The truth you don’t want to hear is—you will lose a prospect or two (or many) even if your sales reps work hard to convert leads.
And every lost lead costs you money. The good news is that these lost leads can be won back.
But how do you do it not to scare them off again?
In this article, we explain the reasons why sales reps lose their leads and share the tactics for luring them back, according to the expert.
What Is a Lost Lead?
A lost lead is any qualified sales prospect who has shown initial interest in your product or service but lost interest.
For example, they may have stopped opening your emails, reading your content, or responding to your messages.
Grégoire Luel, an account executive at lemlist and growth outbound expert, explained what qualifies as a lost lead.
“The general definition of a lost lead is any deal with a scheduled discovery meeting that doesn’t progress.”
Lead can be lost in qualified opportunities, too. Gregoire Luel argues that in that case, a lost lead is “any deal that has been validated after discovery and is worth pursuing but doesn’t move forward.”
Why Do You Lose Sales Leads? 7 Common Reasons
To start re-engaging lost leads, you need to understand why you lost them in the first place.
On average, more than half (67%) of interested prospects will drop the form before sharing their information with you.
But there can be numerous reasons why leads drop and fall through the cracks in your sales process.
Gregoire shared 7 most common reasons for leads turning cold:
1. Poor discovery
Gregoire Luel explains that poor discovery is one of the most common reasons sales reps lose their leads.
“No real pain uncovered, no knowledge of competition, and lack of decision criteria are often to blame for the lost leads.”
2. Single-thread approach
Another big reason for losing qualified leads is that sales reps often use “single-threading instead of multi-threading,” Gregoire added that it happens when “only one person is involved in the deal.”
Getting the team of sales champions on board to close a deal is a powerful move to make sure your leads are targeted 360°.
3. It was never the (right) lead
Two different reasons can be blamed for this scenario.
It’s either you didn’t know your buyer personally well, and it was never a lead to begin with. Or you logged the wrong lead data and never verified it.
Reason 1: You didn’t know your ICP.
Not knowing your ICP in and out is a recipe for losing leads.
And we’re not talking about finding out who is your ideal buyer persona. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We’re talking about everything related to them: how they think, what they need and want (these two can be different!), the problems they face, the goals they want to achieve, the changes in the company, the solutions they have already tried, their sales processes, the stakeholders involved, their tool stack, their concerns, and budget constraints. The list is endless.
To make sure you target the right lead in the first place, use this free ICP generator:
Reason 2: You may have identified the right prospect but got the wrong data.
It’s more common than you think. Only 56% of B2B companies verify their leads before passing them on to the sales team.
For example, you could have a very engaging prospect during a webinar, but after the event, it could’ve been the wrong email they registered with.
Sending emails to that address won’t take you anywhere. Don’t make the same mistake!
To make sure your emails land in the inbox of the right lead, use lemlist’s combo of email finder and verifier and waterfall enrichment.
With an automated waterfall lead enrichment, you simply have to define your ICP and find your leads’ emails and phone numbers.
Waterfall enrichment combines several data sources that check and verify your lead data.
It ensures you have correct and complete contact information, such as verified emails or phone numbers.
If you start using it, you can be sure that a) your valuable lead data is not falling through the cracks due to data inconsistencies or human errors, and b) your re-engagement email now goes to the right person.
lemlist’s waterfall enrichment completes and verifies your leads’ data with several providers so you can be sure that the right leads receive your emails. The result? No lost leads due to invalid data. Credit: lemlist
4. You were too pushy
It may have been the right person, but you came on too strong.
51% of leads unsubscribe from emails because they receive them too frequently.
For a B2B business, prospects often need time to consider your offer. When communication within this period is too frequent, it can be a big turn-off.
5. You over-promised and under-delivered
Perhaps in your sales pitch and offerings, you promised a specific feature.
Leads will see something else during their interaction with your product, service, or review from other clients. This is very common with leads who engage with your free trial.
The number one reason users never upgraded after the free trial was that the product did not meet their expectations.
So, review your sales pitch to ensure you’re not overpromising or overselling.
