The deals they forgot about came back

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Fri(yay) - and that means it’s time for your Revenue Play - an issue where I share some stories from my own career as a data nerd.

This week, we're digging into a CRM graveyard. Years of lost contacts, piling up, completely forgotten. Turns out, not all of them wanted to be there.

Let’s dive in.

I once worked with a service-based client with a CRM full of closed-lost contacts that had been accumulating for years. Deals were just sitting in close-lost, as if some horrible track record.

The business ran on annual renewals, but nobody had ever looked back. If a deal didn't close, it got pushed to closed-lost and left there. Out of sight, completely out of mind.

The “we tried, and it didn’t work” approach.

There was no system for revisiting why a deal was lost, or when. No segmentation, no follow-up logic, no reactivation plan. The assumption was that lost meant gone forever. When we actually looked at the data, two patterns showed up immediately: deals lost due to price, and deals lost due to timing, specifically, slow speed to lead or quote.

Does that surprise you? Probably not.

Since this was a renewal-based industry, I knew that contacts lost six to nine months ago were likely coming up on a renewal with a competitor. That's a window.

I built a reactivation plan segmented by how long the deal had been sitting, and for that six-to-nine-month group, we came in with a compelling offer designed to get them back into conversation before their renewal locked in.

I examined the competitive differences and hammered home everything they were not getting with common competitors. I didn’t know who they went with, but all I wanted to do was plant a seed that maybe they were paying more for less value.

For older contacts, the approach was different. The goal was to reopen the door, not hard sell.

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The reactivation created real activity. Conversations started back up, interest came in, website traffic climbed, and calls got booked. We also introduced an audit offer where prospects could have their current setup reviewed for bigger deals, where the free time made sense. It gave people a low-commitment reason to re-engage, and it worked.

Pull your closed-lost contacts right now and sort them by loss date. If you are in a renewal-based industry, anything in that six to nine-month window is potentially sitting at a competitor's renewal. B2B space? Think fiscal year.

Build one reactivation sequence with a low-barrier offer and send it before that window closes.

TL;DR

A lost deal is not a lost customer, but rather a paused conversation. The data tells you when to restart it.