Talk to your lapsed customers. They’re your second best source of business.
Traditional sales books tell us that the easiest (and cheapest) people to sell to are your customers. Much of your sales effort is hopefully already targeted at this group. They must be made to feel special.
The next best group to talk to are those people who have bought from you in the past, but aren’t now. Why are they not buying? Has their business experienced a downturn perhaps? Do they no longer do the same sort of business as previously? Or have they found an alternative supplier to you? If so, what do they think of your competitor? What would it take to win them back?
Build a strategy
Consider how you will communicate with this group and win them back. The first stage (and perhaps most obviously) is to identify them and put them into one list. A client I was working with recently in Northampton calls this their ‘zero spend’ list and had allocated one member of their phone team to work the list from an Excel spreadsheet and update the details via their CRM.
Have you thought about incentivising them? Many businesses offer campaigns with special discounts for lapsed customers. In any eventuality I’d favour calling them so that you can engage in dialogue with them. Find out what is happening. As a result of this work you will find that some will have left the market. It’s a small business and it has ceased trading. Or the owners retired. Maybe they’ve been taken over by a larger company. You may have this alternative company on your system already. The real gold nuggets though are those still trading who have simply switched allegiances to one of your competitors. They stole your customer from you, so now is time to steal them back! One of the things which is great about working with lapsed customer lists is that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They are spending zero with you now. If you can win a few of them back ………………….. who knows where that will lead to?
If you want some training to help get on the front foot and generate some excellent quality conversations with these prospects, talk to us at To Market. We specialise in training outbound lead generation teams and telesales and telemarketing. And I’ve even written a book about the subject – based on my years of managing outbound phone teams, and experiences with my clients. The book is available from all good bookshops including Waterstones and Amazon.
If you want to discuss training for your team contact us here.