5 lessons on: Cross Selling
As I begin this venture of setting up Boldbridge, my first instinct is to write about my formative experiences, and the jobs I have performed that have had the biggest impact on my employer and my clients. This week, I am focusing on Cross Selling.
Cross Selling is a sales strategy, where businesses encourage existing customers to purchase additional products or services. Not to be confused with Upselling, which is a term describing the sales strategy whereby companies target existing clients for more complex or upgraded services.
This happens more than you think. Whether it’s being offered wheel shine services at a car wash, or even a new hair conditioner but the person who cuts your hair. These additional sale offers provide opportunities for more revenue from new sources, and, if done in the right way, can enhance your customer experience.
In a financial service, where companies provide a broad range of services, from accounting, regulatory reporting, compliance to investor services, there are plenty of opportunities to cross sell. In the context of moving to new regions, the cross-sale initiatives center around selling services from different offices.
It can be a tricky strategy to deploy and is a process that should be approached with care. If not handled correctly, loyal customers could feel as though their relationship with you is devalued, as sales teams continuously contact them about products that do not fit their needs. Cross Selling can put a strain on the existing relationship team if they are not brought on the journey of the sale and can be left having to explain to the client why they have been hounded to sign up to a service that clearly doesn’t fit their needs.
Effectively cross selling to your client can lead to increased customer lifetime value and a better relationship with your client as you are providing a more complete, helpful service.
Here are some of the best practice lessons for deploying an effective cross sale strategy:
Lesson 1 – Know your client!
Firstly, the most important step in this process is to ensure you know your client, their needs and strategy. You need to ensure that the services or products you are offering are going to help the client and compliment their business. Without doing this homework on the client, teams can often upset a relationship by persisting with new product offerings that clearly are not wanted by the customer. On the contrary, if you can identify complimentary services and products that will support your customers strategy, it can enrich your relationship with them and potentially lead to more business in the future.
Lesson 2 – Teamwork is the key!
If the relationship is in a good place with the client, this is of course a great thing, but great relationships are formed over time by a great client service team. Operating in a silo and contacting clients without the incumbent service teams knowledge can be troublesome. Firstly, the offer for new products/services may directly conflict with other conversations in progress with the relationship lead, or may have already been offered. There is a risk that your company looks disjointed and upsets a good client relationship. For any sales team looking to deploy a Cross Sale strategy, the first two steps are to check your Client Relationship Management database (CRM) and to give your first pitch to your client service team. Winning over the teams that the client trusts, and getting to grips with the current state of the relationship can set you up for success!
Lesson 3 – be ready to service!
The last thing you need after spending all that time working to educate your client on this new product /service is to find out that that your service teams are not ready to provide this service and the sales team know enough about this service to educate the client on its benefits. This can undermine your position in front of the client and lead to mistrust in the future. Spending the time on the internal training, stress testing and project deployment at the outset of the project is time well spent, and will ensure that you and your teams are ready to offer these services to your clients.
Lesson 4 – Relationship building is key!
Often cross selling can be seen as ‘low hanging fruit’ because the business already has the relationships with the client. In some cases, this may be true, but clients are rarely sitting around waiting for you to offer a new service to them, and therefore the chances are, they either already have another service provider doing this work, or they have a plan to do this work internally. Just like the way we need to bring the existing client facing team on the journey of this new service offering, we need to bring the client on the journey too. Start with an introduction of the client from the existing service team, and strategically educate on the development of the service. Introduce members of the team and find out more about the clients operational set up and how your new service could improve things for them.
Lesson 5 – be patient
As with any sales exercise, the key is patience. If you operate with honesty, integrity and consistency, your clients trust will continue to build, and you will be strategically placed to sell your service to them when they need it the most.