Welcome back to our ongoing parade of the 9 different Maverick Multipliers to increase your bottom line, happiness and meaning from your business. You should be able to apply this multliplier immediately!

Maverick Multiplier #2: Reactivate & Re-energize

There is a serious hidden asset just waiting to be mined…and that is somebody who used to be your client, customer, subscriber or patient. Or even a prospect sitting on the fence. It’s easy to create a significant windfall with a few proven ways of reactivating dormant assets here.

Most people will never even look at the number of customers who leave their business every year. But with a little bit of attention you can start reclaiming the lost profit potential from these customers. Every day you are losing money and you don’t even know it.

Before going to the outside market advertising your services, you can use this technique to fund your efforts.

Think for a moment about all your effort, time, and expense initially capturing that client. By just letting them go, it’s all lost. In fact, to replace a lost client takes significantly more effort and expense. I’ve always used the number 5X more expensive, which I saw in a Fortune magazine survey.

Why Do Customers Leave?

1) Some clients leave due to things beyond your control like moving away, or they really don’t need your product or service anymore.

2) Other clients simply had a bad experience with you or your staff. Maybe they did not get enough personal attention or they had to wait too long, or your product didn’t meet their expectations. Whatever.

It happens, hopefully not too often, but it happens. For these clients once you make an effort to contact them again and reconnect, you could be surprised with the results.

3) The third group (the largest and most common), are people who for some reason or another just haven’t felt wanted or are not aware of other services you have which could benefit them. These clients are typically your biggest group and the easiest to induce back.

They simply leave because of the perceived indifference.

How Do You Start Getting Your Old Clients Back?

First, you need to establish a guideline to use as your time parameter for reactivation. It could be six months, one year or maybe eighteen months, it depends on what your business is. If you have a monthly SaaS, your parameters are different than a tree company that trims their customers branches 1x or 2x/year.

Just estimate what is realistic since you don’t want to reward clients too early — but then again you want to catch them before they establish a relationship with another professional or forget about you.

Next, craft a sincere, heartfelt client-reviving letter.

Now you will create a system that alerts you whenever a client falls into your time parameters for being contacted. Most CRM software like Infusion or Ontraport should let you do this in a more sophisticated way.

Just make sure you continually follow-up and do it. Make it a system of doing business. Finally record results. Keep what works and change what doesn’t.

Your Client Reactivation Letter

Contacting your former clients will help rebuild the bond you had at one time, since they came to you and trusted you to solve their situation. Now because they have not been back, you need to put forth effort to reconnect in a meaningful way.

The simplest way is through a personal letter ideally (not an email). Your letter needs to show your concern for their well-being and offer them an inducement to come back. Also in your letter you may want to tell your former clients about something new since the time they’ve been away. And don’t stop at one correspondence. It’ll do a lot better if you have a 2^nd and 3^rd follow-up. Kinda like collection letters.

Re-Energizing ‘Dead’ Prospects:

There’s an even bigger instant moneymaker I want to share you with you too…it’s taking all your old leads and revitalizing them. This works incredible well…

One of my favorite clients I ever had when I used to work with cosmetic surgeons was Robert Kotler in Beverly Hills. The guy was really on it. We sent out about 100 letters to prospects, 16 of them inquired and 4 had surgery…all from prospects who had already gone through his ‘funnel’ and sales process but never made a decision before. That’s over $20k in surgeries – so this works! The staff was really impressed since they didn’t believe these people would ever schedule.

This works best for anybody who has at one time or another inquired about one of your services (you are keeping those names, right?). Here’s your fill-in-the-blank template:

* * *

Dear Ms. Jones,

I’m writing to alert you to a special one-time offer.

For some reason very few patients decide to have {your service, i.e. surgery, tax planning} during {month}. I don’t really know why, but nevertheless, it ends up being a slow time in our office. And that’s why I’m writing to you.

You had originally come in for a {consultation} some time ago, but I never heard back from you. That’s why I wanted to make you a special offer during my “slow” period.

My problem is your opportunity

Here’s what I’ve decided to do in order to “nudge” you along and take that next step. If you decide to go ahead with your {your service, i.e. surgery, procedure, tax planning, etc.} before {date} I’ll do something special for you.

I will give you {special offer of discount, free bonus, etc}.

So if you’ve put off having your {your service, i.e. procedure, tax planning, etc.} because of the price or some other reason, now is the perfect time to reconsider. Why not give {your assistant} a call at {xxx-xxxx} and take the next step to {benefit they want}. You’ll wonder why you waited so long.

Or if you have any further questions or concerns, {your assistant} will be happy to answer them for you. But please don’t wait because this special offer is only good until {date}. After that time, our office picks up again and we are usually booked for several weeks out.

I really hope you’ll be able to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity.

Sincerely,

{xxx}

* * *

Why does this work so well?

Telling people the reason why you are doing something is one of the most powerful influencers of human behavior.

Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion talks about an experiment by Harvard social psychologist, Ellen Langer, that concluded people like to have a reason for what they do.

