Success Story of Outplay: The New-Age Sales Outreach Platform to Help You Book More Meetings

Preeti Karna

Jan 9, 2023 — 6 min read

Outplay Success Story

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Outplay.

The sales team plays a crucial role in any business. Increasing annual sales and profit is the core focus of any business. With the evolution of automation in business processes, the scope of the sales industry is continuously changing. Businesses are leveraging sales and marketing automation tools to quantify their marketing campaigns and workflows. Sales engagement platforms are one example of automating sales activities. A Sales engagement platform helps businesses in streamlining the communication of the sales team to their customers.

Outplay is an Indian-American SaaS (Software as a Service) company headquartered in San Francisco, United States. The company offers a sales engagement platform that helps businesses to prospect efficiently and reach their revenue goals faster. Read to know about Outplay, its founders, the startup story, solutions it provides, funding, and more.

Outplay - Company Highlights

Startup Name	Outplay
Headquarters	San Francisco, United States
Industry	Software
Founders	Ram Papineni and Laxman Papineni
Founded	2019
Total Funding Raised	$9.3 Million
Website	outplayhq.com

Outplay - About
Outplay - Industry
Outplay - Founders and Team
Outplay - The Idea and Startup Story
Outplay - Vision
Outplay - Products
Outplay - USP
Outplay - Marketing Strategy
Outplay - Funding
Outplay - Growth
Outplay - Competitors
Outplay - Tools Used in the Company
Outplay - Recognition and Achievements
Outplay - Future Plans

Outplay - About

Outplay is a new-age sales engagement platform that combines multi-channel outreach and sales automation to help sales teams hit their revenue goals.

The company’s core belief is to always deliver top-notch services to their customers, along with stellar support. It believes in providing meaningful opportunities for their employees to grow in, at all levels and takes pride in sharing all their wins, thoughts, and failures openly across the team. Its mission is to help salespeople achieve their dreams.

Outplay - Industry

Outplay is part of the Sales Software Industry. The company is rapidly expanding and bringing in more customers from the SMB market.

Outplay - Founders and Team

Brothers Ram and Laxman Papineni co-founded Outplay in the year 2019 in Wilmington, Delaware. Laxman is the CEO of the company while Ram serves as its CTO.

Ram and Laxman have always been building things together. Ever since they were little boys, the idea of building something of their own fascinated them - anything that was creative, or would help people around them. Being brothers, both of them understood each other's plus points early on. Ram was more interested in building platforms/tools, and Laxman was more inclined toward connecting with people and sharing stories. That’s how their current roles fit perfectly with their personalities and goals.

Outplay currently has over 100 employees, and offers the most flexible work culture that helps in delivering a sense of belongingness to the employees and makes them create a proper work-life balance. Outplay sees its employees as the most important assets in the company, and does everything possible to make them feel comfortable and seen. They believe that it's only when the employees’ needs are met, that they can continue building a world-class product.

Coming to the hiring part, the company is able to bring in a lot of its employees through the simple means of referrals. Its existing employees - the Outplayers as they are commonly known, are always eager to share the openings within their network. And when they bring in someone, they’re rewarded for it. Apart from that, we’re also big on campus drives to hire college freshers, helping them start their professional journey with Outplay.

Outplay - The Idea and Startup Story

Outplay Logo

The whole idea of offering a Sales Engagement Platform began with blogging. Ram and Laxman’s first venture was a blogging network. That’s where Ram and Laxman learned about start-ups and what goes behind running one. They started their first startup called AppVirality - a referral marketing software that was backed by shoppingmode Microsoft Accelerator.

During their first start-up stint, they realized the importance of sales and charted down how they could make it better for all the sales folks out there. They had 2-3 of their friends who left their jobs to join them at AppVirality first, which then morphed into Outplay. Together all of them sat through hours to build the right framework, get a few investors interested, and started pitching Outplay to people who were looking for a switch.

Outplay - Vision

Outplay’s short-term vision is to get good brand recognition and generate substantial revenue from the SMB market.

Its long-term vision is to become a household name for large enterprises and expand fully to regions like ASEAN and APAC. Outplay aspires to become the No. 1 sales engagement platform in the world.

Outplay - Products

Outplay currently offers one product, which is a sales engagement platform that helps salespeople journey through their goals with ease, removing unnecessary clutter and providing top-class features to help enhance their outreach every step of the way. The product has a sleek UI that helps sales reps navigate between various tasks and sequences with ease, and also helps them hit their targets on time, with proper prioritization and automation.

Outplay - USP

Outplay’s USP includes multi-channel outreach which is a mix of channels like email, phone, SMS, social media, and magic chat - a webchat box that is launched when a prospective customer clicks on an email link. Apart from this, they also provide access to top-notch features such as multi-channel outreach, smart sales sequences, real-time sales insights, website, and email tracking, the ability to set activity triggers, and powerful analytics among others.

Outplay - Marketing Strategy

Outplay launched an eBook as part of its marketing efforts and was able to create a lot of buzz in the market. The ebook is titled ‘30 Sales Teams Share Their Sales Sequences’ and contains a list of full-fledged sales sequences from top companies like Drift, Hubspot, Vidyard, etc. along with 30+ sales sequences from hyper-growth companies.

Outplay - Funding

Date	Stage	Amount	Investors
3rd March 2021	Seed funding	$2 Million	Sequoia Capital
21st July 2021	Series A	$7.3 Million	Sequoia Capital

Outplay’s series A funding which was in July 2021, helped the company successfully expand its operations, increase its workforce to 100+ employees, and work towards building features for its current and future customers, by understanding its current needs and issues.

Outplay - Growth

The company currently operates in the US and Indian markets. It has users spread over both regions.

Outplay - Competitors

Some of the top competitors of Outplay are:

Outreach
Salesloft
Klenty
Yesware
Reply.io
Mixmax
Mailshake
Lemlist

Outplay - Tools Used in the Company

Few tools that help accelerate the startup are:

Hubspot
Gong
Salesforce
Slintel
Sales Navigator
Seamless
Lusha

Outplay - Recognition and Achievements

The company’s recent funding news made it to Times Square, New York - announcing how Outplay raised $7.2 Million, Series A. Apart from that, its podcast ‘The Hype is Real’ was added to Sequoia’s Surge Academy.

Outplay - Future Plans

Since artificial intelligence is the future, especially of SaaS platforms, Outplay is also infusing AI into its sales platform. This step will simplify the lives of sales reps even further.

Its users already have access to a feature that can magically write their sales sequences with the power of AI, but the future will see them making the AI capabilities more stronger and robust. With the company’s sole focus being on the USA for now, it wishes to expand towards ASEAN and APAC countries in the near future.

FAQs

When was Outplay founded?

Outplay was founded in 2019 in Wilmington, Delaware.

Who are the founders of Outplay?

Ram Papineni and Laxman Papineni are the founders of Outplay.

Who are the top competitors of Outplay?