6. You promise everything and nothing
In some situations, you’re just not communicating clearly. Your offers have everything, so when you pitch, you think you’re showing all you can offer.
In reality, the prospect is overwhelmed and finds a simpler or tailored offering.
So don’t try to outline every single thing your product can do. Highlight what the client needs.
Make your message simple by focusing on one solution to your lead’s pain.
7. Your lead capture is not capturing
Getting details about your leads in a lead capture form (a free tool, a subscription, a sign-up to a webinar, and so on) can neither be too long nor too short.
Finding this golden middle requires both expertise and experience. If the form is too complicated, leads will bounce.
You won’t capture enough lead information if the form is too short.
That means your sales reps won’t be able to personalize their recommendations.
9 Expert Tactics to Re-Engage and Convert Lost Leads
Gregoire shared his go-to tactics to engage lost leads and bring them back closer to conversion:
1. Share updates on new features, especially if they are waiting for a specific one.
New features mean your product or service went up in value. Use this opportunity to announce the update to your lost lead.
It’s especially relevant when you determine that a lead turned away because of a particular feature (or lack of it).
2. Provide value through relevant content.
You can never give too much value to your leads, even if you spill your best-kept conversion secrets.
Improving your content with useful tips, use cases, playbooks, and templates is a great strategy to lure back lost leads.
3. Involve them in an interview to gather feedback and shape the SaaS they need.
Have you just lost a lead? Ask why! That’s a straightforward trick, but you’d be surprised how well it works.
You can always interview them directly or launch a survey with questions to discover why your lead lost interest in you.
Was it because of a particular feature they lacked in a free trial? Was there a particular problem that pushed them to make the decision?
Maybe it was a lack of timely customer service when they needed more information about particular features.
It can be a new website redesign that’s too complicated and clumsy.
There’s a chance a product demo didn’t show how your product can solve their problem but rather exhibited all the tools’ features.
It can always be that your follow-ups were not timely, or your email landed in spam.
If you don’t ask, these are only your best guess.
Genuine and direct feedback from lost leads is invaluable since it helps you improve the product and its processes.
As soon as you have some news to deliver and solve one of the churn reasons, you can confidently contact your lost lead again.
4. Always understand why a deal was lost.
Instead of launching a re-engagement campaign, find the tangible reason why you lost that lead.
Consider how many leads drop off before or after interacting with your sales team, how many emails they opened, and at what touchpoint they dropped.
With these insights, you can spot the key drop-off points in your sales funnel and come up with a solution to a problem.
5. Avoid pushing for a meeting—focus on staying at the top of their mind.
Scheduling a call with your lost lead is tempting. But Gregoire warns sales reps against it.
The goal here is to stay on top of their mind and nudge them slowly into taking another action.
When winning lost leads, you gotta be smarter, not necessarily faster.
6. Invite your lost leads to events or webinars.
Many sales reps forget how important it is to build their real-life presence alongside their social media personality.
Sharing value-packed LinkedIn posts daily and having the strongest personal brand doesn’t provide your prospects with a personal touch.
When re-engaging lost leads, you must show you exist by hosting webinars, leading a discussion, answering questions, and doing in-house events.
It’s an excellent way to reconnect with your lost leads on a human level.
7. Use multiple channels: emails, calls, videos, LinkedIn, and events.
Multichannel outreach is always better than one channel to engage leads because it converts more.
The same rule applies to engaging your lost leads.
Make sure you combine different engagement activities and steps in your outreach sequences, like emails, events, calls, and LinkedIn interactions.
A multichannel approach increases the chances that a lost lead will re-engage with you.
With lemlist, you can go multi-channel at scale, in a human way, by customizing your LinkedIn, cold email, cold call, manual steps, and API steps (to send a LinkedIn voice message, for example).
8. Avoid full automation—every relationship is unique, so keep it personal and relevant.
Automating your communication with leads is great— it saves money and makes your outbound much faster.
That’s why so many sales reps love it. But if you lost a valuable lead, you need to take a different approach.
Gregoire suggests actually spending time and effort in personalizing your lead re-engagement campaign.
