There's a common assumption in sales: if a lead went quiet, they chose someone else. They found a better deal. They're not interested anymore.
In reality, that's true for maybe 15-20% of your dormant contacts. The rest? Life just got in the way.
They had a baby. Work got hectic. They went on holiday and never came back to it. They decided to do the extension before the solar panels. Their financial situation changed temporarily. They simply forgot.
None of those reasons mean they don't want what you sell. They mean the timing wasn't right. And timing changes.
Here's something interesting about human behaviour: the effort of re-starting a search is often greater than the effort of continuing where they left off.
When Sarah enquired about a mortgage review eight months ago, she already did the hard part - she identified the need, found your business, and made contact. If someone checks in with her now and says "are you still thinking about this?", the path of least resistance is to say "actually yes, let's pick it up."
She's not going to go back to Google and start from scratch. Not if you make it easy to just... continue.
Across the campaigns we've run for Irish service businesses, we consistently see a 30-35% response rate on reactivation messages. That means roughly one in three people reply when you reach out in the right way.
Of those who reply, roughly 15-20% are genuinely interested in picking things back up. That doesn't sound like a huge percentage until you multiply it by the size of your database.
The businesses that have tried reactivation before and found it didn't work almost always made the same mistake: they treated it like marketing.
They sent a mass email with a special offer. Or a text blast saying "We miss you! 10% off this month." That approach gets a 1-2% response rate and annoys everyone else on the list.
What works is the opposite. Personal, conversational, and specific. Reference who they are, what they originally enquired about, and simply ask if it's still on their radar. No pitch. No discount. Just a human check-in.
The irony is that the less salesy your message sounds, the more sales it generates.
There's a sweet spot for reactivation: contacts who enquired between 3 and 18 months ago. Younger than 3 months and your sales team should probably still be following up manually. Older than 18 months and the relevance starts to drop (though we've seen results from contacts as old as 2 years).
The 6-12 month range tends to be the goldmine. Long enough that their situation may have changed, recent enough that they remember your brand.
Your old leads aren't dead. They're just waiting for someone to check in.
We'll show you how many appointments might be sitting in your CRM right now.
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