Get to work on your lost customers

Only buying customers or is your back door open sometimes too? Every company has to deal with customers who in time go and buy somewhere else, sometimes this is natural turnover, but it can happen that you lose sight of customers because interesting new customers or buying customers demand your attention. If you are not careful, all your newly gained sales will disappear through the back door. The question is how do you prevent them from becoming a lost customer? And how do you win them back?

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Identify lost customers

For starters, you need a printout of your customer base, along with sales for the past few years. Next, determine when someone becomes a lost customer. If you are an organization with recurring customer orders, you can use the rule of thumb that a customer becomes a lost customer after he or she last ordered a year ago. It is important that you determine after what period of time, after the last order a customer received, he or she becomes a lost customer.

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Click on the link to download the Leaky bathtub model, an Excel that automatically filters your lost customers.

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Bathtub_model_TMC Media

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Who are the interesting lost customers?

It sounds strange but some customers don't fit your business and yet they bought from you. Sometimes it is better that they buy somewhere else because they take too much time from your office. Yet there are also customers you lose sight of who do fit in well with you. Unfortunately, there is no handy or clever trick to quickly identify these companies. You will have to go through this list with your salespeople and work on winning them back based on that list.

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How do you avoid losing track of customers?

It starts with communicating with your customers regularly, through LinkedIn messages, newsletters, as well as phone contact. If you don't think about them, chances are they won't think about you either. In doing so, you can use some tools that alert you when a customer is about to become a lost customer.

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Tools that can help with this are a CRM / ERP or possibly BI. For example, you could create a maxim based on the last order date: a notification comes when it passes 12 months. Then it is up to the salespeople to assess whether this customer is interesting to contact.

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Use Leadinfo to turn lost customers back into customers

Leadinfo is a tool that allows you to identify companies on your website. For example, when you send an email containing a link to an offer on the website and the customer clicks on it, it will be identified by Leadinfo. After he is identified you could call him or her. This makes it a lot less cold to call a contact.

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If you may already have Leadinfo, you could use the list of lost customers to see if they visited your website during a certain period of time and what they looked at. In addition, give them a lost customer label and use the trigger function to get a notification when this lost customer visits your website. This way you can follow up with him at the right time.

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Need help winning back your lost customers? Or interested in a free demo Leadinfo? Then contact me at casper.lucassen@tmcmedia.nl or via the contact button.

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