Spiking Revenue with Customer Winback

They weren’t stressed about being acquired, the founder had made sure everyone was very well taken care of.

They weren’t even stressed about generating the extra $1 million, they knew they could do that too.

What stressed them out was it had to be done in six months and sales cycles ran 9 to 10 months.

There was no way they could shorten sale cycles that much. If you rushed it that much you’d just shoot yourself in the foot.

But Katrina (a pseudonym) had a plan.

She was going to stop all new prospecting, put any deal that couldn’t be done in six months on the back burner and focus the entire team on winning back lost customers.

She got a ton of pushback.

No one thought lost customers had much value and ignoring new business entirely was a little out there.

It actually took her longer to convince her team to try it out than it did to come up with her entire plan.

Katrina knew sales cycles would be cut down to 3 to 4 months when they sold to their lost customers because so much of the time intensive work like finding qualified prospects and building relationships had already been done.

And experience had taught her that lost customers who come back generate more revenue than new customers. 

So in her mind, customer winback was a double win - shorter sales cycles and more revenue.

And she knew that with the right approach a lot of their lost customers would come back.

Katrina strongly believed that this was the only way they could spike sales in record time.

She explained all this to her team and they still weren't entirely convinced, so they decided to do a six week test.

The test worked like gangbusters and the whole team was sold on Katrina‘s idea.

The campaign, like the test was a huge success. 

In under 6 months over 40% of their lost clients were won back and $1.5 million in new sales were created. 

And many of those returning clients stayed on for years generating millions more for the acquiring company.