Outreach is a sales engagement platform that enables sales teams to effectively engage with their prospects and customers at scale. Outreach provides sales reps with a suite of tools to automate and streamline their sales outreach efforts, including email sequences, call scripts, task management, and analytics. Salesforce provides reps the data they need to make those decisions in Outreach.

Organizations use Outreach for their Prospecting and connect the application to Salesforce to manage their Opportunity generation and pipeline.

Within this guide, we will discuss how to install the plugin within the Salesforce environment of your choosing, discuss how Outreach Types and Salesforce Objects relate to each other, and most importantly how you can get the data flow in sync between the two systems properly.

Audience: Outreach Admin

To integrate your Outreach account with Salesforce, as an Outreach Admin open Outreach and navigate to your User Avatar button in the bottom left corner, then open Settings.

In the System Config menu, click “Plugins,” followed by “Add.” You will have two options to connect with Salesforce (Production or Sandbox). Select one and follow the prompts to integrate. If you are using the Integration User, you must have login access in order to use the Integration User to connect the two systems.

Audience: Outreach Admin

Now that the Plugin is installed, it's time to map the fields. On the Plugin Screen, click the Salesforce row. When you see that, a new screen will appear, with the following tabs on display:

Types in Outreach equate to a Salesforce Object. Within each Type, you will have 5 different sync options on how an Outreach Type interacts with a Salesforce Object. In order to do so, click on the Type in scope > this will bring you to a new window where 3 new tabs will be displayed (Sync, Fields, Mapping)

The first tab under each Type is Sync. The actions you take here correspond to the above screenshot where you saw the 5 different actions.

Below is a breakdown of how each setting impacts the integration.

As Salesforce and Outreach work together in tandem, we would want updates made in Salesforce to carry over to Outreach therefore, it is best to have all the Inbound options enabled. Simultaneously, updates we make in Outreach should also then get updated in Salesforce so it is recommended to have Outbound Update enabled.

Considerations for Outbound Create

Since SFDC should always be your central source of truth,it is recommended to have the Outbound Create option Deselected for all objects in scope. As you scale your GTM ops, Outbound Create can start to get messy and potentially cause records to not get created in Salesforce as they will be subject to validation or duplicate rules. This in turn may confuse your end users into why these records are not syncing properly between the two systems.

Lastly the polling function allows for Outreach to automatically scan your CRM for any newly created record or changes to existing records. Outreach will only notice a recently updated record if the change occurred to a mapped field.

Under polling you will see Polling Frequency. Polling Frequency determines how often we poll your CRM for new and/or updated Salesforce records. The more you increase the time between polling cycles, less API calls will be used.

Now that you have your sync settings set up, click on to the Fields Tab. Here you are mapping your Outreach fields to your Salesforce fields. Additionally, you are telling Outreach what the data flow should be between the two systems (Updates In vs Updates Out).

To update the field level security for the object in scope, follow these steps:

Field Level Security (In Salesforce)

The last tab under each Outreach Type is Mappings. Mappings show you a list of what records you have in both Outreach and Salesforce. Notice under the Salesforce column, you'll notice the Salesforce Record ID that is displayed.

Here you can search for an Outreach record to see if it exists in Salesforce.

Under the Plugin section, you can view your API usage between Salesforce and Outreach

API Limits are important to periodically look at especially when configuring a new integration so you know that your data between both systems will be flowing back and forth without any interruption.

If you saw the note about Inbound Polling above, this is an item that could affect your API limits.

Settings here are more global to the integration. Here you will configure when data is refreshed and how to handle merged or deleted records between the two systems.

Refresh Users on Reconnect:

The Refresh users on reconnect option allows admins to determine whether Outreach automatically syncs Salesforce users into Outreach when the Salesforce plugin is reconnected.

Sync merged and deleted records

Here you are asking Outreach how to handle records when they are merged and deleted in Salesforce. It is our recommendation to have all the settings enabled so that your data is always in Sync.

The activity and Logging Tabs will be your front line defense when it comes to debugging issues between Salesforce and Outreach.

Each event will be time stamped and logged here. Additionally, you will be able to see what actions were made.

Under Activity you can filter for specific criteria such as a date range, user, or type of action to triage certain events.

Under Logs, you can export error messages created into a CSV. Note Logs are limited to error messages for the past 30 days or up to 10k errors and are updated hourly.

Audience: Outreach Admin and Rev Ops Team

While in Part 1 and 2 we discussed how to set up the Outreach Integration with Salesforce, in this section we will discuss some best practices we have seen in order to get your data flowing properly between the two systems.

Wondering why every activity on your lead or contacts are being attributed to the Outreach Integration User in Salesforce even though your rep made the outreach? This is because your Mappings between record ownership in Outreach and Salesforce may have not been set up correctly or configured.

Before pushing any Outreach records into Salesforce, setting up your User Sync and Mapping settings are a sure thing to set up so that you do not have to retroactively update activities that may have gotten assigned to the Outreach Integration User in Salesforce.

This is especially important if you deploy Swantide’s SDR Activities or Metrics Dashboard into your Salesforce Instance so that attribution is properly assigned.

Make sure to have the ordering of your Lead Outreach Type come before Contacts. This is to ensure that leads are the first to be checked for a matching email address then a contact.

The following are the recommended settings to enable when setting up activity syncing in the Lead and Contact Outreach type.

If you are looking to gather metrics on activity engagement on opportunities it is important to set the integration between Outreach Opportunities and Salesforce Opportunities correctly.

To do so, go back to the Salesforce Plugin and first set up the Outreach Type: Opportunity.

Here we want to pull in Salesforce Opportunities into Outreach. Note, we do not want to work on our Opportunities in Outreach so we will not enable the setting under Pushing and Outbound Create. We do this because Outreach doesn't have a way to honor SFDC Duplicate Rules or Validation rules so Opportunities should always be updated in SFDC. Therefore, your setup should look similar to the image below.

Next, we would want to set up our Opportunity Stages. In Outreach, Opportunity Stages can be found under Settings > System Config > Opportunity > Add Stage

It is best practice to set up your Outreach Stage Names as the same as Salesforce.

Once you have set up the stages, go back to Plugins > Salesforce and configure the Opportunity Stage Outreach Type.

Lastly, as you create activities in Outreach you would want to attribute those activities to Opportunity Contacts in Salesforce so that you can report on your pipeline.

Associating activity attribution to Opportunities provides valuable Rev Ops metrics in knowing how many touches it takes to progress an opportunity through each stage and especially knowing when your touch points are too much or too little.

To begin, Enable Contact roles in Salesforce.

Once you have enabled Contact Roles in Salesforce, configure the integration settings in Outreach under the Opportunity Contact Role Type.

When you compose a new email or make a new call in Outreach only opportunities the Prospect is associated with via contact role should populate in the list.

If you need any of your custom Salesforce fields to be visible in Outreach, you’ll need to complete this two-step process:

The reason to set this up from the get-go is so that your data in this fields can be update based on each polling interval and not get triggered just because an update was made in Salesforce

As you are working with prospects you will move them through various prospect lifecycle stages such as MQL, SQL, SAL. In order to capture these important stages it’s best to bring into those values from Outreach into Salesforce. Therefore we have two options in doing so:

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