WinBack and Playing the Long Game

An Interview with Rob Hartnett

Rob Hartnett is a high achieving sales professional with a wide range of skills who’s broken organization sales records by over 400%. 

In this article Rob explains how he wins back lost customers and the critical importance of playing the long game.

Dan Pfister: Before we get into winback, could you tell us a little bit about you and your and your company Rob?

Rob Hartnett: I work with visionary leaders to figure out strategies that address high-priority challenges and opportunities in growing their business. A lot of our work these days involves helping sales leaders bring sales, marketing and technology together to win more business.

Dan Pfister: Could you share a story around one of your winback initiatives?

Rob Hartnett: I'm a huge believer in winback. It’s been big for me all through my work around business development, sales and marketing.

One of my early winbacks came in my IT days with a big mining company called Rio Tinto.

I was working at an Apple reseller when we lost the account, but after I moved to another reseller I decided to try and win them back because they still fit my ideal customer profile.

I reached out to the head of procurement at Rio who I knew quite well and said, “I know what you're up to, I know where your contracts lie and I'm not asking for any business right now because that would be disrespectful.  But if it’s okay with you, I'm going to shadow account management.”  

He said “What do you mean by that?” and I told him “I'm going to get really close to you guys, I'm going to call on you every so often and when I see an article or something else that I think could be really useful for your business I’ll sent it over.

And if your current incumbent is unsuccessful or if something changes, I want you to know I'm there for you and I can turn on a dime.  

Also, at some point in the next 60 days I’d love for you and a couple of your people to come down and see us in our new facility and meet our leadership.  I want you guys to know it's not just me saying this, I've got a whole team behind it and I'd love you to come and meet them.”

So I left it at that and lo and behold, two weeks later he called me and said they’d like to come down. “But there’s no obligation, I just want to come check you guys out and get your story.”

They came down and my managing director took them around and we all went out for lunch and the whole time the focus was always squarely on what we could do for them.  

Three months later I got a request for a quotation.

It was a test. It wasn't a big deal, maybe five or six PCs and some networking gear. 

We submitted and won that little bit of business and we really over-serviced it.

Six months after that we had the opportunity to pitch on the entire business. We were a reseller of Apple and we pitched in partnership with them and won the business.

That was a multi-million dollar account for both ourselves and Apple over a period of five years.  So in terms of the upside, it was in the hundreds of percent, it was phenomenal.

I’m a huge believer in playing the long game and this is a great example of just how effective it can be. But it can be hard at times because there’s so much pressure to get new logos.

Another colleague of mine at Apple did the same thing.  He went up against Compaq and like us, he played the long game.  He networked, kept close to those people and kept adding value. 

He wasn’t selling at all, he just kept in touch and you wanted to take his call. It’s like you and I Dan, when you ring me, I'm excited that you ring me, and I'm hoping it's the same for you.  There are people that when they ring, they're going to add value to your day and that's what he did.

He added value at a procurement level, at a technology level and at a senior management level and when the other guys kind of fell away he started seeing signals that they may want to come back.

They’d ask questions like, “What do you guys have in this space? What do you know about this? Can you help me?”  They were starting to ask questions higher up in their buyer journey and that’s a great place to start.

Dan: So would you say the length of the sales cycle with winback is considerably shorter than with new sales?

Rob:  Definitely. If you think of it as a graph it probably has a long tail and then it just goes up really fast.  

That long tail represents all the internal hurdles they have to jump.

For example, there’s internal politics. They’ve moved from you, so what happens if they go back? Who wants to move back to you?  How will they be seen internally?  Will the person responsible for the move be upset and how will they be seen?

Once they’re over their internal hurdles, I think they can move quickly because they were looking for permission to buy from you and now they can.   

Dan: So now that their internal hurdles have been scaled, how do you make it easy for them to come back?

You've got to identify and eliminate the reason why they left in the first place.  

If we screwed up, where did we screw up? Literally ask them where we messed up. Was it in service? Was it in the materials? Was it lack of account management? Was it lack of inspiration? Was it the people?

Often when I ask “So what made you decide to move?” they say price and that’s never the only issue so I dig deeper. I say “Great. Let's get that sorted, now, what's the next one?” And then I ask a third time and that’s where we learn why they really left.

Then we’ve got to acknowledge the problem, understand it caused them grief, show empathy, fix the problem and demonstrate that we've fixed it.  

