Sales Engagement evolves to Revenue Execution - with Anna Baird, Chief Revenue Officer - Outreach

Anna Baird is the Chief Revenue Officer at Outreach, the leading Sales Engagement Platform.  Anna started her career as a partner at KPMG, and continued her career journey across multiple “C-Level” roles including CFO, COO, President and now CRO.

The first portion of our conversation centered on the maturity of the Sales Engagement Platform category.  Anna shared that across all B2B Sales, that the category has only achieved a 2% market penetration, as measured by the number of B2B sales professionals.

What started as a point solution for Sales Development, top of funnel prospecting tool, Sales Engagement has now evolved from the B2B Tech industry as an entry point to how do you impact the entire Go-To-Market team across the entire customer journey.

Research shows that 51% of B2B SaaS companies have invested in a Sales Engagement platform.  Anna sees the expansion opportunity for Sales Engagement to be both across every Go-To-Market function and across multiple new industries beyond the technology industry.  By automating the workflow associated with every point of customer engagement across the customer journey, data capture into the core Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system of record. 

Expansion revenue is becoming a larger component of ARR growth in the B2B SaaS industry. As a result, the Customer Success function is becoming a more prominent user of Sales Engagement, to manage expansion and renewals at scale. 

Anna’s vision is that Outreach becomes the primary dashboard that any GTM professional enters and lives their day, including highlighting the highest priority activities and tasks for the day - using predictive, revenue intelligence within the platform.  IIn fact, the vision is much larger, because the pain that exists goes far beyond tactical activities, it’s how to view every customer engagement point is available in a single, integrated platform.  In fact, Outreach is expanding their category name to the “Sales Execution Platform” - going beyond engagement to execution across the entire customer lifecycle.

Anna’s vision evolves Outreach into a “System of Execution” which is more about customer process execution versus a datastore of customer information.

Next, we pivoted to how revenue leaders can leverage “metrics and revenue intelligence” to make better decisions. By aggregating all customer conversations into a single environment, it becomes easier to apply revenue intelligence to all of the signals from customer engagement points to prioritize which signals are of highest priority.

Anna also shared her perspective on the importance and priority of Revenue Operations. Anna, calls the role “Revenue Excellence and Operations”. This role is responsible for both the strategy and then the execution of revenue processes. Having Revenue Operations being responsible for the operations and administration of processes + the platforms drive revenue performance.  In fact, the head of REO at Outreach is intimately involved in almost every strategic, revenue centric company level discussion.

Anna provides a highly strategic and insightful perspective on how technology is critical to enhancing Revenue Execution across every B2B Go-To-Market organization.

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