Re-Engagement Strategy: Close More Sales

It’s happened to all of us. You have a great meeting with a new business prospect, and you both agree they are a fit for your product or service offering. But something in the timing isn’t quite right. So you leave the meeting promising to stay in touch.

Six months later they pop up on your list of people you need to check in with, so you place a call and are greeted with those dreaded words: “Oh, I wish you had called me last month – we JUST closed out the RFP.”

You can call it bad luck. Or you can call it what it really is: lack of a re-engagement strategy – or poor execution of one.

How to Re-Engage Middle of the Funnel Leads

After nearly twelve years of helping our clients get in front of new business opportunities, we’ve seen the impact of making sure the back end of the prospecting effort is as well thought out as the front end. When you think of the classic sales funnel, we all think about the leads that come into the top, and the deals that are pushed all the way through to the bottom. But there’s gold sitting there in the middle of your funnel, and if you don’t pay enough attention to how to mine that gold, it can get siphoned off by your competitors.

A successful re-engagement strategy needs to incorporate the following:

• A clear method to define when a prospect has gone from someone you are actively pursuing, to one where your actions need to shift to longer-term nurture mode
• Content that is informative and relevant which can be pushed out to the prospect at intervals that are frequent enough to keep you top of mind, but not so frequent that you start getting ignored
• A pre-determined timeframe to actively re-engage with the prospect that ensures enough time has gone by for their situation to have potentially shifted, but not so much time that you risk missing the window of opportunity
• Systematic execution of all of the above – because let’s face it, we all have good intentions but can be focused on the immediate here and now, inadvertently letting gold slip through our fingers if we don’t have a process in place

I know – it seems like a lot of effort. But we’ve seen the pay-off (and the lost opportunities) often enough to know it’s worthwhile. That’s why many clients look to us to proactively execute their re-engagement strategy as part of our ongoing lead generation efforts. In executing a re-engagement program, MarketLauncher keeps the client top of mind and moves the prospect back into the sales funnel when their need and interest have aligned with the right time to pursue.