Your Best Leads Are People Who Already Said No

Good Morning. Today is National Give Something Away Day. In this newsletter, we give away free sales sauce every week. But for you, the best thing to give away today is a little bit of your time to the prospects who’ve been sitting in your CRM untouched. Give em’ a call. They’re just waiting for you to bother talk to them. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:

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There’s a bunch of stories about people who lived in a house for decades without knowing they were sitting on mineral rights worth millions. 

Every day, waking up and living a normal life, without ever realizing that life changing money was literally under their feet.  

Then one day, an oil company shows up with a check, and they’re rich. 

You’re probably doing the same thing when you log into your CRM. 

Grinding cold outbound and fighting to get a first meeting booked, while hundreds of closed lost deals sit untouched. These are prospects who have already taken a demo or gone through discovery, and they might just be ready to buy now.

The estimated B2B win rate is around 21% (this varies a ton by industry). That means roughly 4 of every 5 deals end up closed lost. 

And according to an analysis of 230K contacts & 7K opportunities inside CRMs, 36% of new deals that close had a previously closed lost opportunity. 

More than 1/3 of the people who eventually bought already went through a buying cycle and said no. THIS IS YOUR BEST LEAD SOURCE EVER!

Sorry for the yelling, but I felt like that needed to be emphasized. 

Today I’m giving you the playbook for reviving these deals and turning old closed lost opps into your next commission check. 

The very best time to try to go after a closed lost deal is when they email you and tell you they’re ready to buy now.

The second best time is when there’s a trigger…

A trigger, put simply, is when something at the company changes. Something like a company raising a new funding round or hiring someone new on the team. Anything that shakes things up and makes the company more likely to buy this time.

There’s a lot of sales tech out there that claims to have intent & trigger data, but finding triggers for free is easier than most reps think. If you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can easily “save” companies to your account, and they’ll send you an alert any time there’s a change.

If you want to go a bit more old school, connect or follow the main points of contact at your accounts. They’ll post about any major announcements, like funding or getting a new job.

I also like to look at their careers page to see if they're hiring for the department that would use your product.

When you spot a trigger, the outreach should be simple and straightforward: "Hey Jan, I saw you recently hired a VP of RevOps. When you spoke to my colleague Bob last year, XYZ was one of the reasons the timing didn't work. Figured it might be worth a fresh conversation."

Be specific and focus on what changed.

Trigger events are ideal. But you and I both know most CRM notes are garbage.

In most of my roles, the last rep who had an account didn’t care to leave detailed notes when they closed it out. The notes say something like "went dark," and the reason says "other".

And in 90% of cases, the internal change that will make them a buyer now isn’t something you can find on LinkedIn. You’ve just gotta catch them at the right time.

So in these cases, your job is really simple… Just follow up.

Block off an hour, pull up every closed-lost deal from 6 to 12 months ago, and just start reaching out. Word it like a genuine check-in: "Hey, you talked to my teammate in January about X. Wanted to see if this is a better time to revisit?"

You'll be surprised how well this works.

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.