Retain and expand top accounts with triggers and more in Outreach

Updated November 14, 2024

To deliver sustainable profitability and growth, organizations don’t just need to acquire new customers -- they need to retain those accounts and grow their footprint over time. In fact, in a recent Outreach study, 30% of customers indicated they expect customer expansion to be their primary source of revenue in 2024. 

While traditionally thought of as a means to build pipeline, when paired with the right signals and data, sales engagement is perfectly suited to help AEs and CSMs deliver on the commitments made at the time of sale and create happy, long-term customers. 

We’re demonstrating how a few new features from Outreach’s latest quarterly product release can help onboard customers, execute renewals, and find opportunities for upsell and expansion.  

Track what customers have purchased in Outreach to enhance your account-based selling efforts

Opportunities alone don’t necessarily deliver the full story of what each account has purchased. Using Account Purchases in Outreach, you can now track which products your accounts have in place alongside critical details like the value and volume of those products as well as contract start and end dates. This doesn’t just include your own products but competitor and complementary products as well. That way, you can plan ahead for competitive takeouts, integration opportunities, or co-selling efforts with a partner. 

Products that can be tracked in Outreach are defined by your administrator, including your own products and competing and complementary products. This includes product names, how they are measured, their description, and any custom fields that might apply. Products and purchases can be synced from Salesforce, manually entered, uploaded via CSV, or brought in via public API.

Once products have been added, you can quickly filter on an individual account to see which of your own products, competing products, or complementary products are in place. 

More importantly, with new filters available at the account level and Smart Views you can now use product information to build account lists to enhance your account-based selling. Some examples include: 

• Staying on top of renewals by creating a list of accounts with contracts ending in the next X number of months
• Targeting competitive takeout motions by creating a list of accounts that use your competitors product
• Ensuring new customers receive onboarding support by creating a list of accounts that have a recent purchase start date 

By building these lists, you can ensure that your AEs and CSMs are focused on the right efforts with the right accounts.

Use triggers to ensure that the right actions take place at the right time across the customer lifecycle

When seeking to ensure customers onboard successfully and ultimately go on to renew with you, timing is everything. 

By pairing product data in Outreach with new Time-based Triggers, you can ensure that tasks are being surfaced and prioritized for your team exactly when they’re needed. 

Time-based Triggers work by enabling admins to create tasks based on a known date associated with a record in Outreach. This means you can perform operations like:

• Scheduling the start of an onboarding sequence ten days after an opportunity is marked close won
• Assigning your AEs or CSMs a task to perform account health checks every X number of weeks or months from the start of the contract associated with a product
• Automating the creation of a task to start renewal conversations 3-5 months ahead of the expiration for the contract of one your products

And as an added bonus, tasks from a trigger can now be assigned to a team instead of an individual, and Outreach will automatically round robin that task to a member of the assigned team. This works well for scenarios like a pooled customer success model, where someone from your CS team needs to reach out to a customer but it isn’t critical which member of the CS team takes that action. In case you have a group of individuals from different roles working on an account, you can now also assign trigger tasks to a specific role within that account team.

Leverage new Sequence Blueprints to engage post-sale and create happy, long-term customers

When you don’t have time to start from scratch, use new Sequence Blueprints. Imagine your AE has been assigned a task to start a renewal sequence with their account, or one of your CSMs needs to start an onboarding sequence for a recently closed opportunity. 

Now, when creating a new sequence in Outreach and selecting the option to create a sequence from a blueprint you will see six new options focused on post-sale engagement including: onboarding kickoff, goals discovery, training session, change of exec sponsor, NPS detractor management, and expansion potential. 

Blueprints make it easy for your organization to deploy new sequences quickly and leverage Outreach best practices for sequence structure, so that you only have to focus on personalizing the components relevant to your organization and accelerating time-to-value.