Outplay raises $ 7.3 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital to grow its multi-channel sales engagement platform

The cost of acquiring customers has gone up in recent years. Attracting new customers and retaining the existing ones are some of the challenges facing both new and old companies alike. With thousands of companies competing for the same customers, how do you break through the noise in your prospect’s inbox?

Businesses today rely on a combination of inbound and outbound sales models to drive revenues. While the inbound sales process has rapidly evolved over the last 10 years, outbound sales haven’t. Outbound sales teams typically use high-volume tactics to drive revenue.

However, this approach is not scalable and the revenue eventually becomes a function of the size of the outbound sales team. This is because outbound sales teams don’t have a data-driven approach for targeting prospects that are most likely to convert and end up spending time emailing or cold-calling hundreds of prospects hoping to convert a few.

Enter Outplay, a Wilmington, Delaware-based tech startup that ensures your outbound sales teams deliver the most powerful message at the perfect time in the buyer journey through the right channel. Using its multi-channel sales engagement platform, Outplay helps the company’s sales team follow and reach the buyers wherever they are – be it email, phone, Text/SMS, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Today, Outplay announced it has closed $7.3 million in series A funding led by Sequoia Capital India. Outplay will use the new capital infusion to invest in technology and hiring exceptional talent across the globe. The announcement follows the previous seed round that happened just three months ago.

Founded in 2019 by Laxman Papineni and Ram Papineni, Outplay is on a mission to change this by bringing predictability to outbound sales and help every salesperson talk to the right prospect at the right time through the right channel. The platform helps outbound sales teams plan, execute, track, measure, and optimize interactions between companies and their prospects across multiple channels like email, phone, SMS, social media as well as live chat.

Laxman Papineni, CEO of Outplay commented, “Outbound sales teams are truly the dark horse of the sales organization – the targets are high, but the methods aren’t scientific. Outplay is committed to making outbound outreach data-driven, so that sales teams are talking only to the warmest prospects at any given point across multiple channels, optimizing time and resources. The continued partnership with Sequoia Capital India is a testament to the fact that the sales engagement space, which is poised to be a $5.59B market by 2023, is a huge opportunity for Outplay.”

With Outplay, sales managers can create data-backed sales playbooks to coach their team members and help them achieve their sales targets. The platform’s combination of automation and personalization helps teams start genuine conversations at scale, enabling them to stay on task by using multiple channels through a single interface to drive more meetings. Sales reps are thus able to build a multi-channel outreach plan for their prospects across email, phone, SMS, LinkedIn, Twitter, and chat.

For example, Outplay helps sales teams engage with warm prospects by notifying them when their prospect visits their business website. Enabled by Outplay’s industry-first outbound live-chat feature, Magic Outbound Chat, the rep can initiate live chat and have a contextual conversation with the prospect. Customers have been able to qualify prospects faster and grow their pipeline by 300% using the tool alongside inbound chat.

“We continue to be very excited by Outplay’s mission of making every sales rep perform like the best rep on the team. Outbound sales needs are evolving rapidly and reps now need personalized, automated, and contextual tools to drive sales which Outplay is successfully enabling. Sales reps spend an average of four hours per day on Outplay, demonstrating the effectiveness of the product which has category-leading customer reviews. Additionally, rapid digitization due to COVID has been a significant accelerant for the business and we believe these tailwinds will continue as outbound sales become more digital.” Harshjit Sethi, Principal, Sequoia India

Outplay also offers support to ensure software adoption across customer teams is done within days, not weeks or months. Since the seed fundraises – USD 2 Mn from Sequoia Capital India’s Surge early this year, the company has grown 4X in revenue, 3X in team size, and has customers from more than 50 countries. Outplay was a part of the Surge 04 cohort.