A real estate agent pulled his contact list up on the screen while we were talking.
Just under six hundred people.
I asked him how many of them had heard from him in the last six months. He scrolled for a while, then said seventy to eighty percent, nothing. Then came the part that actually landed. Roughly three quarters of the quiet ones were people he genuinely knows. Past clients. Friends of past clients. People who had been in his kitchen. Not bought leads, not strangers off a web form.
Over three hundred people who already trust him had not heard his name in half a year.
He is not lazy. He is one of the hardest working people I have talked to this year, and that is exactly the problem. He spends his days on the work in front of him, and the list sits there going quietly cold.
Your version of this list is not in a real estate database. It is in your invoicing software. It is every customer you did work for in 2024 and have not spoken to since. The furnace you installed. The panel you upgraded. The family who called you twice in one year and then went quiet.
It cost you something to get every one of those people. You did the marketing, or you earned the referral, you took the call, you drove out, and you did the work well enough that they paid you. Then the relationship ended by default rather than by decision.
And nobody ever gets around to them, because they are the one group that owes you nothing and that you owe nothing to. Everything else on your desk has a person waiting on the other end of it. This list has nobody chasing you for it, which is exactly why it stays quiet.
Here is what fixing it actually looks like, and it is smaller than people expect.
Start by sorting. Export your customer list with the date of each customer's last job or last invoice on it, and sort by that date in a spreadsheet. Not by name, not by revenue. Last job date. What comes out is three groups: people you worked for recently, people who have gone quiet in the last year or two, and the rows that come back with no date in that column at all, who are the people who inquired once and never became anything. Those three groups need completely different messages, which is why the generic "we miss you" blast to everybody performs the way it does.
That sort is also where the legal side gets handled, which is why it happens now and not after you have written something. In Canada, implied permission to send commercial messages to someone you have done business with expires. Two years after a transaction, six months after a plain inquiry. Express permission, the kind someone knowingly opted into, does not expire, as long as they have not unsubscribed. The law covers texts and social messages too, not just email. That matters if your instinct is to text the list instead. The US works differently again, on an opt out basis. That is the shape of it rather than legal advice. The group worth checking is the third one, the people who only ever inquired.
Then pick one thing that goes out on its own. One. A seasonal reminder tied to what you actually installed for them, a yearly check in, a note when the warranty on the thing you put in is about to run out. It has to run without
Then pick one thing that goes out on its own. One. A seasonal reminder tied to what you actually installed for them, a yearly check in, a note when the warranty on the thing you put in is about to run out. It has to run without anyone remembering to run it, because the reason the list went quiet in the first place is that remembering was the plan.
Last, fix the thing upstream, which is usually the real culprit. Ask why a customer list is out of date and the answer is almost always that adding to it is annoying. The agent told me he hates building contact records by hand, so the people he meets face to face sometimes never get entered at all. Same story in a trade shop. The tech has the conversation on site, the detail lives in his head, nothing ever reaches the system. If entry stays annoying, the list stays wrong, and no follow up plan survives a wrong list. That upstream piece is the part worth building properly instead of promising yourself you will be better about it: https://www.chanautomation.com/crm-sales-pipeline
So run this one this week. Do the sort, and count how many people you have actually done work for who have not been back in more than twelve months.
That number is not a dead list. It is the warmest list your business already owns, and the only reason they are quiet is that nobody has said anything.
Kevin Chan
The Ops Shortcut by ChanAutomation
https://www.chanautomation.com/crm-sales-pipeline