Christian posts a nine-step competitor poaching build
Asked how he would take customers off a rival, Christian laid out the list build, the offer and the email, all segmented by complaint.
Asked by Flynn how he would steal customers off a competitor with outbound, Christian posted a nine-step build using Clay, Apify, Trigify and EmailBison, which he says comes off the back of 10M+ cold emails.
Hey Sarah, saw a few {competitor} users mention reporting takes a day to refresh. Ours updates live & we'll move your data over for free. Worth a look?
The list comes first. He sources companies paying the competitor from BuiltWith or Apollo's tech filter, G2 and Capterra reviewers pulled with an Apify scraper, case study logos, job posts that list the tool as a required skill, and people engaging with the competitor's LinkedIn posts via Trigify. Case study logos get run through AI Ark or Ocean as seed domains to find lookalikes, and every account gets qualified by a Claygent column that reads the site before he pays to enrich anyone.
Unhappiness is the scoring model
Step two scores accounts on how close they are to leaving. A 1 to 3 star review in the last 12 months, hiring for a role the tool should have replaced, a new VP auditing the stack, or engagement with posts about switching. Two of those on one account puts it at the top.
Step three is the part that makes the rest work. Reviews get sorted by what the reviewer is angry about, slow support in one group, surprise price rises in another, and each complaint becomes its own campaign sent to every account that raised it.
The offer removes the work of moving rather than arguing the product is better. Free data migration, 30 days running both tools side by side, or a comparison built for them. Emails stay under 45 words and open on the complaint in the reviewer's own words, with a two word lowercase subject line like "{competitor} reporting", spintaxed and launched as 15 variants across the complaint groups.
The reply most people bin
Christian treats "we already have a vendor" as the best reply available, since it confirms budget and a contract with an end date. Ask when it renews, log the date and the incumbent, re-contact 90 days before with the comparison, warm call 30 days out. Enterprise accounts sitting behind Barracuda and Proofpoint get routed to the phone instead, and positive replies get called the same day.
He says one complaint group will carry almost all the meetings, so volume moves there and the rest get retired. The whole list stays on a 90 day rotation until contracts renew. He cites a marketing automation client selling into a market where buyers are locked into 36 month contracts, some prospects 32 months from renewal, whose fastest deal closed in 4 to 6 weeks because the email landed the month the competitor let that prospect down.
For people sending, the relevance here is doing the work in segmentation rather than per-contact personalisation, which is what keeps it runnable at volume.