How this Client Account Executive upsells against competitors

Renewing and upselling are acts of trust, built on a solid foundation of product and ROI. But when the competition is more aggressive than ever before, you only have so many opportunities to get it right. Outreach Client Account Executive Chris Clark, demonstrates how he prepares for upsell while keeping an eye on the competition.

Upselling strategy

Hey everyone, I'm Chris Clark, Client Account Executive here at Outreach. And what I wanna show you today is how I upsell into my existing book of business. All right, so under my Account Overview, if I dive into a specific account, using the Smart Account Plan overview, I can find out what the meat and bones are of that account, but more importantly, who are the competitors that we're up against? So if I scroll down a little bit, what I can see is the list of competitors.

Identifying competitors and tech stack

I can also add what's in their tech stack and any other relevant details about their engagement strategy, strategic initiatives and outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. However, the competitors are who we really wanna focus on. Who do we wanna rip and replace? So again, this is great, but again, I don't know when their expiration dates actually happen or when the renewal dates happen.

Managing renewal information and automating

What Outreach allows me to do is under the Purchases tab, once I start getting that information and getting that insight from my clients on what competitors they're using, when they're up for renewal, even what they're paying for, I can actually start to input this into the Purchases tab that lives directly on the account overview. So what you'll see here is a list of products that they're using internally with us, what the expiration dates are there, but also from a competitive landscape, who are those people and what the products are. So again, we can see RevNav is the competitor, when is their renewal end?

It's gonna be August 7th, 2025. And then also how much are they paying for it? So this is great and all, but what Outreach actually allows me to do is it can create triggers to automate the process and create tasks for reaching out to these customers when the renewal dates quickly approaching. So again, with RevNav, what we can do is we can create a task or automate a task to create maybe three or four months out before August 7th, just knock on their door and say, "Hey, we know that competitors renewal date is coming up."

"We know that you're paying so-and-so amount." Let's set up a demonstration. "We'd love to talk about how we can bring it all into one tool for yourself." Another helpful way that I use Outreach is just to become more knowledgeable about how we're better than our competitors.

Utilizing KAIA for Competitive Analysis

And I can do that through KAIA. So with KAIA, what I can do is I can start to filter based off specific topics. If they're, let's say, competitors involved. All right, now that we have the topic set to competitor, we can drill further in by searching for said competitor and finding all calls associated with that competitor.

Better yet, we can search in the transcript, find out when the competitor was mentioned, and then get more information and more insight that way. What we can also do through KAIA, we can find specific content cards that were mentioned during the call. This gives us a huge competitive edge, especially on live calls, where we're able to get information about our competitors that we can actually let the customers know right there and then on the call. So as you can see, Outreach vs. said competitor appeared at seven minutes and 35 seconds in the call.

And that's how I use KAIA to make sure that we can start to upsell into existing accounts, especially with competition involved.