Win Back Churned Customers

When the leadership at a target account won't take your calls, the people who'd use your product every day are often the best way back in.

This play is how to build that case from the bottom up. Know their world before you pitch. Let the product prove itself against what they use today, one office at a time, until the feedback reaches the top. Then clear the path to signature before anyone has to ask.

Zach Stoia, an AE on ZoomInfo's strategic team and a five-time back-to-back Presidents Club winner, ran it on a publicly traded workforce solutions company that had churned from ZoomInfo.

It took the deal from security review to signature in under 60 days, at $500K. Steps 1 to 3 cover knowing their world, steps 4 to 6 let the product prove itself, and steps 7 to 9 clear the path to signature. What Zach did sits under each step.

Start with accounts that bought from you and left. A win-back comes with history you can learn from, and live signals tell you which ones are worth going after now.

What to look for in a churned account

• Time since they left. Long enough for something to have changed, either with the vendor they replaced you with or inside the business itself.

• Stacked signals. Several signals pointing to the same change, such as new leaders, hiring, funding or new tools, giving you a real reason to prioritise them and a reason to reach out now.

• Room for a bigger deal. Headcount, office footprint, strategic shifts and publicly stated pivots that show the old deal can be outgrown.

How we run it at ZoomInfo

• Keep a live list of churned accounts above our contract threshold

• Stack signals on every account: hiring surges, leadership changes, funding, technology adoption

• Use job postings to see what they're building, such as new sales teams, new offices, or AI and automation roles

• Compare current headcount and office footprint against the last contract to size the opportunity

• Prioritise the accounts where several signals are firing at once

Why a win-back. They already know what you do, and you can find out exactly why they left. No net-new account gives you that head start.

What Zach did. Zach's strategic team takes no inbound, so win-backs are one of their core motions, run exactly this way. This company had dropped ZoomInfo about 18 months earlier after a contract worth more than $100K. ZoomInfo showed it was hiring heavily and running more than 20 offices with hundreds of salespeople, well beyond what it had bought last time. That was enough to go after it.

In a company spread across lots of offices, there's no single title to search for. Map every location, the person running it, and who owns revenue and tech.

Build the map

• Every office

• Each office's general manager

• Who owns revenue

• Who owns tech and data vendors

• New hires in each office

How we run it at ZoomInfo

• Pull every office from the company's location and hierarchy data

• Use org charts to find who runs each office and who sits above them

• Set alerts so new hires and leadership moves in each office come straight to you

• Save the map as a list, so every contact feeds straight into outreach

Why map before you sell. When there's no CRO, nobody's title tells you who decides. The map lets you work up the chain one conversation at a time.

What Zach did. Zach used ZoomInfo's location and hierarchy data to map every one of the company's 20-plus offices and the general manager running each. Alerts flagged new hires and leadership moves in those offices as they happened. Then he asked the general managers who were on board who owned revenue and tech, which led him to the person who managed external data vendors.

From the first conversation, find out exactly what's going wrong for the people who'd use your product, and why the account left you last time. Keep asking as the trial spreads.

What to ask

• What does your current tool get wrong?

• Where are you working around it?

• What's missing, out of date or hard to trust?

• Why did you move away from us last time?

Why this comes first. What users tell you becomes the benchmark your product has to beat, and the language your case gets made in.

What Zach found. Zach spoke to more than 50 people across the company, on calls he blocked out time for. Nine times out of ten, the answer was the same: their current vendor didn't give recruiters and business development people the contact information they needed, or any context on why to pursue a client, and what it did give them was out of date.

He used the same conversations to find out why they'd churned from ZoomInfo and who was standing in the way of a switch.

Where their reps were getting burned

• Contact data that bounces

• Calls that reach the wrong person

• No signal for when to reach out

• No context on why to call

• Tools outside the CRM

Your first contact probably can't buy. Give them the product anyway, and let them bring their colleagues with them.

How to start

• A trial for your first contact

• Names from your champion

• Past users at the company

Why start this low. One person can't sign for the company, but they can tell their whole office. A good early champion hands you a shortlist.

What Zach did. His first contact came from an outbound sequence he and his BDR ran 18 months to two years before the deal closed. She couldn't buy, but she was a strong champion from the start. She got her colleagues on the trial and gave Zach a shortlist of who to call and email next. About 40 people in her Boston office ended up on the trial.

Take the trial to the next office, then the next, leading with what their own colleagues have already done with it.

Each message includes

• Colleagues already on the trial

• Meetings booked

• Quotes from colleagues

• A personal opener

The groundswell

• On the trial across offices: 100 to 125

Why it works. Reps trust what their own colleagues are booking more than anything a vendor tells them.

Managing it at scale. Automation carries the volume: one email to the account every two weeks. Block out time for calls, and keep a few people you can always go back to with questions.

What Zach did. Zach used ZoomInfo's location and hierarchy data to move from Boston to New York to Philadelphia. A 10-step email cadence did the heavy lifting, backed by calls from Zach and his BDR to mobile numbers from ZoomInfo.

