Reignite Past Opportunities [a quick win in sales]

Reigniting opportunities for the QUICK wins and low hanging fruit. 

Past opportunities that dropped off, went cold or weren't ready are WARMER than someone that isn't aware of you, your offering or that you (potentially) even exist. 

Reigniting is about personalisation, referencing what they were doing previously and why now is a great time.

This is one of my favourite topics in sales and in this episode I dive into:

1. Why you should reignite opportunities 
2. When to reignite 
3. How to reignite 
4. The importance of personalisation 
5. Why NEVER to let go of a lead 
6. Value Vs Offer 

I love to connect with my listeners so drop me a connection at LinkedIn HERE.

Thanks for listening + Happy Selling.

Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Sell Like You podcast with me, Harriet Meller. And today's episode is all about reigniting opportunities. Now, two things I talk about a lot is replicating your ideal clients and reigniting opportunities. Replicate will come on another episode because we have done or touched on that before. But reignite, I realize I have not done an episode. So here we are today. Now, reigniting opportunities is all about finding past inquiries, past conversations, past information where you have dealt with somebody who maybe was interested or you maybe reached out to them to see if they were interested and they either dropped off, went cold or weren't quite ready. So maybe they were a no. Now, what a lot of funnels manage is they will look at your pipeline, your tick lost, and then it will go into nurture sequence. Now, your nurture sequence is only as good as the value that you are prepared to give and how much time you give back to the opportunity. So if you are dealing with larger opportunities, then we want to be able to nurture them, to be able to keep them warm, to stay frequent, recent and front of mind. And there are a number of different ways to do this. If you've got opportunities that have dropped off, we should be able to go back and find them, even if they are sitting in that bucket of nurture or lost nurture where... Essentially, opportunities can often go to die if there is not a good enough sequence, process or touch point that's set in stone to follow up. Now, I talk a lot about Pipe Drive. It's what we use within the business. It's a very simple solution that allows you to manage your pipeline and be able to set activities, set cadences, next steps, templates. You're able to email through it. So many, so many good things. And the reason why that's relevant as part of our reignite is that without the opportunity that we know so we can go back and find out what we lost or what maybe went back into a lead, if you're using pipe drive, it goes from deal to lead or lead to deal. We're able to set activities so that we can ensure that we keep frequent recent in front of mind so we can keep building in the value and finding ways and reasons to communicate with them. But if this is the first time you're hearing about it, or if you just need some, If you need reigniting yourself, if you need a reason to get back into communicating with past opportunities, that's where we start with every single one of our clients. We start with what I call quick wins and low hanging fruit. And that always resides in the reignite opportunity structure. So as I mentioned, who are we reigniting? We're reigniting past, lost, cold opportunities that you haven't spoken to. Now, I will say this, that with the Reignite, I would recommend that this process, and again, I'm going to give you a free template because you know I love to give you lots of free tools and resources, is ideally used when we are kind of two, three months and beyond. You can use these for opportunities or conversations you had two, three years ago. Okay? It's not going to stop. We're not going to sit within that. you know, window of six to 12 months and we can't do anything with it, we can absolutely do something with them, even if it has been that long. And that is the beauty of a reignite. Now the key to a successful reignite is down to the journey or the, or where we share where we were when we first spoke. If you can follow me along what I just shared there. So where were they when we last spoke? If we can take them on a journey back to that point and get as specific as we can, you will have more success at this point. And you can use this in your conversations. You can use this in your agendas, in your framing of any of your calls as well of when we last spoke, this is what you were doing. This was how you felt. This is what you said you were focusing on. This is where you were at in terms of your business. And this is where we are now and why I think it would be a good time. So where were they? What were they doing? What were they focusing on? Why was it not the right time? So again, we could just say, we know back then it wasn't quite the right time. If somebody's giving you an objection around price, around that somebody else was better, we don't necessarily want to highlight that in our conversation unless something has changed that will make now a reason to take action. So if the price was an issue and you've now halved your prices, you've got a solution that's cheaper. then absolutely use that. Explain why now is a good time. But if it's something hasn't changed, but maybe you wanna see what's changed within the organization, then go for it. Use that information where we make it more general around back then the timing wasn't quite right. We