Often brands focus on traditional marketing and sales strategies and miss out on potentially exceeding their revenue goals. If that’s the case with you, you’re missing out on low-hanging fruit. In today’s ever-competitive business environment, to fully leverage your hard-won customers, you need a dedicated upsell cross sell strategy in place.
According to a study by Sumo, up-selling boosts your average revenue by over 15-30%, whereas cross-selling boosts sales by over 20%. Therefore, the right up-sell and cross-sell strategy not only boosts your revenue & profits but also equips you to foster a healthy customer relationship by offering more personalized services. Before we delve deep into planning cross-selling and upselling techniques, let’s first decode what these mean.
Upsell vs Cross Sell:
An upsell strategy is getting prospective buyers to spend more in that particular single transaction. Wondering what is an upsell strategy or what are the upselling techniques typically used by businesses? Well, on a high level, it involves selling the same product but with enhanced amenities & greater cost. The goal here is to increase the overall price of the product via services such as product protection, extended warranty, version upgrade, customization, and much more.
On the other hand, cross-selling is providing a secondary product that is related to the primary product, which in turn, makes the deal a wholesome package for the customer. For example, if you’re selling a personal computer, you may ask the customer to pay a bit extra for better graphics. However, this is upselling! Cross-selling here is offering products such as a wireless mouse or keyboard which the customer can use along their new computer.
Now that we have garnered the gist about cross sell upsell strategies. Let’s move ahead and understand how you can create and leverage an up-sell cross-sell strategy and take your business to new heights:
- Understand Your Target Audience:
One of the primary steps in creating upsell and cross sell strategies is getting to know your audience more. Knowing your patron is imperative for up-selling & cross-selling success since you can only suggest the services or products they might need when you know them well enough. Now, to begin with, you can start segmenting customers based on their demographics. Further, you can identify profitable customer segments and understand how customer preferences & behavior are changing over time.
Therefore, if done right, studying your audience can help you craft upsell and cross sell strategies that are audience-centered. You can frame the strategies that actually work since they will be based on the preferences, behavior, and needs of your audience. One should note that a business that understands its audience has a better chance of catering to their unmet needs which makes all the difference in terms of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive word of mouth.
- Set Goals & Map Customer Journey:
Now that you’ve gathered enough intel about your customers, it’s time to take the next step and map their customer journey. The idea is to step into the customer’s shoes to discover their challenges and needs. Entrepreneurs and business owners can use a timeline template to visually depict how customers move through their sales funnel and interact at every touch point. If done right, customer journey mapping can help you discover actionable insights that are helpful in goal setting and strategy tunning such that you meet the customer’s expectations.
You can create a customer journey map by identifying customer interaction points such as your website, retail store, support center, social media handle, and others. From here, you can capture your patron’s interactions, pain points, needs, and attitudes involved while buying products or services from you. Once you have all the information, you can plot it into a map template and generate a uniform view of the customer journey. Hence, using these insights, you can make it easier for them to engage with your brands, predict their behavior, and up-sell & cross-sell on the move
- Define & Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
When we talk about effective customer acquisition & customer retention while ensuring profitability of the sales team and the product through up-sell & cross-sell strategy, the way you track the KPI or Key Performance Indicator makes all the difference. If you’re not aware of the concept of KPIs, these are quantitative measurements that help companies measure their success and determine growth. For instance, if you want to check the efficacy of your sales process or team, you can measure KPIs such as Contact to Customer Conversion Rate.
As an entrepreneur, you can plot up-sell & cross-sell KPIs such as Sales Effort Spent, Activities per Opp, Win Rate, Attach Rate, Renewal Rate, and several others on Google Slides themes and vividly track them. Tracking the KPI is as important as capturing them as it is only then you can keep a check. Once you start tracking these, you can establish a baseline and monitor them on the move to track your progress and boost the overall results of your sales process.
Wrapping It Up:
One should note that both up-selling and cross-selling are balancing acts. You do want to boost your revenue, but you don’t want to look obnoxious or pushy in the process. Since upselling is a more expensive version of the product your customer has already committed to, how you explain the benefits in relation to customer experience makes all the difference in the strategy’s success. Though there is no single recipe to sales success, the above points can help you kickstart your business endeavors, today!
