Assigning Churned Logos to SDRs To Win Back Customers with Distro

When a customer churns, most companies write off that account, never to work them again. But that’s a big mistake because you are already familiar with their account, you (hopefully) know the reason why you lost, and you will be able to navigate this deal and deliver a more personalized experience.

At Chili Piper, we have won back a lot of customers with this approach, which is why we have automated this process. In this article, we will pull back the curtain and break down exactly how we do it.

Using Distro, our lead routing and distribution product, we have reduced the time spent by SDRs on reviewing and reaching out to ex-customers in win-back campaigns and ensured an even distribution of ex-customers across the SDR team. We have also limited the potential friction between AMs and SDRs and removed ambiguity around who should be working the account, and when.

Rules of Engagement for Sales and Customer Success

First, let’s start with guidelines that we give the team that tell them how to work together, which we call Rules of Engagement (ROE). These are operating principles mutually created and agreed on between teams for how they will A) work together, B) prevent conflict, and C) resolve conflict if and when it arises. A single team that regularly collaborates across many teams may have many sets of ROEs, one with each of the teams where collaboration happens most.

Aligning our Customer Success teams with Sales and Marketing efforts ensures a cohesive approach to winning back churned customers.

Here are the Rules of Engagement between the pre-sales and post-sales for churned accounts:

When a customer churns, there is a 90-day period following the Closed Lost opportunity date where pre-sales/new business reps are allowed to touch the account, including the AE and SDR teams.
This means that 90 days from the Closed Lost opportunity date, the AMs, and CSMs can perform any actions to help win the churned customer back.
If no contract is sent within the 90-day window, AEs and SDR teams are free to re-engage with the churned customer through sales and marketing campaigns.

Now, let’s explore how we use our Distro product to automate this, saving our reps hours of manual work.

Settings in Distro

Now, we will cover all the settings you need to have in Distro to achieve this use case. Let's get to action!

1 - Create your Team

The first thing we will create is a Team so the records are distributed among the reps you want. If your Team has already been created, you can move to step #2.

In the left-hand menu, click "Teams" under the Assets section.

Then, click the "Create Team" button at the top right. First, give your Team a name in the header.

After that, you can add Team members by clicking the "Add Team Member" button. Once you are done, publish to make your Team active.

We recommend checking this article to familiarize yourself more with Teams.

2 - Create your Distribution

To summarize, the Distribution feature is mainly used to set the behavior during meetings or record distribution among Team Members. If you already have a Distribution to be used, please go ahead and proceed to step #3.

In the left-hand menu, click "Distributions" under the Assets section.

Then, click the "Create Distribution" button at the top right and select the "Prospect/Record Distribution" option, as we will use it in Distro.

Give your Distribution a name, and then use the "Add a Team" button to include the Team you created in step #1 or that you already created.

After that, you can adjust some settings, such as Credit/Skip, Weight, and Capping. Once done, publish it.

Please take a look at this article to learn more details about Distributions and the above-mentioned settings.

3 - Create Your Rules

We will now create your routing rules, which are crucial to ensuring your prospects are correctly routed among your Teams within your Chili Piper products. If you already have your rules in place, you can skip to the next step.

In the left-hand menu, click "Rules" under the Assets section.

Then, click the "Create Rule" button at the top right. We will create three rules, two Without Ownership and one CRM Ownership, to be used in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Click "Add Condition" to start building your rules using Salesforce fields.

This is how we built our Entry Rule (Without Ownership):

This is how we built our Routing Rules (Without Ownership):

Finally, the CRM ownership will be used in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Entry Rule, Routing Rules, and SLAs will be explained above in the Router creation process. Also, you will likely use different Salesforce fields for your Rules, which should be fine!

We recommend checking this article to familiarize yourself more with Rules.

4 - Create your Distro Router

Now, we will combine all the assets we created above and build the flow in a Distro Router.

Click the "Routers" option under the Distro section in the left-hand menu and then the "Create Router" button at the top right.

4.1 - Trigger

Once the Router's flow builder opens, the Trigger will be displayed. A Trigger is a mechanism that initiates an action when a specific event occurs. For example, if the prospect matches certain criteria, the trigger mechanism will start the flow for this prospect.

Click on the Trigger to start the creation:

Next, select the desired Object. Here, you can use any Salesforce object (Standard or Custom) after activating them. Click here to learn how!

