These sales tactics can help change your business for the better.
Learn how cross selling and upselling can affect your business.
Upselling and cross-selling has slowly become one of the necessary tactics in the business world. Why may you ask? With the rise of GDPR, the B2B landscape will be revolutionized. Selling to your current customer base is one of the most profitable tactics. There are plenty of studies and statistics that have proven that this is one of the best ways to generate revenue for B2B companies but with the rise of CRM, upselling and cross-selling will likely become more vital to drive efficient and long term success.
If you don’t know what upselling or cross-selling is, worry not. Upselling is essentially the sales technique where sellers influence customers to purchase more expensive items or upgrades or add-Ons, in hopes of making a more profitable sale. It usually requires marketing more profitable services by exposing the customer base to more options that they may not have considered yet. Cross-selling, on the other hand, is when sellers sell an additional service or product to an existing customer. The objective of this practice is to either increase the income from the client or to protect the relationship. With this in mind, it’s important to ensure that the additional product or service that you’re selling is supposed to improve the client somehow.
While upselling and cross-selling sound very similar, it’s important to know that there is a big difference between the two. Upselling is when you try to persuade the customer to purchase an upgrade of their intended choice while cross-selling focuses on suggesting an additional product. These two tactics are the core components of a customer-focused B2B sales strategy. The best strategy is to find a way to combine the two.
Cross-selling and upselling holds several benefits for B2B companies including:
- Enhances long term value of association
- Broadens choice of product and services
- Offers convenience and flexibility
- Builds customer equity
- Balances growth between new and existing customers
- Increases customer satisfaction
- Lowers price or improves ROI of services/products
- Improves customer service
- Promotes innovation
- Enhances customer profits
- Discourages churn and improves customer loyalty and experience
In order to reap these benefits you’ll need a strong strategy. Here are some of the tips that can help you build a successful upselling and cross-selling strategy:
Data Driven Insights
One of the most important aspects of cross-selling and upselling is understanding your customer. By understanding their needs, behavior, and goals, you’ll be able to provide them with products that they would want to buy. One of the ways to accomplish this is by collecting relevant data. It’s not enough for you to simply do a quick research or look at your old CRM data. You need to make sure that you’re constantly updating your databases. With artificial intelligence solutions available, you can leverage analytics, machine learning, and much more to ensure that you have a strong understanding of your customers.
Telling the Future
Predicting your customers wants and needs is a key skill in B2B sales. With the digital tools available, you can learn and foresee where your customers are projecting towards next and be one step ahead of them. This allows you to create new opportunities for yourself to upsell and cross-sell.
