Outreach's Forrester Study Puts 65% of Its Value on Sales Gains

On October 7, Outreach published a Forrester Consulting study it commissioned. The headline is 244% ROI over three years, with $19.2 million in present-value benefits and payback in under six months.

Most of that money comes from one line. Per the release text, $12.4 million is operating profit from improved sales effectiveness, $4.2 million is productivity, $2.4 million is sales efficiency and $224,000 is retired tools. All of it is modeled for a composite company with $9 billion in revenue and 600 Outreach users.

Outreach's March 2020 Forrester study leaned the other way. It claimed 387% ROI, and its biggest line was $6.9 million in productivity from automation, against $5 million in sales effectiveness. Effectiveness went from about 40% of the listed benefits to about 65%.

The 2020 release describes its dollar lines as savings rather than present values, so the bases differ, but the direction holds. The case for the product moved from hours saved toward deals won.

That shift matters more than the drop in the headline ROI. Hours saved can be checked against activity logs and a salary table. Deals won rest on a modeled lift in conversion or win rate, multiplied by deal size and margin, and built from what a handful of customers told an interviewer. A buyer can audit the first kind of benefit and has to take the second largely on trust.

Salesloft and ZoomInfo put four-fifths of their modeled value on selling more

Salesloft's 2019 study claimed up to 329%. Its April 2025 study, published in full on Forrester's site, lands at 236% for a composite with $7 billion in revenue and a 1,500-person revenue organization, built from interviews with four decision-makers.

Four of its six benefit lines are increased operating profit, from sales effectiveness ($12.4 million), more selling activity ($10.9 million), opportunity management ($4.4 million) and customer loyalty ($2.3 million). Together they come to $30 million of $38 million, or 79%. Team productivity, the line closest to time saved, is $6.8 million, about 18%.

ZoomInfo sells data rather than sequences, and its December 2025 study has the same shape. ZoomInfo's summary of the study gives 316% ROI and $7.6 million in benefits for a $1.5 billion composite built from five customer interviews.

The largest driver is $5 million in margin from a modeled 1.5% revenue improvement, plus $1.3 million in new revenue from better targeting. Labor productivity is $1.1 million. The revenue lines are roughly 83% of the total.

Clari, now part of Salesloft, commissioned the fourth study, on its Groove sales engagement product, and it's the one we couldn't fully read. The December 2023 release reports 238% ROI and a $7.35 million NPV from six customer interviews.

It puts a dollar figure on only one revenue line, $1.2 million in profit from better deal conversion. The other benefits come only as percentages, such as 30% more first meetings and 83% less time spent writing emails. The full study sits behind a form, so its benefit mix can't be computed from public material.

The vendors also describe these studies differently than Forrester does. Forrester's TEI policy says every study is clearly marked "commissioned" and that clients can't purchase favorable results.

Salesloft's 2025 release called its study an "Independent Study" in the headline. Clari's release called Groove's "the independent study," and ZoomInfo's summary calls its own "independent, third-party validation." Outreach's release is the cleanest of the four on this point, saying plainly that the study was commissioned and isn't meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

A lower headline ROI can be the more credible pitch

These studies were never meant to be lined up against each other. The composites differ by a factor of six in revenue, and the products differ in scope. Outreach's own disclosure rules out reading its study as a competitive comparison. That's fair, and it's why this piece compares the benefit mix rather than ranking the ROI figures.

Falling headlines also have an explanation that has nothing to do with the products getting worse. A Forrester consultant wrote in 2022 that buyers tend to doubt very high returns and that a moderate ROI can persuade better than an extreme one. Read that way, 244% after 387% and 236% after 329% are vendors pricing in skepticism. Forrester also risk-adjusts benefits before it computes ROI, and Salesloft's study assumes only 60% of users adopt in the first year, rising to 100% by the third.

Neither point touches the mix, though. A study can lower its headline and still move more of its value into the lines a buyer can least verify, which is what happened between Outreach's two studies and what Salesloft's and ZoomInfo's newer ones show. We found no operator publicly pushing back on any of the four studies on LinkedIn, X or Reddit, so for now the scrutiny has to come from the buyer.

Without the $12.4 million line, Outreach's 244% return falls near 20%

The same split runs through Salesloft's and ZoomInfo's newer studies, where revenue and profit lines carry 79% and roughly 83% of modeled value, and through any renewal argued from one of them. Outreach's $19.2 million in benefits and $13.6 million NPV imply about $5.6 million in present-value costs. Taking out the $12.4 million effectiveness line leaves $6.8 million in benefits and a return near 20% instead of 244%.

Hours saved can be checked against activity logs and a salary table. Deals won rest on a modeled lift in conversion or win rate, multiplied by deal size and margin, and built from what a handful of customers told an interviewer.

Sales effectiveness carries about 65% of Outreach's modeled benefits, up from about 40% in its 2020 study, while Salesloft's and ZoomInfo's revenue lines carry 79% and roughly 83%.

By Business of GTM