This year, we decided to get more serious about maintaining our connections with former clients, rather than just letting our relationships with them fade out and going to chase new prospects instead. As part of that, I've also had to think a lot about which former clients we want to work with and which ones we don't - and why. It's been a surprisingly big project to do! We’re coming up on our 17th birthday of ClearPivot this coming summer, so there is a lot of client history to go through.
First I had to think through which types of clients we would want to work with again and why, and systematize the attributes of good-fit clients going forward versus not-as-good-fit. That was the easier part.
Then came the much more time-consuming part: updating and tagging our customer records in our HubSpot portal. That took several steps:
- We’re focusing on larger companies for our ideal customer profile going forward, so we researched company size by employee count, bucketed it into groups, and marked those that were or were not future prospects based on their size bucket.
- We thought through which industries and business types we work best with, chose them as our ideal customer profile (ICP) going forward, and marked future prospects based on that.
- And then a surprisingly big part of the process was flagging which former customers were even still in business in their current form. As we reviewed our historical records, we found many mergers and acquisitions, as well as several businesses that shut down altogether.
- And then there were a handful of former customers with whom we just don’t want to work, regardless of whether they fit the other criteria. 😆 Some people and companies just are not fun to work with for one reason or another, ya know? Luckily, that was the smallest disqualification reason by company count.
By the end of the process, we had only marked 23% of our former clients as future fits. Honestly, I wasn’t too surprised to see the final number come out that low. Eliminating a lot of the smaller companies we worked with in the past was a big part of it. And then just general attrition over the last 16+ years was a big part of it too: our points of contact leaving the companies, acquisitions, retirements, etc.
I’m feeling pretty good about our “former clients / future prospects” list going forward. 👊 The current plan is to start reconnecting with them about twice a year, starting this month.
How do you handle former customer relationship management? Do you have a systematic process for it, or do you do it mostly ad hoc? Do you get as picky about who is or is not a future fit as I did here?
