Objective
The primary purpose of this article is to provide direction to Outreach Admins on how to set up automated Teams membership management, and automated hierarchical Teams management, by linking them to User Roles and User Roles hierarchy. This article also touches upon some other automation mechanisms.
Applies To
- User and Team Management
- Admins and users
Pre-requisites
Before you begin, since Teams automation relies on User Roles to be the source of truth, it is critical to have your User Roles up to date and ready to be linked to Teams.
Which means:
- If you are planning to automate Teams membership only, User Roles must be up to date reflecting your intended memberships structure
- If you also plan to automate organizational hierarchy management, your User Roles hierarchy must be up to date reflecting your intended organizational structure
- As a general best practice, we highly recommend that you clean up any unused teams periodically. If you haven't done it in a while, this is a good time to perform the clean up
Teams management experience User Management experience. If you are new to Outreach, you can get familiar with the with how User Management is managed in Outreach here.
Overview
Teams in Outreach are multi-functional – they can be flat or hierarchical and they can be managed manually or synced automatically with User Roles. Once set up, these Teams can be used across the product in a variety of Team Selling scenarios.
Flat Teams
Teams without an assigned parent is a Flat team. Flat teams are best for non-organizational Teams like project teams, cross-functional teams or simply ad-hoc special purpose teams.
User duplication is allowed, that is, the same user can be part of multiple Flat Teams.
Hierarchical Teams
Optionally, any Outreach team can be assigned a parent. If an Outreach team has a parent, they are considered to be a Hierarchical team.
Hierarchical teams are best for setting up organizational structures. As such, the same user cannot be part of multiple Hierarchical teams. That is, user duplication is not allowed.
If you are trying to convert a Flat Team to a Hierarchical Team and Outreach detects user duplication, the conversation action will be rejected and you'll need to remove the duplicate user membership. This is the same behavior as User Roles today.
Levels of Automation
Outreach Teams provides the following levels of automation – fully manually managed all the way to fully automated where both user membership and hierarchy management are completely hands off.
| Automation Level | Team name | User Membership | Teams Hierarchy |
| 1 | As given by admin | Manually managed | Manually managed |
| 2 | As given by admin | Synced with 1+ User Roles | Manually managed |
| 3 | 1:1 with User Role | Synced with 1 Role from User Roles hierarchy | Automatic and 1:1 with User Roles hierarchy |
Additionally:
- Teams of different levels can be created and maintained side by side
- Automation level can be changed from any level to any level at any time. Some of these changes can be disruptive. Outreach will warn in the UI or through error logs, as applicable
- Legacy Outreach Teams will start as Level 1, to maintain backward compatibility, and can be automated to a higher level
Manual set up
Creating Teams hierarchy
Creating hierarchies with your Outreach teams is as easy as going to the Administration > User management > Groups > Pick any Outreach team > Settings > and selecting the appropriate team from the Parent team dropdown > hit Save:
Viewing your organizational hierarchy
To see Teams hierarchy in action, you can navigate to the Administration > User Management > Groups > Hierarchies tab:
Content Governance
If you are using Content Governance, content associated with child teams will be automatically available to users in the parent team chain. Or in other words, we’ll respect the ‘Direct reports’ model of access control for Teams Hierarchy.
Automatic Teams Management
The true power of Outreach Teams is of course in its ability to completely remove the manual maintenance burden from Admins. Whether it is through linking them to User Roles, or through our robust set of APIs and SCIM support. Let's look at them next.
Level 3: Automate both Team membership and hierarchy
If you have your organization set up using User Roles Hierarchy, Outreach allows you to bring forward the hierarchy as-is to Teams Hierarchy. This is excellent for customers who want to connect either the entirety or specific parts of the User Roles Hierarchy to Teams and provides admins with ultimate, hands-off automation.
Once the hierarchies have been synchronized, any changes to Roles membership and hierarchy will be automatically reflected in Teams membership and hierarchy, respectively. Roles hierarchy changes will be reflected as long as all changes are made within the same root node. Root node is any Team in the hierarchy without a parent assigned. In our example above, Revenue Operations is a root node.
To set up hierarchy automation, go to Administration > User management > Groups > Outreach Teams or Hierarchies and pick the team you want to connect to User roles > Then click on the 'Sync from user roles' button.
In the 'Sync members' dialog that launches, select the topmost Role you want to automatically sync into the team and check the 'Auto-sync hierarchy' checkbox and hit Save. Once saved, Outreach will automatically create and maintain the entire teams hierarchy for you including the child roles.
In this example, VP, North America Sales will be linked to the team and all the sub roles will be transformed as-is into a Teams Hierarchy and maintained as your User Roles are updated.
