35%.
Amazon generates 35% of its sales through additional sales!*
Cross-selling and up-selling can therefore represent a real growth lever for your company, even if you're not a web giant!
*Source: The Future of Commerce
Cross and up-selling, what are they?
Cross-selling is a sales technique in which customers are invited to buy products or services that complement those they have already purchased or are in the process of purchasing.
Up-selling, or additional selling, is a sales technique in which a customer is offered the opportunity to buy a product or service of a higher range (and therefore more expensive) than the one they were initially considering. |
Without even realizing it, you're confronted with these techniques on a daily basis! "And with this?" when you buy your baguette, "En menu maxi best of?" when you order your favorite hamburger...
But cross- and up-selling don't just apply to the B-to-C sector.
This sales strategy can be applied in B-to-B, whatever the sector or size of your company.
Today, we'd like to show you how to initiate this process in your organization. |
KEY No. 1 - Gathering information
After several exchanges with your customer, you often think you know him. You may even be able to find out their next vacation destination!
But in reality, your customer rarely shares more strategic information, specific to the running of their business. And it's this kind of information that's needed in a cross- and up-selling strategy.
You need to take advantage of the fact that you're already in contact with your customer to gather as much useful information as possible for your sale.
By gathering as much data as possible about your customer, his company and his environment, you'll be able to identify his objectives and the weaknesses that are preventing him from achieving his goal... and you'll be able to demonstrate how your new offer could solve his problems!
This information gathering will help you to create an awareness in your customer's mind: an awareness between what he's doing now and what he could be doing, and therefore an awareness of new needs!
To do this, you need to go further than the simple functional need expressed by your customer.
Go to the "Why?" of his action, challenge him!
You'll then be able to question the initial system imagined by your customer in order to propose a more suitable solution, and therefore sell more and bring more value!
For example, for a professional training organization:
A Sales Director who uses Excel files for his customer relationship management won't necessarily be aware that his organization could be optimized. He's happy with the current situation!
It's by asking him about his practices that you can suggest that training in a CRM tool will have a better ROI than simply training in Excel. It's the kind of thing that will raise their awareness!
A variety of sales techniques and marketing tools are available to help you gather as much information as possible about your contacts and get them to ask questions about their uses and needs.
Chez Kestiowe train our customers in theart of questioning, in order to raise awareness among their prospects. We also use various data enrichment tools to obtain relevant information during our exchanges.
If you'd like to find out more about these methods and tools, we 'd be delighted to hear from you !
KEY No. 2 - Added value
The second key to encouraging cross-selling and up-selling is to offer the prospect of added value that complements a service available to the customer. In other words, you need to make the ROI clear by showing the prospect of gain.
Setting the scene & example
For example, if you propose a solution that solves a major problem, such as the time wasted by a manager manually dispatching alerts, you can show how your solution can improve productivity, the process and overall results.
By giving concrete examples of how your solution can help solve your customer's problems, you can convince them of the importance of your offer. Continuing with our example, you can explain how the solution's settings enable alerts to be dispatched automatically to people according to certain criteria, leading to greater customer satisfaction thanks to faster processing of alerts and a better distribution of work among employees.
In short, the key here is to show your customer how your additional solution can add real value to their business, enabling them to accomplish something more, optimize their time and better distribute their work.
We explained how to initiate this process during the webinar on Thursday, March 16 at 2 p.m.. This d webinar focused on the techniques you need to put in place to initiate a cross- and up-selling strategy. Click on the button below to watch the webinar again.
KEY No. 3 - Personalization
Adapt your sales pitch to your customer's profile! It's important to understand that every customer is different and has specific needs. To sell effectively, it' s essential to know your customer's personality profile, so you can present your cross- and up-sell from the right angle.
The advantage of cross- and up-selling is that you know your customer better, you've had several meetings with them and you potentially work with them, so you need to exploit this knowledge of the profile and adapt your sales pitch by highlighting the elements that speak most to the person in front of you.
For example, if we use the personality styles of the DISC model, which presents 4 main emotions through a composition of colors:
- D - Dominance
- I - Influence
- S - Stability
- C - Compliance
For example, the proposal for an automated prospecting service will differ according to profile: for a blue profile, we'll focus on improving the process, for a red profile, we'll insist on better target achievement, while for a green profile, we'll emphasize a better experience for employees.
As well as knowing the customer's personality profile, it's important to constantly gather information to understand how they're organized, what they want to achieve, and identify gaps that your solution could fill. Commercially speaking, information is always key!
Ultimately, there are two levels to consider in order to sell effectively:
- What do you need to do to attract the customer's attention?
- Once he's interested, what do we need to sway the decision?
Would you like to find out more about the DISC model, so you can adapt your communication to your interlocutor's profile, and better understand how he or she thinks, feels and operates? Click on the button below to view our webinar on the DISC profile.
KEY No. 4: Expert advice
