WinBack & Customer Retention

An Interview with Alice Heiman

Alice Heiman strategizes with CEOs and sales leadership to grow sales and maximize retention, and Forbes.com says "She is among the world’s leading experts on the complex sale".

In this article Alice shows us how to win back past clients and implement strong retention protocols to retain those customers once they return.

Dan Pfister: Before we get to your insights on winback, could you say a few words about what you do.

Alice Heiman: I work with the CEOs of privately held companies who want to rapidly increase their sales, keep their investors very happy and create a high valuation.

Dan Pfister: Can you share a story about how you won back a past client?

Alice: Recently, one of my clients lost a customer to the competitor. We thought they were going to renew, so we were working on the renewal and it was going along pretty well.

Now they’d been purchased by another company and the two companies were merging, and one of the companies was using one tool, and the other company was using my client’s tool. They wanted to put everything together and then they we're going to decide between the two.

So we had to do a lot of work, but we were told “it's a sure thing,” they're definitely going with our tool. But we learned that it wasn’t a sure thing when our main contact told us, “it's out of my control, the new CMO is going to make the decision.”

My client didn't have a really good relationship with the CMO and in the end, the competitor won the business.

Now I always tell my clients to exit graciously, so I asked “What can we do right now to make it as easy as possible for them to move off your tool and move onto the other tool, so they feel really good about us, and so we still have our foot in the door?”

Well we helped them onboard the other tool and stayed on for almost two months even though their subscription was up.

Eventually they realized that the other product couldn’t do what it promised to do and they ended up coming back to us.

Instead of being angry or upset that we lost the account, we were gracious and extremely helpful. If we had just walked away mad, they might not have come back but because of the way we handled things, the door was left open for them to return.

Dan: You mentioned that the relationship with the CMO wasn’t that strong. Was that one of the things you worked on after you won the business back?

Alice: As soon as we realized we lost the business we started building relationships with the new CMO and people on the sales side.

Dan: Was it difficult to get in to talk to the salespeople?

Alice: Actually it wasn't, which makes you wonder why it hadn't been done in the first place.

Salespeople will usually talk to salespeople, and sales leaders who have a need and see that you can solve for that need are going to want to talk to you. But sales people get busy and once they have interest from one group, sometimes they don’t go find all of the other decision makers.

Once they landed the account, they should’ve found all the players who were going to be affected and built strong relationships with them.

With this tool you can pull a lot of analytics that sales leaders want. They should have asked their marketing contacts to set up meetings with sales to show them the metrics and start building those relationships.

Dan: How would you compare the length of the sale cycle for acquiring a new client versus winning an old one back?

Alice:  With most complex sales, which is what I deal with, the sales cycle is going to be three months on the short end, to a year and sometimes 18 months if it's a large deal. So that's a long time and it’s a lot of work to get a deal closed.

But if you're already on their approved vendor list, you've already done business with them and you have established relationships, of course, it will go faster when you are trying to win back an old customer.

Dan: How do you keep customers on board after you win them back?

Alice: It depends on what kind of sale you have.

If you have customers who are on recurring revenue models and you maintain them really well and deepen your relationships and continue to grow with them, understand where they're going and help them go in that direction, you shouldn't have much of an issue in terms of retention.

However, as you know, sometimes things happen.

They could think “We've had this for three years. Maybe it's time for us to look at some new technology.” and that’s where having those great relationships is really helpful.

The other thing I find helpful is if your customers know each other, especially if they're in a similar industry with similar products and they're not directly competing. If you introduce them to each other so they can talk about how they use your product, you’ll have a kind of super-users group where clients are learning from each other and they’ll feel like they're part of a community. 

That’ll make your product stickier so you’re less likely to lose them, but if you do, they’ll also be easier to win back.

Dan: After you win someone back can you use that story to win back other customers?

Alice: Yes, when you win a customer back, they’re even more loyal and they’ll definitely provide a great testimonial and perhaps even talk to prospective customers and tell them about their experience.

Dan: So many businesses don’t even try to win back past customers, why do you think that is?

Alice: Well it depends on the industry you're in and why you lost them. 

I had a client a couple of years ago who lost a customer because they delivered a food ingredient that was somehow inferior or tainted. It put their customer’s whole production way behind and they were very, very upset.

It’s hard to win something like that back, because they're so angry with you, because you cost them so much money. 

But if you really messed up and you fixed the issue, and can prove you fixed it, then I think it's fine to go back to your customer and say, “Look, we really, really messed up and we completely understand why you left us. But we’ve put these processes in place. We've done these things. We've hired these people, and we really know how to do this now. We'd love another chance. How can we do that?”

But there are some things that are irreparable, like when trust is lost and you can't fix that. However, if you lose to a competitor and there are no hard feelings, then yes, you should always go back.

Dan: If we want to minimize winback situations we’ll need to up our retention game, where are our best opportunities to retain more customers?

Alice: In most cases we don't really understand our customer well enough and I think that’s a problem that exists across the board in sales. When we train new salespeople, we just don’t teach them enough about our customers.

What are they like? What do they want? What do they do?

We don't teach them what a day in the life of this person they're calling on is like. And they don't do it on their own, well the best salespeople do, but most salespeople don't and we totally miss the boat by not training on that.

So once we land a customer, we really need to get to know what a day in their life is like and what kinds of things they're dealing with so that we can support them.

If they're talking a lot about training, for example, or user engagement and we have ways to help with that, we need to tell them because a lot of times we assume they know what we can do, and they don't.

I also think we need to meet more of the players, which we just don't do, we just don't dig deep enough and find all the people because we don't know how to say, “I need to meet these people because … “

They just say something like “I want to meet all these people.” 

It should be “I need to meet them because I have data for them. I have training for them, I have a playbook for them.” Whatever it is that you're offering them or whatever information you need from them, you can bring them in based on that. You also have to find all of the people who are peripherally involved.

And the last thing is just to bring in a team and match like levels. Maybe I talk to director level and user level people and I want to bring my VP of sales or my CEO or somebody in my company who's higher up to meet the leaders of the customer.

We need to show up in force, especially when we're a smaller company selling to a gigantic company. We need to show them that we have a team and that our CEO cares about their business and is available to them. I think that helps tremendously.

Dan: And if we lose a client and win them back, we should do everything you just mentioned to retain them.

Alice: Absolutely. 

And I'll tell you another winback case with one of my clients.

We sent the CEO in for this one. The salespeople didn’t feel like they could go back in but the CEO had established a really good relationship with one of the key people at that company. So we briefed the CEO on what was going on and gave him the talking points.

He called on this higher up at the customer and said, “This is what I heard happened, can we talk about it?” They discussed the situation and the customer decided to come back. That relationship the CEO had built and maintained was critical for the winback.

Dan: Before we wrap this up, is there a final thought you'd like to leave us with?

Alice: The main thing I want to leave everybody with is when you win business, it’s a great honor, treat it like the honor that it is. Be thankful, show your gratitude, write a handwritten note to everyone involved and thank them for their business.

Then implement flawlessly, onboard flawlessly and really get in tune with their needs. That way you’ll build a very loyal relationship, get opportunities to partner and when you're a partner, you're less likely to lose the business.

Dan: If people would like to get in touch or learn more about you, where would they go?

Alice: They could go to https://aliceheiman.com/ or they can go to LinkedIn and say hello there https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/aliceheiman/.