Outplay Secures $7.3M Funding to Scale Outbound Sales

Outplay Secures $7.3 Million in Seed Funding to Revolutionize Outbound Sales

Typically, outbound sales managers depend on a large number of leads to secure customers. However, this often results in revenue being directly proportional to team size. Outplay offers a solution by providing tools that automate campaigns, pinpoint the most promising prospects, and leverage data to optimize pitch timing.

Funding and Growth

The company recently announced a successful seed funding round of $7.3 million, led by Sequoia Capital India. This new capital will be allocated to further technological development and team expansion.

Including a prior $2 million investment from Sequoia Capital India’s Surge program in March – following Outplay’s participation in the program’s fourth cohort – the total funding raised by Outplay now reaches $9.3 million.

Since its initial seed round, Outplay reports a fourfold increase in revenue and now serves a customer base spanning over 50 countries, with a primary focus on B2B software companies.

Company Origins

Outplay was established in 2019 by brothers Ram and Lax Papineni, who previously founded AppVirality, a referral marketing platform designed for app developers.

Designed for Modern Sales Teams

Outplay is specifically engineered for sales teams engaging with prospects across multiple communication channels, including phone calls, emails, SMS, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

The platform consolidates these channels into a unified interface, eliminating the need for salespeople to constantly switch between different applications.

Automated Sales Sequences

Outplay also automates sales sequences – marketing campaigns that begin with an initial outreach through various channels and incorporate automatic follow-up messages if no response is received within a specified timeframe.

This functionality aims to supersede the traditionally time-consuming and difficult-to-scale practice of cold-calling, allowing salespeople to concentrate on the most qualified leads and determining the optimal channel and timing for contact.

New Features and Integrations

Following its seed funding, Outplay has introduced several innovative tools and features. These include a Chrome extension enabling salespeople to add prospects directly from LinkedIn and Gmail, send emails, initiate calls, and perform other tasks without navigating to the Outplay dashboard.

Furthermore, the platform now integrates with popular sales tools such as Gong, Dynamics CRM, and Zapier, complementing existing integrations with Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Hubspot.

Magic Outbound Chat

A significant new addition is Magic Outbound Chat, a web chat box that activates when a prospective customer clicks a link within an email.

Salespeople receive immediate notifications and are provided with relevant context regarding the prospect. According to Laxman, this feature, designed to address the needs of outbound sales teams, has helped some clients increase their sales pipeline by up to 300%.

Laxman also noted that the Outplay onboarding process is streamlined, typically taking only a few days, and sales managers are provided with proven sequences to facilitate a quick start.

Competitive Landscape and Future Outlook

Outplay’s competitors include established players like Outreach and SalesLoft. Laxman observed that while inbound sales processes and technology have evolved rapidly with the rise of SaaS, outbound sales teams have largely continued to rely on traditional, high-volume methods.

“The last major disruption in outbound sales tech occurred in 2011 with the founding of Outreach and Salesloft. We have great respect for their contributions to the industry, but their approach isn’t easily scalable, and revenue ultimately depends on team size,” he explained.

He added that Outplay is transforming the process by utilizing data-driven insights to connect sales representatives with the most likely prospects at the most opportune moment and through the most effective channel.

Dynamic Sequencing

For instance, Outplay’s Dynamic Sequencing feature automatically transitions prospects between sequences based on their engagement levels, maximizing the potential for success.

As an example, a prospect who opens a sales representative’s email more than four times could be moved to a sequence specifically tailored for highly engaged leads. Laxman reported that customers using Dynamic Sequencing have experienced open rates as high as 80% in the second sequence.

Industry Validation

Harshjit Sethi, a principal at Sequoia India, stated, “Outbound sales requirements are changing quickly, and representatives now require personalized, automated, and contextual tools to drive sales, which Outplay is successfully providing. The fact that sales representatives spend an average of four hours per day on Outplay demonstrates the product’s effectiveness and its category-leading customer reviews.”