B sales prospecting. This platform’s emphasis on data, deals, and revenue also makes it a favorite among leadership looking to optimize their current sales processes, as well as customer success teams wanting to take advantage of potential upsell opportunities. Overall, this solution operates effectively at a high level, making it a top choice for businesses looking to scale.

Target audience for Salesloft

Salesloft positions itself as a solution to help sales operations run more efficiently overall. From coaching sales reps to centralizing communication both internally and externally, Salesloft appeals to a few key audiences, including

1. Sales development teams
2. Account executives
3. Sales and revenue managers

This sales automation software features a variety of pipeline management tools that are ideal for sales development teams looking to optimize their customer lifecycle. Salesloft also prioritizes nurturing the customer relationship. Through tools meant to engage, manage, and communicate with potential leads, this solution is ideal for account executives. Salesloft also offers tools to help coach sales teams and gain insight into revenue forecasting, making it an excellent addition to a sales or revenue manager’s toolbelt.

Key features of Outreach

Outreach offers users a robust catalog of sales engagement features built to enhance performance through data-driven insights. There are many capabilities you can discover by browsing their site, but here are a few of the top features

1. Pipeline management: Among Outreach’s core capabilities, the pipeline management tools stand out as some of the best. Through AI and data-driven insights, Outreach offers several tools that enhance the way you collect leads and move them through your sales pipeline.
2. Sales forecasting: From scenario modeling to automatic roll-ups, Outreach’s sales forecasting tools help sales and RevOps teams generate the most accurate predictions possible for future performance.
3. Revenue intelligence: Outreach’s revenue intelligence software changes the way your team views the entirety of your revenue workflow. This solution uses AI to create accurate revenue forecasts, optimize workflows, and develop a sales strategy built around revenue-generating decisions.
4. Deal insights: Outreach’s deal intelligence capabilities (including deal health scores and AI-powered deal assist) are so deep that the platform even offers a separate pricing tier for these features.
5. Sales engagement tools: To optimize the prospecting process, Outreach’s sales engagement tools are designed to enhance the effectiveness of prospecting and increase consistency in follow-ups.

Key features of Salesloft

Salesloft’s advanced capabilities are easy to use and built to provide end-to-end assistance across your sales lifecycle. Although Salesloft does offer some top features as add-ons, the following capabilities are offered through base packages: 

1. Sales pipeline management: Salesloft offers industry-leading pipeline management features, but with a focus on process efficiency. Through Salesloft’s Cadence platform, your team can turn into a well-oiled, lead-nurturing machine.
2. Conversation intelligence: In addition to improving processes, Salesloft offers teams a range of tools to enhance sales conversations. From live call coaching to post-call analysis, these features can elevate your entire interaction process.
3. Deal management: Salesloft Deal is designed to enhance team collaboration, prioritize qualified leads, and maintain reliable pipeline data. Deal management tools are further enhanced by AI agents, which offer features like deal spotlight and integration with Salesloft’s Rhythm workflow automation.
4. Sales and process automation: Thanks to its built-in, native AI, as well as its new AI agents, Salesloft is fully equipped to streamline your sales process through automation. Salesloft Rhythm even offers AI-powered recommendations for next steps in your sales process to optimize your efficiency.
5. Analytics: In the Salesloft command center, sales and revenue leaders can view real-time data to make adjustments based on actual results. AI agents can assist with the extraction, analysis, and interpretation of these results to help provide actionable insights from your performance data.

Common features of Outreach and Salesloft

These two sales engagement platforms offer your team many of the same tools, but each solution excels in different areas. Therefore, it’s important to understand how they compare in these shared spaces:

1. AI agents: While both Outreach and Salesloft have AI agents, Salesloft’s breadth of capabilities is more helpful than Outreach’s is at the moment. Outreach has only a handful of agents compared to Salesloft, which is continually expanding the capabilities of this feature.
2. Forecasting tools: Outreach is known for its forecasting capabilities, specifically in the area of revenue. Both solutions have tools to increase the accuracy of your forecasts. But if this is a priority for you, Outreach may be a better option.
3. Pipeline management: When it comes to pipeline management features, your preferred solution will ultimately depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. Want to increase efficiency? Salesloft may be better. Want to improve prospecting? Outreach may be the ideal solution.
4. Deal management: Although both solutions are equipped with deal-centric solutions, Outreach places a higher priority on this aspect of their platform than Salesloft. Both software options provide your team with AI-powered solutions, so consider which specific tools better suit your needs.
5. Conversation intelligence: Salesloft is known for its customer-centric approach to improving conversations. With tools like its rep coaching and Drift self-service platform, it slightly outperforms Outreach in this area, especially when it comes to post-sale management.

