In the last episode, the task was to walk through the customer lists to identify your best customers, your most profitable customers, and customers not contributing to the bottom line. The exercise should expose those customers who cost more to maintain than the profit from their jobs warrant. It is worth considering firing those customers.

There is another group of customers that is worth revisiting: your lapsed customers. These are the customers who may have been profitable, high-volume customers in the past but dropped off the books. The starting point is a look at their past orders and revenue.

The task is to review customers who have not ordered within the current fiscal year but who were regular customers in the past. Don’t spend time on one-off buyers or buyers that would have fallen into the low-profit or no-profit categories. Look for those that represented significant contributions to the bottom line.