For regional managers, he ran their public profiles through ChatGPT to find something personal to open with, which is how he built a key champion in the Phoenix office. The trial grew to between 100 and 125 people.

Your trial users still have their current tool. Compare the two on the exact things they've been burned by, and let their results make the case.

The benchmarks

• Data accuracy

• Signal precision

• Multi-threading

Why their benchmarks. Compare on the problems they raised in step 3, and the result answers the question they already have.

What Zach did. When managers caught wind of the trial results, they shot down the idea of switching, because they were using another vendor. Zach kept the trial growing anyway and gathered usage, meetings set and quotes from reps on why they preferred ZoomInfo to what they had. On all three benchmarks, ZoomInfo was the clear winner.

When leadership says no, keep building, and find out when their current contract ends. Go back to the top just before they have to decide whether to renew.

Before you go back

• Who's blocking, and why

• Renewal date

• Current spend

• Trial results and quotes

Why the renewal. Whoever bought the current tool won't want to switch mid-contract and have it look like a mistake. The renewal gives them a clean moment to change.

What Zach did. Leadership was committed to their current vendor and wasn't open to a conversation. So Zach kept the groundswell going, and learned their renewal date and how much they were spending.

Three to four months before their two-year renewal, a ZoomInfo executive sent an alignment email with the trial usage, meetings set and quotes from their reps. Nobody replied. Then the GTM systems contact Zach had built a relationship with asked him onto a call that same day, with the CTO and the head of IT.

When they come to you, they may offer a small starter deal. Check it against your evidence first. If more people already want the product than they're offering to pay for, keep the trial going and let the review run alongside it.

Before you accept a small start

• People on the trial

• People who'd vouch for you

• People with the same problem

Why say no. Buying a handful of seats and coming back for more two months later costs both sides time. If more people will vouch for you than the deal covers, the deal is too small.

Run the review in parallel. Keep extending access while IT, security and legal do their work, so the evaluation and the paperwork finish together.

What Zach did. They asked for around 30 users. With about 400 salespeople at the company, and 35 to 40 people he could have asked to vouch for ZoomInfo, Zach turned it down and offered a longer trial instead. Over the next two months, more people got access while IT, security and legal reviewed it at the same time. That's how the deal went from security review to signature in under 60 days.

Five principles to keep it moving

• Let your internal contact lead. Once procurement starts, the person championing you inside the business can move things faster than you can from outside. Let them run the process and introduce you to the senior people who sign off.

• Step back when asked, but keep the trial open. Procurement teams often ask vendors to stop contacting their staff while they run a formal process. Respect that, but leave the trial running, so people keep using the product and the case for it keeps building.

• Prove it using their own company as the example. Show the buyer what your product would tell them, using data about their own business. Zach set up ZoomInfo alerts that flagged when the company was researching other sales tools on G2, the software review site. He sent the screenshots to procurement and IT with a simple message: this is the same alert you'd get on your own prospects.

• Run security and legal checks during the trial, not after it. Don't wait for a trial to end before starting security, legal, and IT reviews. Running them at the same time as an extended trial removes weeks of waiting from the end of the deal.

• Agree dates for each step early. Set a timeline with your internal contact for every stage of the process. When each step has a date both sides can see, there's less room for the deal to drift.

Why do it first. A late objection can stall a deal you've already won on the evidence.

What Zach did. The last objection was that reps wouldn't use a tool outside their CRM, so Zach showed them ZoomInfo plugs natively into it and armed his champions to close. During procurement, he let his GTM systems contact run point, and sent procurement and IT G2 alerts of the company researching competitors, as a live example of what they'd get.

The result

• Deal: $500K

• Users to start: 300

• Security review to signature: under 60 days

The deal closed at $500K with a publicly traded workforce solutions company. It started with 300 users, more than double the most people on the trial at any one time, plus CRM enrichment and additional data.

FAQs

What if leadership has already said no?

Keep building underneath them. In this deal, managers shot down the idea of switching, and leadership said they'd never look at ZoomInfo. The groundswell kept growing anyway, and the next ask was timed to their renewal, when switching was finally on the table.

Why turn down a smaller first deal?

Because the evidence said the problem was bigger. Zach had more people ready to vouch for ZoomInfo than the 30 seats on offer, at a company with about 400 salespeople. A longer trial got the deal to a 300-user start.

How do you run a groundswell across 100+ people?

Mostly with automation: one email to the account every two weeks, a 10-step cadence, and blocked time for calls. Keep a few people you can always go back to with questions.

Does this only work on win-backs?

This example was a win-back, which gave Zach a reason to go after the account and a history to learn from. The groundswell and the head-to-head work anywhere the people using the product aren't the people buying it.

What if procurement asks you to stop contacting their team?

Do it, and keep the trial open. Zach's GTM systems contact asked him to stop reaching out to her team once procurement started. Usage carried on, she ran point, and she made the introductions to the people above her.

Where does ZoomInfo do the work?