[Funding alert] Sales engagement platform Outplay raises $2M from Sequoia’s Surge

Outplay, a one-stop sales engagement platform (SEP) that helps sales teams plan, execute, track, measure and optimise interactions between companies and their prospects across various channels, has raised $2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital India’s Surge.

“A 2017 study showed that 57 percent of sales reps miss their quotas. Sales reps are less effective and efficient when they use just a CRM or multiple tools to get their job done. Our Outplay platform is easy to use, set up, configure and roll out across sales teams, helping sales leaders to get immediate insights into the business. This saves both time and costs for the companies who use it,” said Laxman Papineni, CEO and Co-founder at Outplay.

“We’re a new challenger brand to the sales engagement sector and are confident that our next-generation technology will allow sales leaders to generate granular, insightful reports and truly stay connected to prospective customers,” Laxman added.

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Challenges for sales teams

According to the startup, all sales teams face a common set of challenges, such as getting responses from prospective customers, spending too much time on administrative tasks, and maintaining customer relationships post-sale. 

Outplay’s combination of automation and personalisation helps teams start genuine conversations at scale, enabling them to stay on task by using emails, phone calls, social apps, and text through a single interface to drive more meetings, the startup said. It is deployed in teams within days and not weeks or months.  

 “Outplay also helps sales reps to not ‘drop the ball’ once a prospective buyer visits a website/blog/case study. They continue the conversation with a personalised chat by automatically hiding Drift/Intercom chatbots, which often try to requalify a lead by asking questions that the sales rep already knows. This is a feature not available on other sales engagement tools,” Laxman said.

 Outplay was founded in Delaware, US, in January 2020 by brothers Ram and Laxman Papineni. Ram started his career as an engineer at Infosys, while Laxman worked at Wipro and Oracle Corporation.

Before Outplay, Ram and Laxman built Appvirality – a referral marketing solution that helped mobile app developers grow their user base.

In less than 12 months, Outplay has acquired over 300 customers around the world.