Traditional sales engagement has often relied on a blend of emotional and financial exchanges between sales representatives and their prospects or customers. Despite the prevalence of high-volume sales tactics, which are not scalable, many businesses fear that automating sales engagement might result in a loss of personalization. Traditional outbound sales models, which lack a data-driven approach, often fail to effectively utilize the time spent converting prospects. To address this challenge, Laxman Papineni and Ram Papineni launched Outplay in 2019. Outplay is a multi-channel sales engagement platform designed to bring scalability and predictability to outbound sales.
With features such as dynamic sequencing, Magic Outbound Chat, and detailed analytics, Outplay empowers sales teams to plan, execute, track, measure, and optimize interactions with prospects. The platform provides sales development representatives (SDRs) and business development representatives (BDRs) with the right signals, allowing them to focus on the most promising prospects across various channels including email, phone, SMS, LinkedIn, Twitter, and chat.
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Outplay has raised $7.3 million in its Series A funding round, led by Sequoia Capital India. This follows an earlier $2 million investment from Sequoia in March, underscoring the growing significance of the sales engagement space. Laxman Papineni, CEO of Outplay, remarked, “Outbound sales teams often operate in the dark, with high targets but no scientific methods. Outplay is dedicated to making outbound outreach data-driven, ensuring that sales teams engage only with the warmest prospects across multiple channels, thereby optimizing time and resources. The ongoing support from Sequoia Capital India highlights the enormous potential of the sales engagement market, which is projected to reach $5.59 billion by 2023.”
Outplay’s multi-channel outreach plan, combining automation with personalization, enables sales managers to develop data-driven sales playbooks for mentoring team members and achieving targets. Since its seed round, Outplay has experienced a 4x growth in revenue and a 3x increase in team size. The new funding will be used to advance technological expertise and talent acquisition. With a growing customer base spanning 50 countries and industries such as marketing, IT, computer software, and recruitment, Outplay integrates with CRM platforms like Salesforce and Pipedrive, offering salespeople tools to enhance productivity and automate administrative tasks.
Harshjit Sethi, Principal at Sequoia India, commented, “We remain excited by Outplay’s mission to elevate every sales rep to top performance. As outbound sales needs evolve, reps require personalized, automated, and contextual tools, which Outplay effectively provides. Sales reps spend an average of four hours per day on Outplay, demonstrating its effectiveness and earning category-leading customer reviews. The rapid digitization driven by COVID-19 has accelerated this business, and we anticipate continued growth as outbound sales become increasingly digital.” With major competitors like Outreach and SalesLoft recently achieving unicorn status, the future looks promising for Outplay and the broader sales engagement sector.