Her experiment consisted of people waiting in line to use a library copy machine and then having experimenters ask to get ahead in line.

The first excuse used was “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?”  This request coupled with a reason was successful 94% of the time.  However when the experimenter made a request only: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” this request was only granted 60% of the time. A significant drop.

Okay now for the shocker.

It may seem like the difference between those two requests was the additional information of “because I’m in a rush”, but that’s just not the case.

Because in a third experiment, the experimenter asks “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?” There’s no reason mentioned or new information presented, just the words “because”.

This time a full 93% of the people said yes simply due to the word ‘BECAUSE’! And it didn’t even matter that there was no reason given. Just the word because triggered a magic response.

Using this psychological ‘trigger’ can massively increase your Marketing success.

Here’s an example: John E. Powers, one of the top copywriters in the 1900’s, wrote this ad for a Pittsburgh department store in severe financial trouble:

“We are bankrupt. We owe $125,000 more than we can pay, and this announcement will bring our creditors down on our necks. But if you come and *buy* tomorrow, we shall have the money to meet them. If not, we shall go to the wall.”

And this ad was said to be responsible for saving the store.

Another ad written by Powers, for a different merchant, proclaimed “We have a lot of rotten raincoats we want to get rid of.” This sold out the entire inventory of raincoats by the next morning.

These are some of my favorite ads!

Max Sackheim, famous for the long-running ad “Do You Make These Mistakes In English” and originator of the book-of-the-month concept, says this: “Whenever you make a claim or special offer in your advertising, come up with an honest reason why, and then state it sincerely. You’ll sell many more products this way.”

And this powerful strategy works just as well today (as you saw). I know this probably goes against every grain of business sense, but I promise if you give people a good, believable reason why, they’ll respond with open wallets.

* *

I’m going to give you several tried and true “Instant Cash Surge Generators” that just about any business can put to work.

3 Simple Steps to Making It Work For Your Business…

 1. Just think about the reason for the special offer. A couple of my favorites are:

My accountant/boss is on vacation and he/she’d kill me if he/she knew I was making you this offer (written from a staff member).

• Can you help me settle a bet?
• Pre-publication/pre-release offer.
• “Long-lost” inventory found (and now we need to get rid of it).
• Odds and ends sale.
• Overstock sale.
• Beat the pending price increase.
• It’s my/company’s birthday but we want you to get the present.
• Damaged goods or “scratch and dent” sale.

“Scratch and Dent” Template You can use immediately. Works for any kind of physical product – perfect for retailers, business-to-business companies and information product (videos, tapes, manuals, etc) sellers:

* * *

From The Desk of {your name}

Dear Friend,

In the rush and excitement of selling {#number# } of {product name} the last few months there was no time to pay attention to slightly imperfect or damaged sets, except to lay them aside.

And that’s good news for you…

Right now we have {#quantity left} of {product name} on hand that are slightly damaged.

{Explain slight damage —  i.e. Some of the covers may be slightly off-color. Or perhaps it may have been smudged during handling. In most cases, you’d have to look real close to notice anything wrong with them. But we can’t sell them as new.}

So instead of sending them back to the {printer/wholesale/distributor, etc.} (and letting them profit), we’ve decided to offer them to you at a significant discount during this one-time only “scratch and dent” sale.

Right now, you can save {$xxx} off of  {product name}.

Only {#} Sets Left!

But there’s only {#} sets left to sell at this low price. And when the last one leaves our warehouse, it’ll be impossible to get {product name} for less than its regular price of ${xxx}. Naturally, the best ones will go to those who reply first.

Plus, you’ve covered by our 100% no-risk guarantee.

Now, here’s how to secure one of these {product name} at a big, big discount:

Phone: Between 8 A.M. and 5 PM Eastern time, you can call toll-free 1-800-xxx-xxxx.

Fax: Anytime, 24 hours-a-day, 7 days a week – you can simply fill out the action form and Fax it to xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Mail: Or if you prefer to pay by check, send your completed action form and payment to: {your address}. (But be warned, if your envelope gets here after our stock is gone, your order will not be processed – no exceptions.)

Don’t hate yourself for missing this chance!

Sincerely,

{xxx}

P.S. Remember, there are only {xx} slightly damaged sets of {product name} available at this incredible discount. And once they’re gone this offer absolutely expires. Don’t wait and be disappointed!

* * *

2. What’s the offer?

Spend a little time to think about an offer that people would be crazy to pass up. The better the offer the more you can overcome any buyer’s resistance.

3. Get your offer out to your customers and/or prospects. That’s it!

Now you’ve got a template for reactivating lost customers and re-energizing existing ones for instant windfalls to your bottom line. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or I’d be interested in your results.

The next Maverick Multipliers are coming soon….

Note: We had a lot of interest in the upcoming Maverick Multipliers workshop but dates are not working in July for many people – so it looks like we’ll turn this into a webinar series and make it much more widely available. Stay tuned.