Sales Misadventures #2: Make the most of your calls

Reactivating a lapsed customer is one of the best return on investments you can make. But when this business lets the opportunity slip through their fingers, it gets the attention of the Real Results Guy.

One early evening my spouse answered her mobile phone. It was a spa/esthetician that she used to frequent, but doesn’t really visit much anymore. They were on the phone for less than a minute.

Me: “What was that about?”

My wife: “They called to ask if they can close my file.”

Me: “That’s it? Nothing else?”

My wife: (with a twinkle in her eye, because she knows me so well) “That’s it. No special offer to win me back, no survey to find out why I don’t go much anymore, nothing.”

I smiled. My wife is becoming a Marketing Coach by osmosis.

What an opportunity missed! The business is obviously investing the time to have someone call to “close” files. It could just as easily, with a little bit of preparation, be winning back the customer or at least gathering valuable marketing intelligence.

Re-activating lapsed customers is a quick way to get some sales. Put an offer together and start calling them or send them a letter. In this case, it could have looked like this:

Good evening Ms. Jones, we have noticed that you have not visited us within the past year and we just wanted to be in touch to find out if it was something we did or could do better? (gather info here)

We appreciate your feedback, Ms. Jones, we always strive to offer the best service to our customers. To thank you for your time, we would like to offer you an opportunity to enjoy a 3-massage package at a promotional price of $249  and I’ll upgrade you to a massage-facial package at no extra cost. So you get three massage-facial packages for only $249.

They could have even structured a few offers and presented the one that matched most closely to previous purchases.

You may think that this is quite the deal. It is supposed to be. Even if you don’t make a lot of profit on the package, the idea is to win-back the customer for the future business. If you’re keeping track of your marketing metrics, you know how much it costs you to acquire a new customer and how much each customer is worth to you. Based on these numbers you can decide how to structure your offer to make it worth your while.

Sales lesson: If you going to be calling anyway, you might as well try to win back the business or at least find out why they left.

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