Cross-Selling And Up-Selling: What Is It, Examples, And How To Do It? Understand How To Boost Your Sales
Cross-selling and up-selling, Have you heard of these sales techniques? Do you know how to upsell and cross-sell? Learn all this and more in this article!
To give you an idea of the importance of understanding what cross-selling and up-selling are, research has shown that 35% of Amazon sales are the result of cross-selling.
Therefore, if you are thinking about how to increase your company’s sales results, you need to implement cross-selling and up-selling strategies.
In this article, you will understand what cross-selling is and what upselling is, and how these strategies can help you increase the value of your commercial proposal, make better use of your customers’ purchasing potential, and boost your company’s sales results.
Continue reading and also check out some examples and these 6 tips to get inspired and put additional and cross-selling into practice :
- Offer relevant and in-context solutions
- Consider the customer profile
- Highlight gains beyond values
- Understand if the customer needs what you have to offer
- Talk to your customer
- Make use of specialized data software
In this article, we will present, in detail, how to apply each of these steps. Keep reading!
What is up-selling?
Upselling (additional sales) is a sales strategy that consists of offering the customer a solution that is superior to the one they are thinking about purchasing or have already purchased.
It’s a way to improve buyer acquisition and increase the company’s average ticket.
Generally, the product or service offered in upselling is more expensive than the previous one, precisely because it has more features or is of better quality.
In other words, the upsell aims to make the customer buy a version above the model they already have or intend to have.
Up-selling examples
When a customer goes to a cell phone store to buy a new device, he or she is determined to buy an iPhone XS. However, upon arriving at the store, the salesperson shows that, for an extra fee, the customer can get the iPhone XS Max, which has more features and a reasonable price difference.
Another example is cable TV subscription services. It is common for operators to contact their customers trying to convince them to migrate to a plan with more channels for a “small” extra value in the monthly fee.
Telephone companies also love to upsell their plans by offering more gigs of browsing and access to applications that don’t consume mobile data.
What is cross-selling?
Cross-selling can be defined as a strategy in which the customer is offered complementary products to what they have already purchased or are about to purchase.
In cross-selling, the customer is encouraged to purchase solutions that complement their experience. The products offered match the initial purchase.
Example of cross-selling
An example of what cross-selling means is commonly seen in businesses such as e-commerce.
When the customer is about to finalize their order, a message almost always appears on the screen like “you will also like:” or “whoever bought this product also got:”.
In physical stores, returning to the example of the customer who is interested in the iPhone X, the seller can offer additional items: AirPods headphones, cell phone covers, or anti-impact films.
In this way, the customer has the opportunity to have a more complete experience with the product he is purchasing. The company managed to increase its average ticket.
How to cross-sell and up-sell: 6 essential tips
Now that you know more about what cross-selling and up-selling are, check out the following 6 basic tips on how to upsell and/or cross-sell and implement these strategies efficiently, increasing your company’s revenue.
1. Offer relevant and contextual solutions
The first tip on how to cross-sell and upsell is to offer products or services that are related to the customer’s original acquisition.
In other words, it doesn’t make sense for you to offer a microwave to the customer who is buying an iPhone X, whether in an additional sale or cross-sale.
2. Consider the customer profile
It is also extremely important to consider the profile of each client. Seek to gather information about:
- purchases historic,
- how much the customer is willing to pay,
- aspects that he values most, etc.
This way, it is possible to be more assertive when offering complementary solutions or upgrades.
3. Highlight gains beyond values
A cross-selling and up-selling strategy is generally closely related to price, for example “for another $0.50 you can buy a large fry”. This is a very attractive offer, used by McDonald’s, and is an example of an upsell.
Using this appeal, of a small value added to the final price, is very important to call the customer’s attention to a cross-selling and up-selling action, however, companies also need to make clear the value of this for the customer. Remember: value is different from price.
In other words, what does your client gain by “accepting” your proposal? In short, what do you offer instead of more fries?
This is important, especially for businesses that work with price variations that exceed values as low as $0.50. It’s easy to sell more potatoes for more than $0.50, but is it so easy to sell your solution for the value you’re presenting?
Therefore, the greater the difference between the amount the customer pays today and what he will pay by accepting your offer, the more clear advantages you must present to him.
4. Understand if the customer needs what you have to offer
Trying to push the customer to a more expensive plan, without him needing it, can have the opposite effect: the customer has a bad experience with your company and stops doing business with it.
In other words, instead of increasing the value of the average ticket, you lose a customer and increase churn rates.
This is the reason why many sellers do not implement cross-selling and up-selling strategies.
However, not investing in cross-selling and up-selling can also lead to a customer having a bad experience. If he can take advantage of, for example, a faster internet, you can lose him to your competitor, if you don’t take the attitude of offering this solution to him.
You must understand the customer’s needs. For example, a customer who consumes their entire data plan every month needs to purchase a more robust plan.
This applies to all types of companies. Understand how your customer uses the solution they hired from your company and identify whether they can achieve better results by taking advantage of your cross-selling and up-selling options.
5. Talk to your customer
Calling and asking if the customer is satisfied with the item purchased is a way of identifying whether there is room to offer one more item or a new, more complete item.
But, be careful, use this call to ask how the customer’s experience is with the offer purchased, if anything is missing, if they miss any functionality, or if new needs have arisen since the last time you spoke.
This is not a commercial call, but rather a diagnostic call, which can present several opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling actions.
6. Make use of specialized data software
Technology can be a great ally in your cross and upsell strategies. Through software specialized in data collection, storage, and management, such as a CRM platform, it is possible to better understand your customers and improve the sales cycle.
Service companies, SaaS, or even products, can – and should – use CRM to evaluate which customers have shown the most tendency to cross-selling and up-selling, so you look at your customer base, the history you have lived with them and it can identify which ones can best take advantage of the solutions offered by cross- or additional selling.
It is common for some customers to start with leaner plans to test the service, for example, so, after a while, your company can offer an upgrade for these.
CRM will also help you evaluate which clients are suitable for a more complete solution or to add a solution to the package of services you already hire from your company.
In short, use CRM to keep track of customers and identify which ones may be ready for an upgrade or package expansion.
Tools combined with after-sales for cross-selling and upselling
Well, is it clear what cross-selling and up-selling are? Now that you know more about these commercial strategies, how about putting them into practice in your company to boost sales?
Zendesk has a series of integrated customer relationship solutions that can help your company get to know your customers better and create cross-selling and up-selling offers in an extremely assertive way.
The sales team CRM system can be used before and after closing a deal to:
- centralize all customer data and interactions;
- optimize the flow of information provided;
- integrate different departments, for example, sales, marketing, and service;
- access history of purchases made;
- identify new sales opportunities quickly.
In addition to this solution, your company can also enjoy all the benefits of customer service software, a complete tool that encompasses the entire customer service aspect, which will help you implement efficient after-sales, which includes new sales.
Among the resources offered are:
- Integration of different service channels such as messages, real-time chat, email, or voice.
- Unified agent workspace to facilitate customer monitoring, prioritization, and responses.
- An integrated help center and community forum can be created to provide better customer service,
- Collaboration tool, which connects internal and external partners, facilitating the work of agents,
- Automation and AI-powered bots to get the context customers need,
- creating, managing, and delivering an intelligent knowledge base to improve customer self-service empower staff, and more.
Were you curious? So, get in touch with Zendesk and find out what they can do to help you improve the customer experience through agile service and sales strategies such as cross-selling and up-selling.
