From Revenue Orchestration to Recursive GTM

Julia Nimchinski:

Awesome, and next up, we welcome Paul Selby, Director of Product Marketing at Outreach, and Caleb Netterfield, Senior Solutions Consultant. super excited to have you here. How are you doing?

Paul Selby:

Good, how about yourself?

Julia Nimchinski:

Very excited.

Paul Selby:

Blame him.

Caleb Netterfield | Outreach:

guys.

Paul Selby:

Well, hello and welcome, everyone. As Julie mentioned, I’m Paul Selby, I’m Product Marketing and Outreach. With me is our Rockstar Senior Solutions Consultant, Caleb Netterfield. He’s going to be sharing a demo here in a bit. Little quick framing before we get started.

We’re going to spend about five minutes on how Outreach thinks about Recursive GTM, then roughly 20 minutes or so live in the product, and then we’ll take questions as time allows. So, as you’re watching, think about your own organization, and where do things like context get lost between handoffs today? Hold those questions for us for the end.

So, HSE sessions today are around a particular theme, the shift from systems of record to systems of action, and now systems of learning. Most revenue teams live in the first two. That would be systems of record, and those systems of action. Systems of record store what happened, and reps dig through them before they do anything. With systems of action, agents can execute then on signals.

But the full system really only learns when every outcome becomes context for the next workflow. Therein lies the context problem. How does AI get the context it needs to adapt your go-to-market? Our answer is orchestration. People, agents, workflows, and shared context, all running together as one system. Orchestration doesn’t make a system recursive on its own, it just creates the conditions for it.

So let me show you where that shared context lives in Outreach. Busy slide, I know, but this is where Outreach answers that context problem. We’re going to start at the very bottom. Revenue data are things like emails, calls, meetings, CRM, first-party product usage, third-party intent, public market signals, and your own knowledge content. Key is they’re all together in one place. Next layer up, revenue context.

This is the layer that matters most for today’s topic. It turns raw data into structured context that carries forward from one workflow to the next. This means your agents don’t start working from nothing. The agent execution layer determines how agents actually act, and how you’re able to govern what they do.

That leaves Omni, Outreach’s purpose-built agents, and third-party agents running across the core revenue workflows and showing up where your revenue teams are working, including places like Slack, Teams, email, and their calendars.

The point here for Recursive GTM is that everything above the context layer reads from it, and everything that’s happening above those layers, like agents and your seller’s actions, writes back into it. So let’s take a look at what that looks like when agents work together. To be clear, we don’t have agents teaching other agents… yet. What we have is this idea of recursive workflows.

The output of one workflow becomes the input to the next, because every agent reads from and writes back to the same revenue context you just saw. So here’s an example of a win-back loop. It starts with Revenue Agent finding churned and closed lost accounts worth another look, and it begins the engagement process.

Personalization Agent turns buyer context into the message that you’re going to share with those prior accounts. Research Agent adds what’s changed. Maybe there’s some company news, an acquisition took place, or maybe there’s a competitor inside the account today. Meeting Prep Agent briefs the seller and the solutions team from all the emails, calls, and research that already exists in the system.

After that first call, Deal Agent reads the transcript and recommends updates to the methodology fields back in your CRM system. Then the loop closes. With those deal agent updates, deal fields are kept up to date and summarized for current pipeline reviews, and the gaps they reveal kick off the next win-back or prospecting workflow back at step one. Along the way.

Agents are orchestrating all the steps, and our integration through MCP brings the rest of your stack in as needed. So where does the learning actually happen? It’s at the platform layer, not inside any single agent. Knowledge is a library of your documents, like product docs, playbooks, and case studies. Agents search it and pull details that matter for each question.

Or context is an admin-curated summary of what you sell, who you compete with, and how you sell. Agents read every active block on every turn, so nobody has to re-explain the basics. And this is part of our October release, so kind of fresh off the presses here, and it’s rolling out to eligible customers now.

Deal context is every email, call, and meeting that adds that additional detail that will be useful in future interactions. For even more context, you can tell Omni, Outreach’s conversational agent, to remember a preference, such as, you know, always format my call prep agendas as bullets. And it applies that consistently, then, going forward.

Outreach can also call into tools you already use, as I mentioned, through MCP, like ZoomInfo, Glean, Seismic, or Snowflake, and bring that context with what Outreach already knows into the account and deal. Outreach can also serve as an NCP server, so tools like Claude or ChatGPT can work with your outreach data.

Alright, I’m done talking, you’re all here for the demo, so I’m gonna kick it over to Caleb now to take it away.

