Current or churned customer - does your reporting software know the difference?
When it comes to processing the leads your company receives, both completed deals and ones that got away, it can often come down to guess work to correctly label and identify ones worth revisiting, especially if you don’t have the right systems in place. If you generate a high volume of leads, then it’s even easier for potential sales to slip through the net. After all, just because someone doesn’t convert the first time, doesn’t mean they won’t convert in the future.
"But we have no idea who is a current or churned customer. The reports don’t make sense!”
Does this sound like a conversation you’ve had with your team? Don’t worry, you are not alone. Correctly identifying and labelling customers is a vital part of the revenue operations process. Here’s how you can fix it.
The key is during the offboarding phase
The difference maker here is during the offboarding process of your customers. Many businesses don’t focus much on this aspect of the sales pipeline, preferring to focus solely on those leads they can convert now. So this is an area where you can gain an advantage. After all, you’ve already done the hard part in attracting that potential customer’s attention in the first place. You have a foot in the door at least. Here’s a secret for you. There are so many churned customers that choose to come back!
The trick is to make sure that you are capturing the date that the customer decides not to proceed with their sale. Knowing when they fell out the pipeline can give you a base from when to begin your remarketing.
But it is also vital that you work to capture the reason why they decided not to proceed in your customer relation management system (CRM). Don’t leave that data lost buried inside a report somewhere that no one sees. Sales and marketing would love to have insights into why someone chose not to complete.
One, because that means they can better focus their efforts to ensure whatever blocker flagged is dealt with in their presentations and marketing materials. And two, because they can see if that customer is truly someone who has decided not to complete, or someone who could perhaps, with a little extra persuasion, be convinced to convert at another time.
Demonstrate your value with quarterly check-ins
Every quarter, marketing and sales can run reports to segment customers who churned and the reasons why, and look to re-engage. It's working. We do here it at RevOps Automated. It’s also something we do for a lot of our customers.
There are many businesses that will come to us and ask for an initial audit and strategy development so they can improve and optimise their marketing, sales and customer success operations. Not all are in a position to make full use of our services now. But, at 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months, we will get back in contact with them to see how they are getting on, whether or not they actually paid for a service from us.
If we have developed some new resources that they may not have seen before, like our new lead scoring template or HubSpot and Salesforce integration mapping, then we share this with them. There are no expectations our end. We just want to reinforce with them that we are here if needed and that we are constantly evolving to improve our services - making our proposition and the value of what we offer even more enticing. And guess what. The moment they run out of capacity. The moment they think, "We need help with marketing operations, or our RevOps or our RevTech stack," they will think of us.
Need support?
Discerning between current and churned customers can be automated with the right integrations and report setup. It’s something we specialise in. So if you’re not confident in your reporting, unsure if your segmentation is accurate, and fear that you are missing out on potential customers and revenue, then reach out to us. We’re happy to help.