Dan Pfister believes there is gold in your database of lost customers and his “Strategic WinBack” process will help you find it. Dan helps companies create strategies to win back their past customers to grow revenue, profits and market share.
“Businesses are sitting on this huge revenue engine, and all they need to do is turn it on and start it.”
In 2016, The Business Source, a company in which Dan is a partner, had a particularly bad year for attrition.
All those lost customers cost the company a fortune. There was lost subscription revenue, lost upsell and cross-sell revenue and then there was the cost of replacing those customers.
Those huge losses forced Dan to create a program to try and win back some of those lost customers. He had already done plenty of retention work so he didn’t think many of them would be open to returning, but he had to at least give it a try.
That program generated a 57X ROI. It wildly overshot Dan’s most optimistic projections.
“In my 20 years of marketing nothing had generated that much ROI with so little time, money and effort.”
The ROI was high because it cost next to nothing to run the winback program. It was all done with phone and email outreach with existing staff. And the sales were amazing.
This is typical of winback programs. They cost little to run and sales average $485K for small to medium size businesses (SMBs) and larger organizations can generate millions.
“Reactivated customers buy more, refer more and are more loyal than new customers. They are a fantastic source of new revenue.”
Most businesses lose approximately 50% of their clients within four years and Dan’s research shows that about one in four return with a strategic winback program. What’s really interesting is that when they return, they buy more than they did the first time around.
“With strategic winback you win more sales in less time and at a lower cost than when you sell to new prospects.”
You win more sales because the win rate is 5X better with winback than selling to first time prospects. It takes less time because you don’t need to build relationships and educate the prospect on your product – you’ve already done all that. And according to McKinsey, the cost of winning back a client is as little as 1/10th the cost of acquiring a first-time customer.
“If companies knew their winback numbers, most of them would do winback.”
If winback has all these benefits why doesn’t every company have a winback program? It’s because they don’t know the numbers. They don’t know the amazing ROI that winback generates, they don’t know that one in four past customers could come back and they don’t know the huge revenue potential.
How to Get Started
There are 5 steps to strategically winning back lost customers.
Step 1 – SELECT
Create a list of all your past customers and select the ones you’d like to win back. Then pare down the list to the ones who left most recently and generated the most revenue, they’re the ones who can generate the best returns.
Step 2 – RESEARCH
Learn why these customers left and what it’ll take to win them back.
Step 3 – UPVALUE
If your research shows that people will only come back if you fix a problem or improve your product, then you need to do that before going to the next step.
Step 4 – DESIGN
The design of your winback is dependent on your goal. Your program can be designed to grow market share, grow profits or to generate new sales fast.
Step 5 – DEPLOY
After the program is designed, it’s time to launch and start creating those new high ROI sales.
“There are many paths up the mountain. Winback programs can be custom designed to help companies reach their revenue, profit or market share goals.”
Who can benefit from a winback program? It’s pretty well any company that has a significant number of lost customers.
“When it comes to creating new sales, lost customers are the low hanging fruit.”
Dan has had experience in several different aspects of business. He spent his early years in the high-stress world of commodities trading. After 5 years he was totally burnt out and decided to sell everything and travel the world. A year later he was back in Canada and took a job in marketing for a mutual fund company which eventually led him to start The Business Source with two partners in the early 2000’s.
In 2016 he created a strategic winback process, and based on its success he founded Strategic WinBack Services.
If you’d like to learn more visit: https://strategicwinback.com/. Contact Dan to find out how his process can help you Soar to Success. Also be sure to watch our podcast on YouTube to hear our interview in its entirety.