Caleb Netterfield | Outreach:

Excellent. Thank you, Paul. Everybody, great to meet you. I’m very much a visual learner, and so as we walk through things like slides, sometimes just getting it down to what does this actually mean for your go-to-market teams?

So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to put my seller hat on, whether I’m an account manager with a large book of business, or I’m a strategic account executive with only a couple key accounts, or maybe I’m generating pipeline as a sales development rep. Outreach is going to be able to handle all of those workflows that encompass my go-to-market.

And so what I’m going to do is walk you through how agents are meeting in each one of those stages of my workflow, and how they’re learning from the various workflows that are running throughout Outreach. Let’s go ahead and jump into the Outreach platform. For those of you who have never been into Outreach, welcome. Just a little bit of orientation on where we’re at.

So, starting our day within the home screen, this is where a seller might have their cup of coffee and be asking themself, where should I be spending my time? Now, I have agents across all of the workflows, that I’m gonna be interacting with as a seller.

If I start right over here with my key accounts that are being enriched by the signals that Paul mentioned, whether it’s ZoomInfo, or it’s directly from CRM, or Outreach’s research agent that’ll go and look out to the web and pull Contextualized information into each one of my accounts.

Or, it’s the tasks that are due for me that are being automatically populated based off of those signals that we’re pulling in from the web. Then we’re even looking over to, what does my meeting and my agenda look like for today? The specific conversations that I have, that I need to get prepped on, and maybe my solutions consultant, or my account executive, or even my VP that’s joining this critical meeting.

That then brings us over to our opportunities, and every one of those ops are being influenced by the conversations that are being captured by Outreach Kaia, which is our conversation intelligence platform built into Outreach. Last but not least, all the way up at the top right here, Paul mentioned it already, this is where Omni brings all of that to life with a universal chat interface.

So that’s a quick introduction to the different types of workflows. that a seller’s going to be interacting with. Let’s actually walk through them, though, so you can see how each one of these connect together. Starting back down at the account signals that are running, maybe there are specific expansion signals that are coming in from the market.

At a glance, I can see through ZoomInfo my accounts that are automatically being enriched and when they were last enriched. And if I jump into them, I can, at a glance, see my account plan. That’s being summarized by those internal interactions. That would be emails. CRM or recorded conversations over Zoom, Teams, Microsoft, or Google.

And then we’re looking at the external sources as we move down right here, and that’s when we’re looking out to the web. And those get brought all together to help orchestrate my agents that are running my workflows. So maybe there’s a merger or an acquisition in one or more of my key accounts, or I have outbound prospecting workflows that I need to fill my funnel.

There might be even a competitor that we’re really trying to displace this quarter, and so we have key workflows that are running there, and even event invitations. All of these are being queued up automatically by Outreach agents, and I didn’t need to do anything yet. So, got my cup of coffee first thing in the morning, I’m just gonna jump in and click go on these tasks.

Now, first things first, Outreach, as I mentioned, has automatically enrolled this person, Ava Patel, who’s our pretend CRO over at OpenAI. into a sequence. And Outreach has not only enrolled this person into a sequence, a sequence, by the way, is a series of multi-channel touchpoints designed to elicit a response from somebody. So, emails, phone calls, LinkedIn, other generic tasks.

This one has gone ahead and written an email for me using that signals, those signals that are coming in from those internal and external sources. So, for example, right over here, we pulled from the web that OpenAI recently acquired Acme.

And that’s going to be a key signal as a seller here at Outreach that there’s a whole host of new employees that are now underneath the OpenAI umbrella that would be key for me to sell into to land that expansion. Instead of me having to grab my digital shovel and go dig through CRM or go over to Claude or ChatGPT and start doing manual research using my favorite chatbot.

Instead, Outreach has orchestrated the entire workflow for me, and put a highly personalized message right in front of me to click send. Now, I said click send, because this workflow has a human in the loop. That’s me. But with Outreach Sequences, we can automate all of these. So what that means is for those accounts that your team typically doesn’t have the bandwidth to touch.

We’re able to scale those workflows and execute on them without taking additional time off of your team’s plate, but making sure we’re still landing with precision and with relevance in each of those interactions. So, this is a email that was contextualized by my other agents, getting back to what Paul was mentioning about how our agents are learning from one another and contextualizing one another.

There’s one more task type I wanted to touch on for just a moment, and that’s going to be my call task. With Outreach Click to Dial, I don’t even have to leave the platform in order to give David Kim a call.

Also. over at OpenAI, and now we can see that same signal is being populated for me, so I’m not switching between apps, I’m not having to go dig for information, I’m just executing those key workflows that are right in front of me. Alright, let’s back this back out to our homepage for just a moment here.