You can help them see that you’ve made the fix by showing your other clients, people who are like them, or who they aspire to be, working with you. That proves you’re doing things right because you've retained Nike or Adidas or Rio Tinto or whomever it may be.

Now, maybe there wasn’t an issue and they just wanted a change or maybe new leadership came in and it was out with the old and in with the new. It can happen if the old got a bit fat, dumb, happy and complacent and it can happen even if the old was really good.

Dan: It might be difficult for them to tell you where you fell short, is there a way you set the stage so it’s easier for them to share the real issue?

Rob: Yes, you’ve got to have independents, it's as simple as that. It doesn't need to be a true independent, but it can be someone else within the organization, a leader or someone in a different department.

Dan: Are there any other keys to making winback work?

I think the big one I haven't touched on, is make sure you only winback the customers you want. There are customers who leave and you’re like, “Oh my God, thank you”.

You and I have been around long enough to know there are some customers who promise a whole bunch of stuff and don’t deliver.  “We're going to buy this, we're going to do that, we're going to expand” and they don't.

Maybe they just said it to get a lower price based on volume or maybe something went wrong in their business. 

Sometimes it's an acquisition. That can change the whole culture of the business. We've seen great businesses get acquired by larger organizations who destroyed those businesses.  

There's a lot of stuff that can change on both sides so the thing is, do you really want them back in their current form?  If the answer is yes, then by all means do winback.

But you can’t just rely on one voice from the customer.

I remember doing a big key account review with a global business.  I had customer success, customer service and the sales team in the room.  The sales guys were talking really big about this one account and the unbelievable relationships they had.

During the break, four of the customer service people came to me and said “Rob, we don’t want to say anything but we totally disagree with the sales guys. These people are arrogant and self-serving, they treat us badly and don't pay on time. We've got a whole different view than the sales team. Should we voice that?”

I told them they should definitely voice it. The sales team weren't in tune with the service team and the service team didn't have a voice. The bottom line was, if they lost this account some would say “Great” and others would say, “We really should win this one back.”

So “Do we want them back?” is a big question and another one is, “Where is your company going?”.

This is important especially since the pandemic because a lot of us have switched our products and our direction.  You might have accounts that were totally aligned to you through 2019, but you may now be doing something different, your organization might be going in a different direction.  It might be going more towards cloud, it might be going more digital, and winback needs to be strategically aligned with where your company is going.

Dan: So are there any other big mistakes you think that people make with their winback strategy?

Rob: Where they make the mistake is not finding out exactly why they lost in the first place.

They need to do a really good win/loss analysis but very few companies have win/loss analysis as a process, it's ad hoc at best, and it’s normally focused on loss.

You should go and find out why you won. But very few companies do it, they just assume the win came from their amazing relationship skills, their great sales team, or their product was just the best in market.

You need to literally go back and ask, “Why did we win?” 

Get independents on both sides if possible and you'll be fascinated by the reasons why they actually picked you.

Dan: That’s huge Rob. We don't ask these questions, we just make guesses and accept them as reality, but often they’re nowhere close to reality so we end up making strategic decisions based on faulty assumptions.

Rob: 100% correct. You and I have seen it time and time again.

The head of sales of a global logistics business told me a wonderful story about winning a great piece of business, and the price they paid for not asking why they won it.  They assumed it was great relationships, unbelievable products, great pricing, their presentation skills and their RFP.

But when it came to the contract renewal, they lost. They didn't even make the shortlist and the whole team was devastated.

The head of sales asked why they lost the business and she was told they lost on price.  

She said “You’re kidding, what about the value add?” and they replied “We get it, but you lost on price.”  She then asked “Even though it’s three years too late, when we won back in 2015 why did you give us the business?” 

They said “Price, that's how we buy. When you won you had a unique pricing advantage due to currency and you had an unbelievable price advantage on one product. You guys won on price.”

She said to me afterwards that it was a terrible, devastating loss, but the greatest learning she ever had.  

“When you actually looked at this organization from a strategic view, they always bought on price. We just went into fantasyland thinking that they changed for us and we got our asses kicked three years later, and deservedly so.”

It's just so important to understand why you won or lost.

I don't know if you've seen the movie War Dogs with Jonah Hill, but there’s a scene where he does a win/loss analysis. He asks the procurement guys of the US Army “Do you mind telling me why you awarded us the contract?”  

