Cross-selling is a technique that belongs in every company’s sales arsenal. McKinsey says it can boost sales figures by 20% and profits by as much as 30%. That means you can seriously increase your revenue by using cross-selling as a sales strategy. We’ve put together this article to help you optimize how you use cross-selling to drive revenue to your company. Keep reading to find the top sales tips for this strategy and real-world examples to bring the ideas we cover to life.
Top sales tips for cross-selling in 2022 and beyond
Get to know your prospects
B2B cross-selling only works if you recommend products that your prospects will truly find valuable. And the only way to do that consistently is to have a keen understanding of who your clients are and what specifically they hope to achieve.
That’s why the foundation of a strong cross-selling sales strategy is having in-depth knowledge of your clients. If you don’t have that yet, consider building those relationships now so that you can be a more effective cross-seller in the future.
Focus on nailing your timing
Your timing is another important thing to think about while cross-selling.
If you approach someone too soon, you may come across as pushy. This could dissuade a prospective buyer from purchasing anything from you – let alone increase the value of their order.
Similarly, if you approach someone too late, they may no longer have the level of interest in your product that they had in the past. And this could decrease the likelihood that they buy into what you’re selling.
The sweet spot for cross-selling is typically right as a customer is about to purchase. It could make sense to reach out to a recent buyer just after they’ve purchased if you have a good reason to do so.
Make sure you’re personalizing your offers
Building on the previous point, it’s essential to use the information you have about your prospects to offer them personalized cross-selling opportunities. You can do this with information gleaned from previous conversations or by analyzing how they interact with your company online with a tool like LeadLander.
Use technology to automate web-based cross-selling
Web-based cross-selling is a huge opportunity that you don’t want to ignore – especially since there are tools that will automate this for you. If you have an online store, you can use this tactic differently.
One of the most effective options is to base your cross-selling recommendations on a user’s items in their shopping cart. You can cross-reference those items with the most common additional items that other users purchased alongside them.
For example, if multiple customers buy your accounting software also in addition to your tax software, this would be a tremendous cross-selling opportunity for someone with accounting software in their cart.
Work on improving your benefit explanations
When you attempt to use cross-selling on a prospect, the process will involve explaining why they should spend more money on another product. To do that, you need to clearly understand the benefit your prospect would receive by purchasing the additional product. You also need to state those benefits in a way that’s intuitive and easy for them to understand.
A good strategy for this is tying the benefits into a real-world number that matters to the prospect.
Let’s say you know a prospect wants to bring down their marketing costs, and you have a tool that can help them. Instead of explaining how the tool can help, say it could decrease their costs by X% or a specific dollar amount.
Offer a free trial
When you first cross-sell someone, they may not be interested in spending the money. But that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in receiving the benefit the add-on product can offer.
That’s why offering a free trial of an add-on product can be another excellent strategy for cross-selling. You can use this method to get people to enjoy the benefits of the add-on product before they have to pay for it.
Once someone is used to getting these extra benefits, they’ll be likelier to want to continue receiving them. This increases the chances cross-selling will be successful in the long run.
Always follow up after the sale
Most salespeople focus on cross-selling during the initial sale. But less make an effort to cross-sell after the initial sale is complete. If you want to increase your chances of succeeding with cross-selling, you’ll want to reach out after the first sale is complete.
This is an excellent opportunity for cross-selling because the customer will have already seen how much your product helps. Suppose the person is still uninterested in buying from you. In that case, you can use the contact as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, so the client is likelier to purchase from you again.
Track your performance over time
No matter what area of sales performance you want to get better at, tracking your performance over time is a must. Analyzing sales data is the only way to know which strategies are working and which are not. It’s the same with cross-selling.
There are many things you can learn by tracking cross-selling data. You could figure out when the best time to follow up with an existing client is by reviewing what time frames worked for you in the past.
You could also track the products you attempt to cross-sell people who have bought certain products from you. That way, you can see which products you should recommend to different types of buyers in the future.
Examples of effective cross-selling in practice
Now that we’ve covered the best sales tips for cross-selling in 2022 let’s look at some specific examples of how different types of businesses have put cross-selling into practice.
Amazon
Amazon is perhaps the best-known example of successful cross-selling. The company has an immaculate automated process for this.
When you visit an item’s product page on Amazon, you’re shown a list of other products that people have bought with it in the past. If you go to buy a computer monitor, Amazon might recommend an HDMI cord so that you can connect it to your desktop.
One of Amazon’s unique aspects of cross-selling is keeping the value of add-on items relatively low. If you buy a new phone on Amazon, you might see recommendations for screen protectors – not expensive headphones.
This strategy is effective because it’s much easier for a customer to increase the value of their order slightly instead of trying to get them to double it.
Flower websites
Flower websites like 1-800 Flowers are great at cross-selling as well. Most will recommend a wide variety of vases, chocolates, stuffed animals, and other related gifts whenever you check out with an order of flowers.
Both Amazon and 1-800 Flowers attempt to get you to slightly increase the overall value of your order by recommending lower-cost items that are either useful for what you’re purchasing or enhance its value.
Restaurants
Many restaurants also do a wonderful job of cross-selling their diners. A fine dining restaurant might recommend a unique wine pairing with each dish. Other restaurants put together tasting menus that allow diners to upgrade their meal with complementary dishes.
LeadLander can help you optimize your cross-selling sales strategy
If you’re ready to start getting more out of cross-selling, LeadLander is here to help. Our website visitor tracking software provides information about your clients and prospects, including:
- Real-time alerts when they visit your website
- Information about which pages on your site they visited
- An overview of how prospects reach your site
You can use this information to make more effective cross-selling pitches to clients with varying interests. Sign up for a risk-free 14-day trial of LeadLander today.