Because I used the signals that my ops team has set up and connected with Outreach to drive the workflows in order to reach out to individuals, and those AI sequences have then created meetings for me to execute on, and of course, AI agents are going to meet me within those meetings.

Front and center, we can see I got my AI prep right here that’s going to eliminate that 20 to 30 minutes of searching for what’s this conversation about, and help me and my SC and whoever else is joining the call understand what are those key talking points, and look at that.

Acme Acquisition also introduces a competitor, because Acme currently uses Revenue Bridge, which is a fake outreach competitor in this situation. So what we’ve gone from is that catch-up time that maybe we have during those one-on-one conversations before a critical meeting into a coach-up time. So, we’re strategizing on how are we going to make sure that this meeting lands. Now.

Outreach isn’t gonna just leave me high and dry when I step into that conversation, because you’ll notice, with Paul and I, we have a little attendee here, Kaia, who is live transcribing this entire conversation, and even producing content cards to help me action live in the conversation.

So if a competitor comes up, or if there’s a technical question, those get flagged for me, so then myself and everyone else on my team are all speaking the same language about how we’re going to market.

Now, this live transcription isn’t just helpful for keeping us all on the same page, but what this means is as soon as our conversation ends, and, like, when I say as soon as it ends, I mean, like, within 5 seconds of getting off that call. Since the transcript has already been captured, my follow-up email is ready to be sent. I’m not waiting around for my CI tool to render and process.

Instead, I’m executing on that follow-up. and moving on to my next meeting without it piling up at the end of my day. So that’s action that’s derived from the intelligence that my agents are generating for me. Now, meeting prep, meeting execution, and follow-up is only really that helpful if it’s moving opportunities through my funnel. And look at that, I got my new business opportunity right here.

This could probably be an expansion as well. And all of the rich context from those conversations are also feeding my opportunities. So at a glance, being able to see my deal overview, the competitive landscape. that risk factor of Revenue Bridge being in the conversation, and we’re not just summarizing what’s going on, we’re also updating CRM.

So if you’re using a sales methodology, like MedPick or Medic or something custom. We’re pushing those key pieces of information, like, hey, we found that competitor. Now, all we have to do is accept that into CRM, or for certain fields, we’re just gonna automatically do that for you, and that’s all up to you.

So now we have another agent that is taking action on my behalf with the rich context of past conversations and other systems that we have plugged into Outreach. I want to bring our attention up to the very top of the screen here now, because we’ve walked through several key workflows across the sales team, but we’re going to have questions that none of these agents are maybe going to specifically address for me.

Or I’m going to want to get into the weeds. And this is where Outreach Omni is going to give me all of that context. I’d like to call out the Outreach MCP client that is going to make sure that whatever tool I have plugged into Outreach, whether it’s CRAN or competitive intel. or it’s for, my seismic, and making sure that I’m on brand with my messaging, or even amplitude.

We have a myriad of connectors within Outreach that will help to be contextualized as I’m reaching out to my customers and engaging with my accounts. So as I come in here, I might have a question about understanding the health score and this deal with OpenAI, and Outreach is going to help me to understand what’s going on. We don’t need to wait around for that to think here.

I already ran it earlier, and Outreach is going to take not only the past opportunities, current opportunity, the account, and that critical competitive intel that we have right here from Crayon. Where did it go? Lost it for a second. This crayon information right here. And it’s going to help me understand where should I be positioning my product with this new competitor in place.

We can take this to the next level and ask Omni to actually draft me an email to send, or if we’re trying to get multi-threaded. Being able to have my VP come in and send a message, or I can send a message on behalf of my VP to connect with their VP to make sure that we’re running all of the necessary channels to de-risk this specific opportunity.

Now… we’re asking Omni questions, my opportunities are being updated, but this is actually going to bring us out to our full view of my entire funnel, because every single one of my workflows is being impacted by those key insights that each previous agent was influencing.

So now, as a seller, I can understand the risk across my entire funnel, because each one of my agents are acting across those to make sure that nothing is slipping through the cracks.

So now, at a glance, I can understand the health of a specific account, or a specific opportunity, and maybe areas that I should focus in on, or the prospects, or people that we’ve been talking to, and the ones that we actually haven’t engaged with yet. This brings us also to understanding those alerts and those risks that my ops team wants to make sure are being flagged.

Automatically calling out that competitor, or the fact that, hey, this opportunity actually pushed back more recently, that’s something that we need to be attending to. Now, because Outreach has inline edit capabilities with Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce, that means that I’m not leaving Outreach to manage my funnel, and then when I’m submitting my forecast.

