Back in the “good old days” it was not unusual for customers to remain loyal for life. They were often treated like family. Today, however, business relationships have become more temporary and transactional in nature.
It is likely that at least one of your valued customers has experienced a reduction in force, a merger, buyout or other situation that dramatically impacted their business. Perhaps your communication with them has dwindled and they have stopped placing orders with your company.
Of course, this directly impacts your bottom line and is likely to prompt a flurry of activity to find new customers.
There is nothing wrong with wanting new customers. However, research shows that it is usually much cheaper to retain an existing customer than find a new one. In fact, depending on your industry, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
This means that, before you expend time and money to acquire new customers, you should first try to reconnect with your past customers. After all, the “lowest hanging fruit” is your past customers.
NWI recommends that you reinstate relationships with your former customers. To begin that process, here are the steps you should take:
1. So that you can track the success of your efforts to reconnect through the sales cycle, import customers who have not placed an order with you in the past year into a CRM. If you do not have a CRM, take advantage of our offer of one free license for our recommended platform – web3box.
2. Find your former contacts in LinkedIn and/or on their company website to see if they are still with your target company. If you find them, ask them to link with you and start a conversation. Or if you prefer, you can ask one of your mutual contacts for an introduction.
3. Look up the target company on LinkedIn to locate the key team members and get reacquainted with their product and team members.
4. Conduct a Google search to catch up on developments at the company.
5. If your former contacts no longer work at your target company, call or look on their website to see who has taken their place.
6. Send a letter or email explaining how you did business in the past and remind them of your service and product.
7. Invite them over for a tour highlighting your equipment and processes.
8. Offer to stop by to see their facility and reconnect with the team. Do more listening than selling. Inquire about their current supplier. Ask what they like and do not like about their services.
9. Make it known that you would like to be considered for future quotes and familiarize yourself with their quoting process.
10. No matter if they decide to work with you or not, ask for a referral, “who do you know that may need my services?”
11. Ask if you can place them on your mailing list and stay in touch.
Good luck! As you work to reconnect with your past customers, we would love for you to share your success stories with us.
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