Hello,
There's an analogy I use all the time at work and it applies to every business I've ever come across, so I'm giving it to you.
A gym signs up 100 new members in January. Biggest month of the year, everyone's delighted. By March the gym is smaller than it was in December. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody rang up angry. 120 people just quietly stopped coming.
That's how customers leave. Not with a complaint or a goodbye, they just buy a bit less, then less again, then nothing. And your sales report hides it, because new business keeps topping the bucket up while the holes drain it out the bottom.
Here's the maths: if you win 20 new customers a month and quietly lose 20, all that effort, the quoting, the chasing, the winning, stands you dead still.
Most businesses have no idea what their number is. I didn't either until we looked properly.
So. Export your sales by customer by month, last two years if you have it, from whatever system you use, even if that's a spreadsheet somebody types into. Then give it to your AI with this:
Copy and paste this one:
"Here are my sales by customer by month. Find the customers who've gone quiet or are fading away, rank them by how much annual spend looks to have disappeared, and give me the ten most worth a phone call this week. For each one, tell me when they started dropping off and what they used to buy."
The last bit really matters. "When they started dropping off" often tells you why, a price rise, a bad delivery, a new competitor and "what they used to buy" gives whoever's phoning something to actually say.
Fair warning: this is the rough version. The proper one we run uses fixed rules and checks so nothing gets missed and nothing gets flagged wrongly. But the rough version will put ten real names in front of you today, and ten names is ten phone calls.
We run this on our own business every month now. The first time we did it, the number that came back was a genuine fright. The phone calls that followed brought accounts back that we'd never have noticed leaving. Not because anyone was lazy, but because nobody's job was to notice, and quiet customers don't make any noise.
That's the whole lesson really. New business gets all the glory. But the cheapest sale you'll ever make is to someone who already knows you, already trusts you, and stopped buying for a reason nobody ever asked about.
Run it. Then reply and tell me how many of the ten surprised you. Bet it's more than three.
Andrew
Ps. If you know someone who's brilliant at winning new customers, this might be the most useful thing you could send them.