WinBack for Past Clients and Former Prospects

An Interview with Tim Hayden

Dan Pfister: Before we get to your reactivation strategy, could you tell our readers a little about yourself and your company?

Tim Hayden: I’m the CEO of Brain+Trust Partners. We use primary data to help our clients better understand their current customers, to find customers who look just like them, and to provide a better customer experience.

Dan: Could you share your approach or strategy for client reactivation?

Tim: Brain+Trust Partners has been in business for four and a half years now and we’ve logged information about our conversations in HubSpot and we look at our closed or lost opportunities that are 12 months or older. 

We think that it's worth picking up the phone and calling those former prospects or former clients. We feel like it's worth sending them an email. Do we want to send an email blast to 1,000 people in our CRM? No, we don't. What we want to do is send a very personal note to them to see how they're doing and see if they might have 15 - 30 minutes to catch up by phone.

To me, this notion of personalization, the one to one, peer to peer contextually relevant conversation, that empathetic conversation you can have with a former client or a lost prospect will give you a higher opportunity for closing or converting them into a new relationship. Or it will simply educate them to where they'll turn around and tell someone they know in their network what it is you're doing these days.

So there's a few benefits to going back and looking at dormant or lost customers.

Dan: How would you approach these people and engage with them so they’ll actually take your call or respond to your email?

Tim:  Well we use content. Maybe an existing piece of thought leadership, maybe a blog or a white paper that we wrote that could be relevant to their business, to the vertical that they're in, or it could be a third-party news article or something that an analyst wrote. 

Or it could be something from one of our 35 strategic partners. These are software platforms and other consultants and they put out thought leadership content like we do. 

Many times I'll take the content and send that to both current clients and lost customers and say, “I thought you might find this interesting. A lot has changed here and we've got some things to update you on. Would you happen to have 30 minutes convenient sometime next week to hop on a phone or a video call?”

Dan: How well has that worked for you?

Tim: I'd say it's easier now than it has been. As transaction volume has gone down, as the business world has had to pause and focus on the priorities and understand what's going on with their business, it's been a wonderful time, obviously in our line of business to go talk to them about getting their data in order.

We are helping clients bring all their data into one place, a customer data platform, then applying machine learning to build a singular record for each customer our clients know today. That delivers better predictive analytics and behavior modeling so we’re able to identify opportunities to maybe cross sell, reduce media investments or to bring new products to market. 

But this isn’t regular marketing. This isn't the way things were before March 12, 2020 where people could say you’ve got to send newsletters on Wednesdays and you’ve got to send a piece of content and invite them to connect with you on LinkedIn right after you get off the phone.

That linear three or four touch way of sales conversion isn't going to work right now. You're going to have to be much more immediate and direct with a personal outreach. It needs to be something that's contextually relevant for them and straight up in asking them to invest 15 - 30 minutes to share with you on the phone.

I can tell you that we're probably in the 25% plus success rate right now, with Brain+Trust, because again, we're not selling anything. We're just simply using this as an opportunity to check in with folks and educate them on some things that we've changed and some different approaches we’re using in our business.

Dan: What do you use most often, email, text, LinkedIn or something else?

It’s almost always email and we even send text messages to some clients, former clients or even lost prospects because that was part of our communication with them in the past. The text message could just say, “Hey, just wanted to check in with you”, it’s something that’s more personal, more intimate.

Email is where we're attaching that piece of content and with text messages what we're really saying is, “Hello friend, we’ve been thinking about you.” 

I think the thing that most of the business world doesn't yet understand, doesn't totally respect is that there is no normal to go back to and because of that you have to be much more neighborly, an approach that has probably been lost over the last couple of decades.

Over the last decade and a half we’ve all focused on general marketing metrics like email open rates, likes and shares, comments and web traffic, what we call performance marketing - let’s see how the media performs - well that's not what it's about anymore.

Now it's about being able to make a much more direct, personalized connection. That goes the same for a smaller company and an organization that has 10s of millions of customers or more.

Dan: Only they use data to create some level of personalization?

Tim: Right, they'll have to use data. But what if they don't have their data together, if they don't understand who their customers are, and what their preferences are… ? I think that's where we're going to see many businesses get cannibalized by smaller, more agile organizations and certainly by more aggressive and better funded organizations.

Dan: And we’ll wrap it up with this Tim. What kind of data, insights or understandings would be most helpful for winning back a past client or a former prospect?

Tim: I think understanding what worked in the past, and reviewing past objections or refusals to doing business with us, is the kind of insight that can give you direction on how to convert a past client or prospect.