They told him that he undercut by something like $50 or $60 million and the very next shot was Jonah Hill in the corridor kicking the crap out of the wall because he only needed to drop $10 million and he blew all his margin.

At least he asked why they won the business, but so many people just don’t do it.

Dan:  Who should do the win/loss analysis?

Rob: You might want the marketing team to do it because they can be just a little more data savvy. Also, they're not as connected as the BD team, or the go-to-market team so after they ask, “We're redoing our marketing, can you tell us why we lost, or why we won this one?” they can probe a little more with the client.

Dan: Why do you think most companies don't do winback?

Rob: I think the point to make is they don't do it intentionally and it's not strategic. I think it's ad hoc but I think you’ll find the best account managers do it.

When it isn’t done, one of the main reasons is the incentives. It’s not getting done if they're incentivized on new logos, or if their incentivized on quarterly returns, because as you and I both know, most times you can't get winback done in three months.

As they say, show me the incentive and I'll show the outcome. If the incentive is angled towards quick wins and new logos then you're not going to get people focused on strategic winback.

Dan: What gets rewarded gets done.

Rob: That's exactly right. You need the incentives.

I don't think leaders really understand the ROI of winback. The ROI data that you've got is wonderful Dan and obviously the data from the people who have come before you is also great but there’s a lack of incentives for doing winback.

There also needs to be more celebration when you win someone back.  I think some people, especially sales leaders seem a bit complacent about it, “Yeah they came back”.  But they didn't just come back, someone went out and won them back.

With a new logo, they don’t know you well and they may have a go with you.  But when you win someone back, you've got to actually undo all the bad thinking and any negativity they may have. That takes a lot of effort and you have to be willing to listen to a lot of negative feedback about you, about the team and about the work that's been done.  

Not everyone can hang in there, take that feedback and turn it into a positive.

So I think that's the main one. I think it's not strategic.

Dan: Is there anything you’d like to leave us with?

Rob: I think that monitoring the winback numbers is really important.

It's unfair to have salespeople do it, they've got enough on their plate. I think it's up to customer success, sales enablement and sales ops to manage the numbers on winback.

They need to track what customers do over the next three or six months after they come back, track the velocity in the sales funnel, get the analytics and take them to leadership.

If you need Board approval for changing REM, it isn’t going to be easy, but if you can show that on winback the velocity is 3X over new logos, or 3X after sales stage four because the trust is already built, or if you can show that they did an average 2X within six months and 3X within 18 months you’ll have a strong case for winback.

So get the analytics. 

A great friend of mine, Joe Galvin said “Data trumps politics”. Get the data and see what it's telling us, that's really important.

Dan: When you say velocity, are you talking about the speed of the transaction?

Rob: I'm talking about the speed of the deal coming back. For example, brand new logos take 60 days to go through the funnel and winback takes 30 days because we're not doing all the prospecting and relationship building, they already know you.

One of the great points you make and it’s so true, if they've left, only two or three people may have wanted to leave, and there might be fifteen who go, “What do you mean we've left? We love those guys!”

So don’t assume the whole organization had a meeting or an off-site and have gone ‘We hate them.” There'll be a bunch of people who really like you and didn't want to leave in the first place.

So when you want to win them back, you won't have to convince the whole firm, you may only need to convince two or three people.

I have a Seven Stage Sales Process and when they want to come back, they don't go in at Sales Stage 1, they may go straight down to Sales Stage 4. In my example with Rio I was shadowing account management, so if the other guys fell over for any reason, I was ready to go and they came in at Sales Stage 6. Forget the other five, they were like “Can you pick this up now?” 

There isn't any selling going on there, they literally wanted my price. I didn't need to tell them about me and my firm and all that other stuff, because we'd done it earlier, they just came straight down to Sales Stage 6 – boom – in.

That's what I call velocity.  

It's zero days between Stage 1 and Stage 6, and then there’s a bit through, 6 and 7.  That's the important part and that's music to the ears of anyone who's responsible for revenue like business owners, stakeholders and shareholders.

And that's another thing, what are those owners thinking, what are they doing about winback?

Dan: Thanks for all your exceptional insights and highlighting the critical importance of playing the long game Rob.

If anybody would like to learn more or get in contact with you, how would they do that?

Rob: My website is RobHartnett.com and you can find me here on LinkedIn.