This, we believe, is transformative and powerful for customers who can now use these automatically managed Teams throughout Outreach or use these teams for access control using Content Governance.
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Note that in Level 3 automation, the Team names will be automatically set to the User Role names they are syncing with. The Team name will also be automatically updated to any changes made to the User Role name. You can choose to rename a Level 3 Team or change its parents. Doing so is considered to be a disruptive action and Outreach will warn you. If you choose to continue with the changes, Outreach will automatically reduce the Team to be a Level 2 Team. |
Level 2: Automate Team membership only, keep hierarchy manual
Outreach allows you to choose to only automate your Teams' user membership by linking them to your existing 1+ User Roles, while keeping hierarchy management a manual process. This is useful for organizations who want their Team hierarchy to be different from their User Roles hierarchy.
Teams allows you to sync membership to a single User Role or to multiple User roles. Syncing to multiple User Roles is useful if you want to 'flatten' membership from multiple User Roles into the same Team.
Once 1+ User Roles have been linked, Outreach will keep track of changes to User Roles membership and automatically update the membership of the Teams they’re linked to.
Customers can also use SCIM or our APIs to fully automate Team management programmatically.
| Note that setting up Hierarchies through API surfaces are not supported at the moment. |
Setup
To link 1+ User Roles into the same Team, go to Administration > User Management > Outreach Teams > Pick the team you want to automate > Enable sync > Select 1 or more User Roles from the list > Save.
Make sure you are choosing not to ‘Auto-sync hierarchy’ during setup. In this example, any number of Roles selected will be linked to the AE-East team and automatically managed from that point on.
Managing Hierarchy
Once you have set up the Teams, you can manually parent the Teams as you need. It is important to note that Outreach will prevent parenting a Team if it detects user membership conflict. One user can only be part of one hierarchical Teams.
Important things to consider
There are a few things to consider as you use this new powerful tool to manage users:
- Any team can either be managed manually OR linked to User Roles, but NOT both
- 1+ User Roles can be synced either by flattening them to the same Team OR replicating the User Roles hierarchy as Teams hierarchy, but NOT both
- The same user cannot be part of multiple Teams if the Team is hierarchical. Flat teams can continue to have user duplication. Which means:
- Admins will be automatically prevented if they try to add a duplicate user to a Hierarchical team
- Syncing users into User Roles, and therefore Teams, which can result in creating user membership duplication (through CRM, API or SCIM) will result in a failure. Since this is automation, the failure might not be obvious and you'll need to check error logs to understand and prevent this situation.
Backward compatibility with legacy teams
Hierarchical teams are fully backward compatible with legacy Teams for membership and content management. One key consideration however is around parenting. Since legacy teams had no concept of parent or child teams, the root node (that is the top most level Team in Teams hierarchy) must not be a legacy team.
If you want to make a legacy Team a root node, first create a new Team and then make the legacy Team a child of the new Team. Once you are done building or modifying your hierarchy, you can delete the new Team.
Maintaining Reporting history
In order to respect current team membership history for daily reports including Team Performance, Sequence Performance and Sales Execution, as you automate Team management you should continue using the same Teams.
You can now automate the membership or hierarchical management of these existing Teams. Creating new teams will initiate a new Team history. Deleting the Team will remove all membership association history. Regardless of your management of teams, all activity associated with the user will remain at the user level.
Additional Information
FAQs
What happens to my existing Teams?
Your existing Teams will be maintained. You can, optionally, give them a parent. Please note the backward compatibility consideration above.
What happens to my existing User Roles Hierarchy?
User Roles, will continue to as-is and continues to be under Administration > User management > Groups > Hierarchies > User Roles. Synchronization of changes is from User roles to Teams and not the other way round.
What happens to my existing User Rollups Hierarchy?
Your existing User Rollups Hierarchy will remain under Tools > Forecasting and can be used with Forecasting. Teams Hierarchy and User Rollups Hierarchy do not overlap.
What kind of Teams does this apply to?
This change applies only to Teams you have manually created inside Outreach. Other types of Teams will remain associated with their relevant parent objects. For example, Account Teams will continue to have Accounts as their parents.
My User Role is syncing from my CRM. Will my CRM updates get reflected in associated Teams?
Yes! It’ll also work if you are using SCIM or our APIs to manage User Roles today.
I’m using GWC, will it continue to work?
Yes, we don’t expect any changes to our limited GWC released customers. If you have specific usage questions, please reach out to your Outreach partner.
Can I sync both Flat Teams and Hierarchical Teams with User Roles?
Yes both can be synced.
Can I add additional users to a Team that’s linked with User Roles?
You can either manage a team manually or link them with User Roles.
Does this replace Profiles?
No, Profiles will continue to use User Roles for direct and peers’ permission.
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