Your goal is to make your lost lead feel heard and seen. Everyone wants to do business with a company that makes them a priority, even the prospect who no longer has an interest.
If you wonder about wasting too much time and effort on retargeting every lost lead in your pipeline, you can do this level of personalization on a large scale.
lemlist allows you to add multiple layers of personalization that’ll switch a generic email template to one that converts.
9. Track job changes and new stakeholders within the company.
Winning back the lost leads relies on finding the best opportunity to re-engage.
One such opportunity is the changes in your lead’s company, where new stakeholders joined or left.
Keep your eye on decision-makers, especially because they are the ones you want to target in the first place.
More Useful Tips on Winning Back Your Leads
1. Target those leads who are more likely to return.
The truth is that not all lost leads will come back. So, you need to focus your resources on those with a high chance of converting.
Your task is to identify lost leads with the most potential, particularly those with high activity levels and who are lower in the sales funnel.
A great example could be someone who has visited your pricing page often or a prospect who has saved multiple templates you provide.
It could also be someone who has had more than one call with your sales team.
Depending on your business and ideal customer profile, make a new list and build your strategy based on their actions.
If they’ve visited your pricing page multiple times, you might want to offer a promotion to get them interested again.
2. Use the information gathered to create a retargeting campaign.
Once you have the details of why they are dropping off and who they are, launch a retargeting outreach campaign.
This way, you remind the lost lead about your business and the service or product they were interested in.
The goal here is to stay on top of their mind and nudge them into taking another action on your website.
We also recommend setting up conditions for lead engagement triggers on lemlist.
Once your lost lead takes the desired action, like opening up your email, you can spark a conversation that’ll bring them closer to closing a deal.
3. Create FOMO by offering time-bound promotions.
Don’t lose these leads again. Instead, give them a reason to get locked in by offering time-bound promotions.
Make sure that whatever promotion or incentive you’re offering is actually something they are interested in.
For example, if they’ve been worried about the pricing, a Black Friday sale is the perfect opportunity to lock them into an annual plan.
4. Find out what works and double on it.
The most important strategy for re-engaging leads is to keep optimizing. So, when running any of the other steps above, we recommend splitting your campaigns.
With an A/B test, you can see what variation is working best and double on that. Review your sales pipeline, and don’t be scared to switch things up if they aren’t working.
Another small tip: consider optimizing your speed response time.
When a prospect has a question, assign a member of your sales team to deal with these queries or even invest in a chatbot.
This way, your leads won’t feel unheard and take their business elsewhere.
What NOT To Do When Re-Engaging A Lost Lead?
Gregoire said that these 3 are the most important mistakes a sales rep should never make when engaging a lost lead:
- Push them too hard for a meeting.
- Send them generic and untargeted information.
- Rely too much on automation instead of personalizing outreach.
Is lemlist Good For Engaging and Converting Lost Leads?
lemlist is an awesome tool for winning back lost leads.
According to Gregoire, you can use lemlist to target lost leads by:
- Leveraging CRM data such as “Pain,” “Closed Lost Date,” and “Closed Lost Reason.”
- Using AI-powered email variables to personalize your outreach based on CRM insights. This will ensure that each message you send to a lost lead is relevant and engaging.
FAQs
When is the best time to re-engage lost leads?
- You have a new offer or feature that’ll be valuable to them
- There’s a seasonal event that aligns with their needs or interest
- A few months after they’ve gone cold – preferably between 3-6 months
- When they take up a new activity on your website after a long time, you can monitor this from your CRM
What is the worst way to re-engage lost lead?
A call is hands-down the worst way to engage a lead who has lost interest in you.
The chances are you will push them to the corner and scare them away for good.
Don’t rush and wait for an opportunity to re-target.
It can be a new feature launch or an upgrade, or maybe a specific tweak in your software that was the reason why your lead went cold.
A nice limited-time offer is also a reason to re-target.
If your CRM detects a new activity from your lead, like visiting your website or downloading a playbook, take it as a green light to re-engage.
Most importantly, identify the reason why your lead went cold and take your re-engagement strategy from there.
If you provide a solution to their lost interest, you will win them back and close a deal. 100%.
