SalesTech Deep Dive: Outreach
In our latest SalesTech Deep Dive episode, Tenbound's David Dulany and I sat down with Outreach's new CEO Abhijit Mitra to discuss his vision for revenue execution.
Though he avoids the spotlight, Abhijit's track record speaks volumes. He architected ServiceNow's customer-facing workflow business—now a powerhouse in its own right, driving new customer acquisition on par with ITSM for the enterprise application giant.
SalesTech consolidation has been topping the industry agenda for a couple of years now. In early 2024, I cautioned that the market was driven more by eliminating unused applications or departmental consolidation under a single provider than by true cross-category convergence.
Now, as we enter 2025, the landscape has evolved. The four leading contenders —Clari, Gong, Outreach, and Salesloft—have matured their platforms across sales engagement, conversation intelligence, deal intelligence, coaching, and revenue intelligence (forecasting) and have started winning sizable consolidation deals.
It strikes me that this emerging category—dubbed Revenue Orchestration by Forrester and Revenue Action Orchestration by Gartner—may finally deliver on the long-unmet promise of Sales Force Automation (SFA), a misnomer for an application that has primarily served as a system of record rather than truly automating sales reps’ workflows.
SalesTech has largely gained traction among small and midsize tech firms. Interestingly, we’re now seeing large enterprises across an expanded set of industries —telecommunications, financial services, and manufacturing— driving large-scale sales transformation projects, turning to these platforms to enable change within their organizations.
Abhijit unpacked Outreach's Sales Execution platform, emphasizing the criticality of a robust data platform. Every Outreach deployment comes with its Data Cloud, gathering data points from all activities managed via its applications while deeply syncing with CRM systems, integrating with third-party signal platforms, and connecting with enterprise data warehouses and data lakes from Databricks and Snowflake.
Since its inception, Outreach has delivered some of the most robust analytics in the space. Now, it aims to leverage its wealth of data and insights to codify best practices and power its newly released prospecting agent. With a vision of AI supporting humans, Outreach plans to harness agentic AI to automate tedious tasks, freeing up sellers and driving optimal behaviors and best practices.
In a decade, Outreach has transformed from a prospecting tool into a comprehensive system of action—a workflow engine that automates repetitive tasks for reps while providing critical visibility to managers. Organizations still viewing Outreach through the narrow lens of its origins should reassess and explore the full capabilities of its sales execution platform.
Watch the full episode here