The field report
"Which sequence do I even use?"
1,807 people kept asking the same things.
I read 1,807 surveys from sales teams at 350+ companies that run Outreach. Different industries, different teams, the same struggles: which sequence do I use, how do I get a list in, why doesn't Salesforce show my work, which report do I trust. This page is what they said, word for word, and what I built to fix it.
Where this comes from
Real quotes. Real people. No names, on purpose.
These surveys were filled out right after live Outreach training sessions at 350+ companies. Names you'd know. I'm not sharing them, and I'm not naming anyone I quote. These folks answered a feedback form. They didn't sign up to be my marketing. So the quotes are word for word, but the companies only get described. "An HR-software company." That kind of thing.
One more thing. Every number on this page comes from one counting script run over the raw file. No rounding up, no vibes. And yes, the surveys are a few years old. Stick around... that's the twist.
The short version
Everyone hits the same walls.
Here they are, counted.
Rep comments about sequences. Which one to use, who owns them, and why the library feels like a jungle.
Reps asking how to get a list into a sequence without something quietly breaking. The most-asked question in the file.
Managers' top complaint: reporting they couldn't trust. 25 mentions. The next topic got 9.
And when people hit these walls, there was nowhere to go. 519 of them asked for help by name: another session, a refresher, office hours. Something to come back to.
Here's the thing. These questions don't come up in a classroom. They come up at 4:45 on a Tuesday, with a task queue open and a prospect waiting. And at 4:45 on a Tuesday, nobody's around. That gap is why OutreachAdmin exists.
Chapter one · 1,595 rep responses
What reps actually get stuck on.
Reps wrote 1,938 comments about what confused them or what they wished they'd learned. The same topics came up over and over. Here's the count. (One comment can count toward more than one topic.)
Counted across 1,938 written comments from rep training sessions. Not on the chart: 75 people asked for hands-on practice and 28 asked for refreshers or office hours. Those say less about Outreach and more about how training works. More on that below.
Which sequence do I even use?
147 mentions"Seems like the options quickly get out of control, which is why everyone starts building their own."
"If I'm to approach my 50 accounts, exactly how do I strategically approach them via Outreach... sequence A is designed for situation ABC and sequence B is designed for..."
"Creating sequences/content since we don't have access to it as BDRs. It is owned by management."
This isn't a training problem. It's a housekeeping problem, and reps pay for it. Nobody prunes the sequence library. Nobody writes down which one is for what. So every rep guesses, or builds their own, and the pile grows. The rep asked a fair question. The instance had no answer.
How do I get a list into a sequence?
104 mentions"Would be great to include a section for how to get started for new AEs. i.e. bring contact from Sales Nav to SFDC, contact shows up... add contact to a sequence."
"I would have liked more time spent on the Salesforce portion because I want to be fully proficient in how to import a list of contacts into a sequence."
This was the most-asked question in the whole file. And no wonder. Before one email goes out, a list has to hop from LinkedIn to Salesforce to Outreach to a sequence. Three tools, and every hop has a way to fail without telling anyone. The rep finds out a week later, when nothing sent.
The plugin, and the send that skips it
48 mentions"Send with Outreach... many times this gets missed by reps and they send with Outlook. Finding ways to better engrain this process in a rep's workflow."
"Using Outlook plugin for post sequence follow up. Not clear how to do that."
Every email sent outside the plugin is work your CRM never sees. The rep did the job. The record shows nothing. Three months later a manager wants to know why the numbers say nobody's working. Tasks got 63 mentions too, including my favorite quote in the whole file: "so many small hidden buttons." The features exist. The workflow is the mystery. Meetings (61 mentions) and the dialer (50), same story.
This training wasn't built for my job
31 mentions"I am not going to use sequences for chasing my contacts. That's BD work. My benefit is more in a structured follow-up of my accounts."
"A day-in-the-life. This audience was AEs, most of whom have never been SDRs."
Outreach training runs on the SDR playbook, and everyone else sits through it politely. Account executives and customer success folks live in the same tool with a totally different day. When none of the examples match your job, you nod along politely... and still don't know what to do tomorrow morning.
Chapter two · 135 manager responses from 59 companies
Managers asked about one thing.
Over and over: reporting.
Reporting shows up in 25 of the 147 written manager complaints. The next topic got 9. It's not close. And here's the part worth reading twice: managers weren't asking for prettier dashboards. They wanted to know which numbers to trust, where those numbers live, and what to do when a number looks bad.
"Wish managers could customize their view in Outreach."
"Reporting data being in multiple places on the platform, cannot customize views and save as default views."
"Not being able to understand where meetings are sourced from and the limitations with reporting."
"What we should use in Outreach vs. SF for reports."
"I would love to learn more about how we can pull out successful sequences and have a leaderboard of top responding (ie highest conversion) sequences."
"Specifically pointing out areas of concern, how to actually read the data and come to conclusions for better coaching."
The sneaky one is the Outreach-versus-Salesforce question. Manager after manager asked the same thing: which numbers live where, and why don't they match? There's a real answer. But it depends on how your sync is set up, so no training class can hand it to you. It looks like a reporting question. It's actually a question about your setup.
And one manager summed up the whole file better than I ever could:
"Sometimes I feel like there is so much functionality in Outreach that it can be overwhelming. A good problem to have! Just so much to learn, understand, and remember to take advantage of."
The uncomfortable part
These surveys are years old.
The questions haven't aged a day.
Outreach has shipped a lot since these were collected. Some of the screens in these quotes look different now. But I still hear every one of these questions today, from people on the current product. Which sequence do I use. Why doesn't Salesforce show my work. Which report do I trust.
A platform can ship features. It can't ship judgment about your setup. Your sequence library, your sync, your rules, your team's habits. That's where these questions come from, and that's why no release ever kills them.
What I did about it
847 unanswered questions.
So I built the thing that answers them.
You run Outreach.
That reporting mess the managers described? It starts in your sync settings. The free report reads one file from your admin and shows you what's silently broken. About five minutes.
Get the free reportYou sell in Outreach.
The 4:45 question, answered at 4:45. Ask in plain English, get the answer, get back to selling. Free to start.
Open the rep chat →The PDF costs an account. Accounts are free and take a minute. Your download starts right after.
Create my account I already have oneFor the detail-checkers: 1,807 survey responses from 350+ B2B companies. 1,595 came from rep sessions, 135 from manager sessions. 3,317 written comments, counted by a script and read by hand. Quotes are word for word, trimmed only for length. Companies described, never named. Nothing on this page is an estimate.