Musings from Outreach Explore 2024
Outreach hosted its Explore product showcase online earlier this month. The event marked the company's first major appearance under new CEO Abhijit Mitra, who succeeded founder and industry icon Manny Medina.
Outreach unveiled its AI prospecting agent as the event’s highlight. Launching in Q1 2025, the agent combines account and contact research with multi-channel engagement across email, LinkedIn, and voice. It leverages first-party signals from prior communications and third-party signals from public sources, including hiring activity, funding rounds, and job changes. The agent can operate in two modes — human-controlled or autonomous.
Outreach's differentiation strategy in this crowded space rests on three pillars: comprehensive data integration spanning engagement history, CRM, third-party intent signals, and content; a unified platform that consolidates all activities in the prospecting workflow from identification through engagement; and flexible control modes ranging from autopilot to copilot with dedicated touch.
Data infrastructure emerged as a key theme throughout the event. Outreach has been making continued investments to support the customization requirements of large enterprises. Support for custom objects, previously available for Salesforce, has been extended to Microsoft Dynamics. This enables the synchronization of custom CRM objects — extensively used by enterprises — with the Outreach data platform. The company introduced two new data integration capabilities: a Snowflake connector for enterprise data warehouse access and custom event APIs for third-party application triggers. These developments strengthen the data foundation powering Outreach's AI models.
The SalesTech market has primarily experienced horizontal consolidation — the reduction of vendors offering similar capabilities across departments — rather than vertical consolidation. Enterprise buyers with multi-app environments continue to favor best-of-breed solutions. However, the landscape is shifting as platform providers deepen the features of their suite components. Amplitude's vertical stack consolidation offers a compelling case study in platform consolidation. The mid-market software provider (close to 1,000 employees) shared its three-phase migration to the Outreach platform.
Phase one focused on re-implementing Outreach Engage with enhanced cross-functional alignment, addressing the common challenge of fragmented segments and campaigns. Phase two transitioned conversation recordings into Outreach Kaia. Phase three, the most complex, involved translating forecasting rules into Outreach Forecasting. Rather than performing a lift-and-shift migration, Amplitude leveraged the opportunity to simplify a previously complex array of forecasting rules, expanding access beyond system administrators.
With core integration complete, Amplitude aims to leverage its unified stack to gain better visibility into revenue performance. This elimination of fragmented, application-based reporting mirrors Reddit's experience, shared at the November Gong Engage event, where providing a single version of the truth was highlighted as a key benefit of consolidation. Amplitude characterized the improvement as eliminating the “daily treasure hunt" for insights.
Following a quiet period of realignment under new leadership, the event signaled Outreach’s re-emergence with a sharpened enterprise focus and a slate of data-driven innovations.