Why Past Clients are Great Pre-Qualified Leads

An Interview with Joe Apfelbaum

In this article, Joe Apfelbaum shares his insights on the importance of being a servant leader. He also tells us why past clients are pre-qualified and pre-vetted leads that are literally the lowest hanging fruit in your business.

Dan Pfister: Joe, before we get to the story of how you reactivate past clients, could you share a little about your organization?

Joe Apfelbaum: Ajax Union is a B2B marketing agency based in Brooklyn. We build top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel, marketing systems and processes that educate your prospects, build trust, and convert them into customers.

Dan: How do you approach winning back past clients?

Joe:  We had a client who left because they hired a director of marketing and we hadn't really worked with this client for three years or so.

Our goal is to continuously connect with those people and we never burn bridges. We actually fortify those bridges and support them to transition internally or to another agency and we're very, very courteous in that respect.

So whenever we reach out, they always respond, because they know we're not trying to sell them anything, we're happy for them.  We're always adding value and giving advice.

There was a piece of advice that we gave this customer three years after they stopped working with us and they responded saying that they could really use some more support. They had an internal person that was doing the things we used to do but they weren't being very strategic so they took us on and we became their agency of record again.

This is a great example that shows when somebody leaves you, they're not really leaving, they're just temporarily changing how they operate to either include you right now or not include you right now. And if you can view it like that and continuously add value to people, whether they're currently paying you a retainer or not, that will help you win back a lot more customers.

Dan: So you’re monitoring and regularly sending out advice to past clients?

Joe: Yes, it can be something as simple as monitoring everybody's websites. We use an inexpensive tool called Pingdom and when a website goes down, we just notify them and say, “Hey, it looks like your website is down. We've been monitoring it since we've been working together and if you need support to get it back up, or if you need to make sure that it doesn't go down in the future, we can help you change your platform. Or we can guide you so you don't have as much downtime while you're advertising or we can help pause your ads when your website goes down so you’re not sending people to 404 pages.”

Dan: What do you see as the most important ingredient for successfully reactivating customers?

Joe: Continuously adding value. There's a book called “Getting Naked” that talks about how consulting companies need to add value before someone becomes a customer.

If someone's an ideal client for you, make them a client even if they're not paying you. Treat them like a client and what's going to end up happening is you're going to be so embedded into what they do, that it's going to be a no brainer for them to actually become a paying client.

We're continuously having conversations with companies and decision makers who are clients but we continue those conversations even when they move to another company.

There's a woman named Lynn who worked at a very, very large publicly traded company and left for another publicly traded company. Because we kept in touch with her the whole time, and supported her onboarding in this new company, we had a new customer and we still had the old company as well.

Dan: There are so many companies that don't even try to win back customers. Why is that?

Joe: One reason is they resent people who leave them. They get all emotional instead of just looking at it from the paradigm of every customer you’ve ever served is currently a customer - they're either paying you or not paying you but they're still a customer.

But they don't view it that way. They think “Once you leave, you’re out of the family forever.” Come on. If your kid leaves, love your kid, if he wants to come back, let him come back. 

Some people treat their teenagers like they're adults but their brains aren’t fully formed yet. If your teenager decides to run away, welcome them back when they're ready to come back. Don't bounce them from the family and cut them out of the will forever. That's a recipe for disaster and that just shows a lack of awareness.

Dan: What do you think the biggest mistake companies make with customer reactivation?

Joe: The biggest mistake is missing opportunities by not looking at what's best for the customer. They're looking at what's best for their own company first. You want to think about the customer before you think about your own company. Of course when you're activating and reactivating them you’ve got to make sure that it's a profitable endeavor, but you’re there for acts of service, you're there as a servant leader. 

Your goal, and the customer knows what your agenda is because they can smell a liar from a million miles away, is to go in there and say, “Hey, how can I be of service today?”

Maybe I'll be of service by introducing you to somebody, maybe I'll be of service by just hearing you out or creating a space for you personally. Most companies aren’t doing that because they're so busy worrying about making money and they're not giving, but you’ve got to be a giver.

Dan: Are there any other big benefits you see in reactivating past customers?

Joe: Once a customer is inside your system it's so easy to continue working with those customers or to reactivate winback customers than it is to go out and get new customers.

You’re already familiar with them, you know what they're about and they know what you’re about. And we know which customers we never want to work with again. So we know the customers that we actually want to work with and they're kind of pre-qualified and pre-vetted leads. This makes past clients literally the lowest hanging fruit, the easiest to onboard and the most profitable clients.

Dan: Before we wrap this up Joe, is there a thought or idea that you'd like to leave people with?

Joe: I want to let people know that you are responsible for the way that you view things in life and whatever results you have right now come from the way that you view things. 

So, if you're thinking scarcity and competitors are taking things away and there's not enough for everybody, it's your responsibility to improve your way of viewing things. And when you do that, when you shift the lens from which you see business and life, you find that suddenly the world starts to change around you. You start seeing abundance and more power and more freedom and that's what I want people to take away from this. You can create a life and a business that's based in abundance by just seeing things differently.