Navigating the Shift to AI-Powered Revenue Workflows - A CFOs Perspective with Drew Laxton, CFO Outreach

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome to today's episode of the AI to ROI podcast, formerly known as Metrics that Measure Up. Today, I am joined by Drew Laxton, the CFO at Outreach. I'll be covering four topics with Drew today. First, the evolution of outreach in 2025, and what to expect heading into 2026 Second, how outreach is using AI to drive financial performance. Third, the role of the CFO in determining the ROI for software investments, specifically AI software investments. Then a little bit of our passion here, the evolution of SaaS performance metrics in a variable pricing world. With that, Drew, would you mind taking a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the AI to ROI podcast?

**Drew Laxton** (1:00)
Thanks Ray, I appreciate you having me on. Like you said, Drew Laxton, I'm the CFO at Outreach. I have a pretty traditional finance background. I started my career in banking. I came up through Wall Street kind of non-traditionally for a SaaS CFO or software CFO. I started my career in oil and gas. I moved out to Seattle probably about 15 years ago now, and I transitioned into software finance from there at a company called Aptio, took the company public and then back private and joined Outreach soon thereafter. And I have kind of an interesting outreach story because I came in to run the FP&A and the analytics teams here. And in 2023, I left the company to go be CFO of a different company, just natural career trajectory. And about a year ago, the team reached back out to see if I wanted to come back to be the CFO. And initially, I thought to myself, I was in a good position and I wasn't sure if I wanted to. But when I met the CEO, he and I, Abhijit and I didn't overlap initially. He explained where the company was going with the AI products, and it just couldn't have aligned more with my vision of where the company and the space needs to go in general. I know we're going to drill down more on that. But I've been back for about a year now running the finance organization of the whole company.

**Ray Rike** (2:09)
OK, well, the timing of your departure and return is very interesting because most people heard about outreach when you were the leading sales engagement platform. But over the past couple of years, a lot has changed in the category. So can you provide a high level summary of who outreach is in 2025 and probably most importantly, where are you headed in 2026 and beyond with your AI powered revenue workflow?

**Drew Laxton** (2:35)
Yeah, for sure. I love the term AI revenue powered workflow because that's really where we are. Yes, to your point, you ask around about outreach, we have a lot of brand equity, but it's generally thought of as a SDR tool. How do we go build more pipeline? But we've always had the workflows, we've always had the understanding of the full cycle of the sales of the entire sales cycle.
In 2021, we built out our opportunity management conversational intelligence tool. We did a small acquisition as well to build out a forecasting tool. AI has run through the product for quite a long time. There's been a lot of understanding of how opportunities are moving. But what you're talking about, and the reason that I came back is what we've done now.
We have added agentic AI into the platform to go help those workflows where there's manual processes and automate them for sales reps. What we do at its core is we make your AEs more efficient. If you think about all of that history of the company, we understand all the little movements that have an opportunity to move through the sales funnel. We're able to take that and automate where we can. You think about something as simple as our first one that we released is our revenue agent. That allows companies with just a natural language query to go and prospect within their core market, their ICP, the way that they design it. It's automatic. It happens in the background and it's not form letters. These are emails that are tuned to the data that you have, the interactions that you've had previously, and it works automatically. So the sales rep doesn't have to be in there writing email after email. And we're just going through, and to your point, as we think about 2025 and really 2026, is finding these places within a sales cycle that are just slow moving processes and we automate them. And we can do that within the platform. So these are all out of the box. There's very little configuration that happens on the other side of it. So we're able to just go to our customers and stamp these out. To your point, again, we're going to talk about this a little bit more. It's also priced differently. We're going with a consumption-based pricing model on that. So you have an underlying SaaS platform that's existed for a long period of time. And then all this AI that sits on top of it that continues to grow, which makes it a really fun place to come to.