My entire leadership gets a clear view of what is going on within my pipeline, and that rolls all the way up to our executive team.

Now, in the last moments that we have here within the demonstration, I do want to put my CRO hat on for just a moment, and bring us up to the pipeline summary, because this kind of rounds us out with our funnel here and maybe helps me as a leader understand where there are gaps within our funnel to run some more of those prospecting plays and kick this whole cycle back into a loop.

So if I’m a CRO or a head of RevOps, then this might be my front page of the Wall Street Journal, where I’ve had a busy week, I need to understand where are we at. at a glance, I can see what’s changed across key sections of my funnel, whether it’s by stage or forecast category.

I’m not digging or asking my ops team to go and produce any reports for me, I just have it front and center. with a clear view into what is Outreach telling me my projected finish is going to be. This is taking into consideration what is my current weighted pipeline, as well as what doesn’t even exist yet within my team’s funnel that might be created based off of historical performance.

That’s where Outreach is taking all of that contextualized data from CRM and telling me what is likely to actually come in or be created. Now, there are two key charts that I would like to describe here before we’re all done, and that is the weighted pipeline report and the deal pacing report, because that helps me know where there’s specific risks within where we’re gonna end at the end of Q3 right here.

So, at a glance, I can see we got about a 1.82 gap to finish, and… The first place that I’m going to want to look to understand where’s that gap potentially coming from, and where are their risks, is going to be my late-stage opportunities. And with a 78% win rate, my $5.5 million in funnel, it’s not getting me all the way towards that number that I need, and I can even see as I come up to my negotiating stage.

Almost that 1.82 is off pace, and that’s because Outreach understands how each one of your teams operate. and how long it typically takes to get through the funnel.

So now, without having to dig as an executive, I can drill into the very specific opportunities that are risky for me and my team right now, and make sure that, as a leader, I’m able to either provide my own influence on these opportunities, or make sure that my frontline leaders have what they need.

And at the very end of all of this, with that gap that we see down here, I know it’s time to spin up some additional workflows to generate funnel, and to maybe kick out competitors where they don’t belong. Team, that brings us to the end, from creating pipeline to closing pipeline, and how Outreach agents are driving across each one of those workflows.

Julia Nimchinski:

Amazing presentation. Yeah, go ahead, Paul.

Paul Selby:

I will take it back then. One second here, let me switch my slides. Alright, so, to take things home… summarizing what you saw, what you heard from me. Your forecast inputs stay current, because agents keep things updated, like deal fields and methodology, from real conversations taking place and not relying solely on rep memory. Risk is showing up earlier.

You have things like health scores, pacing alerts, these are flagging deals that drift before it gets to be too late. Your sellers are going to spend less time gathering context. You saw many examples there of where the system is working for you, and that results in simple things, too, like research and those pre-meeting briefs. Those are ready before they’re even asked for.

Pipeline gaps don’t just sit on a dashboard, they kick off in the next workflow. Closed, lost, win-back, or signal-based outbound, and the loop starts again and again, better informed each time. That’s Outlook’s Recursive GTM, the way we build it today, and it’s recursive workflows, really, on that shared context layer that make the difference. If you want to see this in your own accounts.

Go to Outreach.com, we’ve got requested demo buttons all over the place, so sign up, and we’ll be happy to walk you through this on a more, tailored basis. So, now I think we’re open for some questions.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thank you so much. Phenomenal presentation. I’m curious, based on your experience, how much context is actually necessary in order to see meaningful ROI on Recursion and beyond?

Caleb Netterfield | Outreach:

I think that really depends on the workflow that we’re trying to run. If we’re running inbound, then we’re gonna need to understand what brought that person inbound, and maybe who… what their title is, and that should be enough. Maybe for outbound, that’ll be a little bit different, and it all depends on the strategy that we’re trying to run.

The good news is a lot of organizations already have a ton of that context just waiting to be used, and with Kaia. That’s, like… So much rich context that is just waiting to be actioned on, and it’s just a matter of capturing the conversations.

Paul Selby:

And there’s context that exists simply by adopting Outreach, right? There’s already a lot of best practices and whatnot that’s baked in, and all you’re doing is now fine-tuning that to a large degree.

Julia Nimchinski:

Love that. And can we expand on this, Paul? Because there is a new tool popping up every day with, you know, crazy investments and whatnot. Could you just highlight your differentiation on the marketplace?

Paul Selby:

Well, and that’s exactly it. It’s years in the space of revenue orchestration, where we have all of those best practices and all of the learnings that go along with that. When… if you were to turn to a Claude or a ChatGPT. they have some information out there, and certainly they’re getting better all the time, but people are not running their businesses through these systems, right?