Unique features of Outreach vs Salesloft

Outreach and Salesloft may overlap in many areas, but there are a few differences between these two solutions that could push you toward choosing one over the other.

Outreach unique features

1. Real-time AI call assistance: Outreach offers an AI-powered assistant through its native Kaia platform, which can pull data, provide insights, and support reps in real time during sales calls.
2. Enterprise features: Built for enterprise businesses, Outreach offers advanced enterprise features like multi-org support, territory management, and advanced role permissions.
3. Base-plan revenue management: Unlike Salesloft, which reserves its revenue management features for its top-tier plan, Outreach offers revenue tools through its Forecast base package.

Salesloft unique features

1. Customer-facing chatbots: Thanks to its acquisition of Drift chatbot, Salesloft offers a self-service AI chatbot to engage with website visitors and enhance lead generation.
2. Full mobile capabilities: While both solutions offer mobile versions, Salesloft’s mobile capabilities are more robust compared to Outreach, and include the ability to make calls, send emails, and manage cadences.
3. Email sentiment filtering: Salesloft’s email intelligence automatically sorts and filters emails based on reply type, such as “interested” or “unsubscribe,” as well as sentiment, to help reps prioritize their communication.

Outreach vs Salesloft: Comparison of key elements

Outreach and Salesloft generally offer many of the same features and benefits. But when you’re choosing between these two platforms, it’s important to focus on key areas like automation and AI, multi-channel outreach, sales pipeline management, integrations, and ecosystem, ease of use, scalability, and pricing. These factors are essential to comparing the value and ease of use that each software has to offer.

Determine for yourself which is the best fit for your business by using the following side-by-side breakdown.

Automation and AI

Both Salesloft and Outreach have their own native AI solution. While each solution’s AI and automation tools are advanced, the unique benefits they provide could be more or less valuable depending on your needs.

For example, Outreach’s AI capabilities are geared toward providing data-driven insights, with automation centered around metrics and analysis. Salesloft, on the other hand, prioritizes AI-powered process automation through AI agents and Salesloft Rhythm.

Multi-channel outreach

These sales automation software options offer similar opportunities for multi-channel outreach. Both solutions give users key sales engagement channels, such as

• Voice
• Live chat
• Email
• Social media
• Text

Each solution can expand its outreach options through integrations with social media apps and meeting software. Where these two solutions differ is in their self-service capabilities. Salesloft, through its acquisition of Drift, offers an advanced self-service chatbot that Outreach doesn’t. Salesloft also offers a feature called Cadence, which allows you to automate outreach across multiple platforms simultaneously.

Sales pipeline management

Pipeline management is the bread and butter of the Outreach platform. Although Salesloft still offers advanced pipeline management tools, they’re not quite at the same level as Outreach. From dashboards to scorecards, Outreach offers a wide range of tools to assist in generating and managing a robust and profitable pipeline.

Salesloft’s pipeline management features are more centralized around efficiency. Its Cadence pipeline platform offers features such as A/B testing, automation rules, and multi-channel personalization that make it easier to maintain a quality pipeline process.

Integrations and ecosystem

Outreach and Salesloft both allow users to connect their chosen sales engagement tool to the rest of their tech stack through a wide variety of integrations. Each of these solutions presents these integrations through an integration marketplace, where users can browse across different categories.

While both solutions offer a depth of integration possibilities, Salesloft has a larger overall array of options. Outreach provides users with more than 100 integration opportunities, but Salesloft’s marketplace features over 260 integrations.

Ease of use

Due to its robust set of advanced features, Outreach is generally considered the more challenging of the two platforms to learn how to use. To extract the maximum value from Outreach, you’ll need to learn how to use these advanced features, which often come with a steep learning curve for the non-technically inclined.

Salesloft is designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. It’s often praised for its ease of implementation and overall ease of use. Even its advanced features seem relatively easy to learn, but this simplicity may come at the cost of some overall complexity as a tool.

Scalability

Each of these digital solutions offers a certain level of flexibility that’s necessary when scaling your business. The majority of their features are designed for businesses of all sizes and can be adjusted as needed. However, Outreach stands out for the way it prioritizes enterprise customers.

