MSPs: How To Win Back Clients Who Left

For MSP’s, winning back past clients is actually one of the easiest and cheapest opportunities… are you overlooking this? Also this week, the horrendous truth of how MSPs are losing sales opportunities and annoying existing clients on the phone, and the MSP who thinks you should sell Google Workspace, not Microsoft.

Welcome to Episode 354 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to win back a client who dared to leave you for another MSP

I want to talk about a type of prospect that almost no MSP ever follows up with.

The prospect is a client who left you in the past.

Let me make the case right now for why winning back these kind of people is actually one of the easiest, cheapest, and maybe even most overlooked opportunities in your entire marketing.

Winning back a client who left you is up to five times more cost-effective than winning a brand new client.

If you think about it, they already know your name, your reputation, they know roughly what working with you is like, even if you’ve changed in the year since they left. And yet research consistently shows that most B2B businesses do not do this. Almost three quarters of companies have no win-back process at all. They lose a client and that’s the end of the story. So why does this happen? And specifically, why does it happen with MSPs?

I wonder, is it down to pride and discomfort? Because I don’t know about you, but I know for me, it feels a little bit awkward to go back to someone who chose a competitor over you. It’s one thing if you pitch to someone and they choose a competitor in the first place, but if you’ve worked with someone for a couple of years and then they leave you for a competitor, that’s where it almost feels slightly personal, doesn’t it? And it can feel a lot more awkward. It almost feels like you’re admitting weakness or you’re chasing them and you don’t want to be. I guess if you put it in ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend terms, you don’t want to be the ex that reaches out because that’s uncomfortable.

But they’re not an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend, they’re an ex-client, and that discomfort is costing you easy revenue that’s sat there to be collected. Let’s be clear about the kind of clients we’re talking about here… We’re not talking about the ones that have been acquired by another business, that business is gone. We’re not talking about the ones that have gone bust, obviously that business is gone as well. We’re talking about if t