Select the record type as "Record is Updated" after clicking Add Trigger:

This is what ours looks like:

4.2 - Entry Rule

The entry rule optionally sets which conditions must be true on the record to trigger the Router's flow.

Click on the "+" sign to expand the options and add a new entry rule:

Select and add the Entry Rule that will be used. This is where we will use one of the Rules created in step #3.

4.3 - Routing Rule

Now, we will add a Routing Rule to route these prospects to the Teams we created.

Click on the "+" sign to expand the options and add a new Routing Rule:

Select and add the Routing Rule that will be used. We will also use the Rules created in step #3 here.

4.4 - Assign & Update Ownership

We will now click again on the "+" button next to the Matched path and create an Assign & Update Ownership node to assign prospects to your teams via Round-Robin, as the name suggests.

Once the node configuration opens, add the Distribution you created in step #2:

Then, select the Salesforce field to be updated during this process. For this use case, we selected the SDR Owner field from the Account object to be updated with the Assignee's ID, but you can use different fields if you wish.

Next, set your Fallback and Capping options - click here to learn more about them.

4.5 - Field Update

Click the "+" button again, and select the Field Update option.

For this use case, we selected the 90 Days Post Term End Date field from the Account object to be updated to False, but you can use different fields if you wish

4.6 - Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Last but not least, we will add an SLA. A "Service Level Agreement" or SLA is a commitment within your Team to establish how quickly your sales team will engage with a prospect based on pre-defined actions.

Click the "+" button and select the Service Level Agreement option.

After a pre-defined timeframe, the SLA will check if a condition is met and, if so, will take action.

For this use case, after 24 working hours, the first SLA will check if the ROE Phase is not equal to unfit to work. If yes, it will send a Slack notification. The second SLA, created in the same node, will perform the same as mentioned above, but it will send an Email notification.

This is where we will use the CRM Ownership rule created in step #3 to check the ROE phase criteria mentioned above.

Click here to learn more about about SLAs!

5 - Create a Catch-All (Optional)

Optionally, you can create a Catch-All path to route the ones who don't match your Routing Rules.

Click the "+" button below your Routing Rule, right next to the "Not Matched" flow, and select "Routing Rule" again. When clicking the "Select Rule" button, select the "Catch-all" option:

Once the Catch-All path is created, you can decide which path they will follow. For example, you can do the same as we did above but distribute them to a different Team.

6 - Publish your Router

Once done with the Router's setup, publish it in the top-right, so it becomes active and ready to roll!

This is what ours looks like:

Other features of Chili Piper, such as Vacation Calibration, help your team operate like a well-oiled Revenue operations, and front-line sales managers love this one. This setting for Round-Robin Queues defines the actions of the meeting distribution when a rep is out of the office. You can calibrate them during their vacation period, avoiding reps receiving multiple calls in sequence once they are back or not. All of the pieces together help make this SpicyOps play to keep your pipeline hot.

The Results: SDRs Save Hours and Build Quality Pipeline

With this automated in Distro, SDRs no longer spend hours reviewing reports, checking and validating Rules of Engagement, or letting ex-customers slip through the cracks, never to be seen again.

Let’s do the math to see how much time this is saving the team. If your SDR spends five minutes on an ex-customer to determine if they are within the ROEs, and you are a mid-market company that churns roughly 30 logos lost per month, this would save you 150 minutes per month, or 2.5 hours.

Not only that, but now your outbound team doesn’t have to manually do all of the research to find out important information about the account as they would a new, cold prospect (e.g., tech stack, size, industry, revenue, etc.). Conservatively, this saves your outbound team another 10 minutes each per account. That’s 300 minutes saved for those 30 churned logos.

Now, you might be saying that’s great, but are your reps actually booking meetings with customers that churn? I bet your meeting rate is 0% for these accounts.

The answer is yes, we are booking meetings! And no, the meeting rate is not 0%. In fact, it is nearly identical to the target accounts our SDR team outbounds.

When it’s time to reconnect, we don’t just dive in with the old "Hey, missed you!" Instead, we take a walk down memory lane, peppering our outreach with a bit of humor and a dash of empathy. Whatever the reason they left, we tailor our cadence to acknowledge their past decision with a smile while also casually mentioning the cool new features we've launched that would be highly relevant to them. So, whether they’re ready to rekindle the flame or just curious about what’s cooking, we’re here to show them that we're ready and happy to help them again.