then talk then about why now maybe. So where are we at now as a business? Has your business changed? Has your offering changed? Has the industry changed that they're in? Has there been a compelling reason for them to act now? Or is it just that we are a little bit further down the line? Other things that we may want to use as reference may be that if they had signed into a new contract, do you know that that is only 12 months, 24 months, 36 months? Do you know who they went with or what they purchased? Do we know therefore what timeframe would be suitable for us to reach out again? So if we use the example, again, a lot of what I teach is around tech sales. If we go down the route of, let's say it's 12, 24 or 36 months, then I would hazard a guess depending on if it's software, hardware or managed services as to where that would sit. So if I know managed services 12, 24 or 36 months, I would then maybe then hazard a guess that 12 months down the line may be an opportunity for review or that I will know that they asked me for a 36 month contract and therefore we've got three years to wait. But what we don't do is we don't wait for three years because we know that as a managed service provider, there may be other ways that we can add value through hardware, software sales, and also project services. There might be webinars, there might be white papers or tools or guides that allow us to stay front of mind. And that's what comes in our nurture sequence. But from our Reignite perspective, if we are now 10 months down the line, and we've been doing a really good job of that, or maybe they've heard from us, never, then we can then use then where we were, you were looking at exploring managed services. I know back then you were able to find somebody else to service you or you stayed with your existing provider. I know you mentioned that that was going to be a 12 month engagement. Now we are a few months down the line with a few months to go for your contract renewal or for your review opportunity. I thought that now may be at the right time or as promised reaching out to you when you free for a call a meeting, a coffee, a thing, and therefore we give them then those couple of options to do so. We've taken them on a journey as to why you asked me to contact you maybe, or that now that we are now at the point where you may be reviewing or at a time where you mentioned you would be reviewing, use the language that they used, use where they were and where they are or where you are now, make it a compelling reason for them, make it relevant and beneficial to them, and ask them for the thing that you want. a meeting, a call, a review time, an update. Okay, make it simple and make it easy. If you've got a compelling reason that might be an event, for an example, let's say that you have spoken to them, you've dealt with them for a contract, they didn't go ahead with it, maybe they just dropped off and went cold, we need to find reasons to reignite them. So do you have a webinar coming up? Do you have something of value? Are you putting the finishing touches to a white paper? Is there an ebook that has gone gangbusters for your clients or other people that you are speaking to or prospects? Think about why, what's in it for them, and we make it relevant. We highlight where we were, where they are, or what we know of them today. What's changed either for them, their industry, or within your organization of now what you can offer? Why is now the right time? And we're able to re -communicate with them. As I mentioned before, This is where we start with every client. We look at what has dropped off, we look at why, we look at some of the other reasons and some of the other impacts within the organization. But at a high level, what has dropped off? Where were they? Why is now a good time for us to reconnect? Have we done something impactful that's relevant to them, their industry or their business? Let's share that and let's move forward with that information. As mentioned, you will get a freebie. download for a Reignite template, I highly recommend that you download that and you try it with 10 to 20 of your past opportunities. If you don't have that many, let's say you're new and you want to get going, or if you're managing a team, divvy that out within the team and let them go wild with this template. The template gives a guide. It's not meant to be, you have to say this and use this information here. But the guide that I usually give or that I like to give around my templates is the succinctness of information, how we frame and position information, and then what has changed. So we've got those plug and play mentalities until we know what works for us. And then we get to get super creative. And if we go this way too far, we know we need to bring it back. But if you've not done this before, your team aren't doing this right now, I highly recommend start here with Reignite. You can go back through any of your opportunities over the last 12 months, 18 months, two years, and let's get reigniting and get connecting with our audiences again. I'd love to know if this episode supported you. If you're watching over on YouTube, hello, and make sure you subscribe and let me know in the comments below what you think. If you're over on the podcast, thank you for having me in your ears. Be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. and be sure to share this and leave a review if you would like to see more of what you are getting right now. Thank you for being here. This is Cell Like You and I've been Harriet Miller.