About Upside ESG | Founded by
Heather Burns
I didn't start out as an AI pipeline expert.
I started out as a sustainability solutions consultant trying to find
my next client in a market that barely had a language for what I
was selling.
There were no obvious lists to mine. The companies I was
targeting didn't self-identify as "sustainability buyers." No clear
buying signals. Just me, doing manual detective work — parsing
press releases, reading between the lines, trying to figure out
which companies were actually moving on their sustainability
commitments and which were just talking about it.
What I remember most is the uncertainty. Even when I found a promising lead, I had no way to know
if they'd convert. There was no scalable process. Every quarter was feast or famine.
The detective work taught me something.
Over hundreds of conversations — with sustainability directors, operations leaders, procurement
heads, and the CFOs who had final sign-off — I started seeing a pattern in how complex, high-stakes
buying decisions are actually made. I turned that pattern into a methodology. And when I started
applying it, my close rate hit eighty percent.
That methodology is what Upside ESG is built on.
Today, Upside ESG builds custom AI-powered sales pipeline engines for sustainability and climate
tech solution providers — and the complex B2B markets they sell into. We take the pattern-
recognition work that used to be manual detective work and turn it into customized AI environments
our clients own and run.
The methodology — now called Penny — is the human intelligence layer behind every AI build we do.
Why complex sustainability sales is different (and why
generic AI fails)
In sustainability and climate tech, the decision-maker is rarely obvious. You're not selling to one
person — you're navigating a buying committee that spans sustainability, operations, finance, and the
C-suite. Buying cycles are long. The solutions are technical. And the difference between a company
that has put sustainability on a slide deck and one that is actually ready to act isn't captured in any
standard sales database.
Most sustainability solution providers' sales teams spend twenty to thirty percent of their week on
manual research. Critical intelligence is scattered across ESG reports, sustainability-linked loan
filings, regulatory disclosures, CSRD and SEC climate disclosure submissions, earnings calls, and
hiring announcements — and the signal that a company is actually ready to buy is hidden inside all of
it. By the time a human rep has pieced it together, the window has often closed.
And if they rely on a generic "AI email writer" to speed things up? The prospect gets a message that
sounds like it was written for a software company in a completely different industry. Because it was.
That's the gap we close. We use Claude to automate the deep, nuanced research so your team can
focus on the relationship.
The line that runs underneath all of it
“The climate solutions exist. The technology is ready. The only thing standing between
those solutions and the scale they need is sales velocity. Every deal that stalls in a
prospect's inbox, every rep chasing the wrong company at the wrong time, is time the
planet doesn't have. That's why we build what we build. Faster pipelines aren't just a
business outcome — they're how the best climate solutions get deployed at the speed
the problem demands.”
— Heather Burns, Founder, Upside ESG
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