Cross-selling & up-selling to your customers

Your sales force doesn’t do a good job of cross-selling products that are not in their core product line. And only the named accounts salespeople (assuming you still have these rare and expensive folks) up-sell. Almost 86% of the people reading this are nodding in agreement according to our surveys.

Your sales force is hardwired to do a poor job of cross-selling and up-selling. It’s a distraction, it won’t get them to quota club, won’t save their job if they don’t make base quota, won’t even make them any real money. That means it’s your job to cue those opportunities up, and their job to take the credit. We could pretend it’s your job because changing the culture, reward structure, and selling emphasis is a huge and painful undertaking that may not yield rewards.

We could pretend it’s an integral part of an integrated strategy. But, here’s the real reason why you want the job: It’s easy. In fact, if you have an integrated back-end, it’s automatic.

You don’t need the sales force, and your cost per sale will plummet when you take control. You’ll have great justification to grab a bigger budget. The first sale to a new customer is inherently low margin. You have just spent a tremendous amount of time and effort acquiring the leads, profiling them, maturing them through the sales cycle, converting them on a one-to-one basis into prospects, and then persuading them that your solution is the one they want to buy. Your accounting system probably doesn’t reflect true acquisition costs (unless you’ve gone through the almost unbearable pain of implementing activity-based costing) but your business sense tells you it’s huge.

Once a customer has been acquired, the good part begins. Now you have a valuable relationship that, properly nurtured, increases in value over time. You already have the machine in place to talk to prospects based on their profile—and customers are just a special case of prospect. The only added information you need is what they bought and how much. Now you can talk to them and turn them into committed customers and evangelists.

Opportunities for repeat business are where high-quality revenue resides. Even with transactional marketing, we always knew that when a customer buys from you once, there is a better chance that he or she will buy from you again. But in an integrated environment, we are engaged in relevant conversations, we already understand their needs and interests, and we know what else they are qualified to buy. The incremental cost to market to customers is very close to ZERO. We retain and grow customers by continuing to provide them with relevant and valuable information with our integrated marketing.

The most valuable product your company can offer is its expertise; in its most distilled form, your brand, your reputation, and the reasons for buying your products all funnel down to what your prospective customers believe about your expertise. It’s what your customers and prospects are really after, even when they don’t directly express the need. Now that expertise can be delivered in a nearly frictionless manner, interactively.

You can have relevant conversations with prospects and customers. You can understand what their needs and interests are and help them solve their business challenges. You can provide personalized expertise so valuable that you will bind your customers to you, influence their decision-making process and optimize the value of your products to them.

The most faithful customers are those that use your differentiated product features—these “expert” users value your products. Other than wizards and twelve-year-old boys, “expert” customers are simply those who have sufficient access to your expertise to learn to operate your products at an optimal, personally useful level. People who use your products marginally tend to hate advanced features (blinking VCR timers, style sheets in Word, etc.). Integrated marketing delivers the expertise they care about and converts them into expert users and committed customers.