So, what they’re drawing from is this aggregate morass of data, and they’re… and certainly it’s helpful… it’s more helpful than trying to do something, say, completely from scratch, but At the same time, you’re really, really missing out on what… all of that experience that Outreach brings to the table, and how Outreach can take your existing information and further refine it and make it true to your own revenue motions.

Caleb Netterfield | Outreach:

Julia, one thing I would highlight that I think is really important is, to your point, there are new tools cropping up every which way. And there are very strong tools that are focused on insights, and then there are tools that are focused on action. And there are a lot of tools focused on insights.

And if I were to quote Paul Phipps over at ServiceNow, he recently said that Insights without action are just expensive advice, and the scaffolding that Paul just mentioned, the over a decade of experience that we have in go-to-market workflows. Those are the systems and the set of features that make Insights actionable. So that’s what makes us different.

Julia Nimchinski:

A 100%. We just pulled our community. what are the, you know, top GTM challenges, Agentic GTM challenges, AI? And number one is actually the lack of, you know, vision and clarity in terms of the art of the possible in all things revenue and AI. What are you seeing, Paul and Caleb? Just curious, and what would be your advice?

It’s really hard to differentiate the marketing of AI and, you know, the reality of it, and keep up with all of the changes.

Paul Selby:

We have a lot of resources on our website, and and we actually just recently our our customer success organization has kind of been rebranded into go-to-market AI advisors. And and I say all that because we’re really doubling down on this idea of AI is here, AI is here to help you, but it also you can’t jump in necessarily with with both legs. You really have to understand, what are my biggest challenges?

What do I need to go solve them? And really start small, because it’s not simply a matter of standing these agents up.

There’s a lot of, you know, I use the term orchestration quite a bit, but there’s also governance, and there’s a lot of concerns about how do we really want these workflows to work, and how do we want them I… as Caleb showed, there are times when you want an agent to work 100% autonomously, but there’s also times when you want to have a human in the loop, and make sure that, yes, this does sound like me, yes, this does represent company values and things like that.

AI will get it right a lot of the times, but still, you really want to have a sense of, in those circumstances, what is the right approach that I want to take? So, what we really recommend is, you know, again, going back to what I was saying. Choose one or two problems that are your biggest problems in your revenue orchestration today.

Let’s figure out what are the agent or set of agents that can help you go solve those problems. And let’s stand that up and start to build this idea of a center of excellence within your organization. It gets a lot easier to stand up agents once you have a process for identifying where you need to put those agents.

Julia Nimchinski:

I’m really curious, last question, your thoughts on the concept of FDEs for deployed engineers. Do you see this role as a necessity to see a ROI or? How do you approach it at Outreach?

Paul Selby:

So, I mean, I’ll invite Caleb to answer this as well. We do have forward-deployed engineers, and they are there. they are excellent at covering exactly what you need. I mean, is it as simple as you need to have someone, like, an extended headcount, or do you need them more tactically solving this one task for you?

So, certainly, I think it’s important for any organization to have these available, and to be very flexible on how How, you know, a customer then can employ their services, right? We do try to make it as easy as possible and we’ve created a lot of resources specifically in the area of standing up agents and adopting AI in an organization. But if you lack that skillset internally, that’s why they’re there.

They’re there to help you out to stand these things up. Connect systems, enrich data, you know, all of the things that are going to make your AI initiative successful.

Caleb Netterfield | Outreach:

Yeah, plus one to that, Paul.

Julia Nimchinski:

Awesome. Thank you so much. And what’s the best next step? Where should our community go?

Paul Selby:

I mean, definitely spend some time on our website, and, you know, I mentioned we have started to really try and push more of the story of AI.

I mean, certainly Outreach is a long-time player in the revenue orchestration space, and everybody has a different feeling about AI right now, and how best to use it, and what we’re trying to do is to make it a lot easier to do that, to understand it a little bit better, open up, you know, more of that black box that I think exists for a lot of people.

We’re trying to be as transparent as possible in how things work, and how easy it is for you to get up and running with it.

Julia Nimchinski:

Love it. Thank you again.

Paul Selby:

Thank you.

Julia Nimchinski:

And that’s a wrap on AI Practice Sessions Recursive GTM. Thank you everyone for joining us today, the speakers, partners, audience, and we’ll be back December 8th, 10th and. Predicting the question, our recording’s gonna be live over the weekend, and everyone who registered, you’ll receive the link, so… Share your feedback, thoughts, concerns on our Slack, and see you soon!