During an economic downturn, a sales person is confronted by challenges.  They receive many knocks.  They are told “no” more than they would like and certainly more than a year or so ago.  For approximately a year, sales people have worked hard just to get a sale.  Now that, dare I say it, we are starting to see a few green shoots of recovery, the sales person must be thinking about maximising opportunities.  Six months ago the prospect of cross selling or upselling might in some areas have been a little fanciful, over ambitious or simply not appropriate.  All efforts were put into just achieving a sale, clearly budgets were and are tight, the sales person has to work extremely hard to make a sale.

Upselling is always talked about in sales meetings, sales managers are clearly keen for their teams to take every opportunity to upsell, however the pressure they put on their sales teams often ends up with poor execution of the task.  Sales people enter a sales situation, the client may well be showing interest in “product a”, the sales person identifies a need for the product, the client agrees and so the sales person presents the product matching the need.  So far so good.  The client agrees to buy “product a”. The sales person suddenly remembers the sales manager’s voice “upsell wherever you can”.  So they blurt out “would you also be interested in Product b?”

The result is that the client thinks to themselves “I have just committed to buying product a, which matches my needs and is therefore of use to me and so I will spend some money on it.  Product b, seems to be an add on which I had not thought about and certainly not budgeted for, so NO THANKS”.  It is the same scenario when cross-selling.  By introducing something else after having sold the first product or element to the service pretty much always gets the same result unless the sales person is lucky!  I am always reminded of the shoe shop example.  We buy a lovely new pair of shoes and are then asked when we get to the cash desk, would you like to buy some “waterproofing cream” for your shoes or some such product.  At that moment, we do not think for one minute that we will need it.  We have never needed it in the past (or have forgotten that we did need it once) so we see this as an annoying effort by the shoe shop to take more of our money.

So what is missing?  If you want to upsell or cross sell, your whole sales strategy must reflect this and do not simply add on options.  Use questions to develop more than one need.  When selling training solutions, I will try to develop two conversations, right from the start.  If the enquiry is about sales training, for example, I will ask questions about their managers, (and vice versa) this will start to create a need for both.  If it does not the opportunity for cross selling is reduced.  The point is that when trying to upsell and cross sell the client/customer must have a need for everything you are selling.  After selling the “lead” product, add ons, extras, options are not attractive to a buyer. Their needs have been matched and they have committed to the first product. They do not think they need anything else.  More questions will create more needs.

In conclusion, to upsell, a sales person must develop existing levels of purchase.  To do this a need to buy more must be created, rather than more being offered!  To Cross sell, a sales person must create a need for a customer to buy another product from their range.  Instead of assuming that they will want to do this, a new level of need has to be created.  Remember, I have one need for shoes, I have another need for polish!