We switched from Outreach to Groove 18 months ago.

Here were the main problems we were having:

The "shadow CRM"

Outreach and other sales engagement solutions manage contact data outside of CRM platforms. This effectively creates a secondary CRM, which causes major compliance issues with the GDPR regulations of the world. It also creates major data sync issues between Outreach and CRM. Only about 60 to 70% of our activity data ever made its way back into CRM, so we had an incomplete sense of what people were doing and what was working. Ultimately, we couldn’t easily A/B test our outbound messaging, which was challenging and frustrating for our team.

Incomplete analytics

Because of the activity and contact sync errors, I couldn't do any meaningful analysis on the revenue outcomes our team was driving. Yes, there are analytics built into Outreach, but most of the success criteria there have to do with call dispositions or meetings booked. That's useful, but ultimately is not what I am accountable for. What I need to analyze are pipeline and revenue. Outreach couldn't do that.

‍♂️ Broken SDR <> AE relationship

Sadly, the AE adoption of Outreach was never super strong despite our training and enablement. The main reason: Outreach does not manifest in an AE's flow of work. It's yet another thing that they have to go out of their way to use. And when they did log in, they found the UI overly complex. Which means ... it didn't get used.

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Spoiler alert: Groove solved all these things. More detail on the easy change management and high rep NPS in a post on Clari's blog.