Outreach’s mature enterprise features give it a higher potential ceiling than Salesloft in terms of scalability. Although this may only matter to larger companies, it could eventually impact the long-term usefulness of the solution in helping you achieve your goals.

Pricing

When comparing Outreach vs Salesloft’s pricing plans, each structures its tiers differently. While Salesloft has a simple, two-tier structure, Outreach’s platform is divided into distinct features based on specific needs. However, it’s also worth noting that some Salesloft features, like Drift AI Chat agent, are priced separately.

Neither platform offers a free version or even a free trial — a benefit many Outreach or Salesloft alternatives do provide. On top of that, pricing for both isn’t publicly available. Each solution requires prospective customers to contact the company directly for a quote.

As we explore below, the plan structures for these two options vary significantly. Although Salesloft is often considered the more affordable solution, direct comparisons are challenging due to the differences in how each plan is structured.

Outreach pricing plans

• Engage: Sequences, snippets, templates, smart account plan, prospect relationship maps, smart email assist, automation, triggers, CRM sync, including custom objects
• Call: Integrated sales dialer, live call monitoring, custom call dispositions, AI-powered call summary, Q&A
• Meet: Real-time call recording, transcription, AI-powered smart meeting assist, automated summary, action items, comprehensive search, playlists, and clips
• Deal: AI-powered smart deal assist, deal health score, deal grid, deal overview with activity history
• Forecast: Pipeline dashboard, forecast rollup, AI projection, scenario planning

Salesloft pricing plans

• Advanced: Pipeline generation, rep coaching, full customer lifecycle workflows, conversation intelligence, opportunity management features
• Premier: All the features included in the advanced package, plus forecasting and revenue management

How Jotform AI Agents enhance sales engagement

Although Outreach and Salesloft offer a plethora of powerful features, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be the best fit for your business. Sometimes, you need to keep things simple and try an alternative that offers high-powered features for a fraction of the cost (and effort).

Jotform AI Agents is one such alternative. This advanced, AI-driven sales automation software streamlines lead capture, data collection, and prospect engagement with dynamic agents that can be customized to match your exact sales needs.

Through Jotform’s user-friendly, no-code AI agent builder, your sales team can create custom agents that deliver key benefits of AI, such as

• AI-powered lead qualification and segmentation
• Automated sales sequences that trigger based on responses
• Multi-channel form automation (email, chat, landing pages)
• Smart data collection and validation for CRM optimization with Jotform Tables
• Custom workflows that integrate into sales engagement strategies with Jotform Workflows

Creating Jotform AI Agents is simple and can be done in a matter of minutes. Here’s how to get started:

1. Create an AI agent from scratch, convert a form into an AI agent, or choose from one of more than 7,000 AI Agent templates.
2. Train your agent by uploading internal files, importing knowledge bases, linking relevant URLs, or even performing hands-on training through practice conversations.
3. Customize your agents to match your branding by adjusting colors, AI avatars, and even speaking style.

These generative AI chatbots are designed not only to improve the quality of your interactions but also to increase the efficiency of your internal team. Jotform’s AI sales bots are capable of unifying your tech stack through more than 100 third-party integrations, including CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. Using these integrations, you can seamlessly transfer and utilize the data gathered from customer interactions without the risks associated with manual data transfer.

Jotform AI Agents are also capable of quickly filling specific roles in your sales team through sales-specific templates to reduce the burden of administrative tasks. These include

• Sales AI Agent
• Sales Associate AI Agent
• Sales Lead Generation AI Agent
• Daily Sales Report AI Agent
• Sales Call Report AI Agent

By choosing the right AI agents for your needs, you can more effectively manage your sales pipeline and free up your sales team to perform meaningful work that increases revenue. These solutions make nurturing sales opportunities easier than ever before and streamline your sales engagement process as a whole.

Choose the best sales engagement platform for your needs

Both Outreach and Salesloft offer a core set of tools that can benefit any sales team looking to enhance their sales engagement strategy. However, if neither of these solutions works for you, consider an Outreach or Salesloft alternative like Jotform AI Agents.

Jotform AI Agents are free to try, making them an affordable Salesloft or Outreach alternative for your team to explore. These AI chatbots can help streamline many of the same processes as Outreach or Salesloft, while also offering access to the full Jotform suite of products, thereby increasing your overall efficiency and return on investment.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash