YourSalesManagementGuru by Ken Thoreson, Acumen Management Group
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Increasing Wallet Share with Cross-Sell, Up-Sell Strategies
During a recent meeting with a new client's sales team, I discussed ideas to drive additional revenue. The meeting began with what products and services the client currently had to offer followed by a discussion on the concept of "cross-sell and up-sell."
Throughout my years as a sales leader and consultant, whenever potential sales looked weak, my first action would be to analyze all existing clients -- specifically, what products and services they currently use or have implemented. Next, I would determine what logical new or additional products and services I could offer them.
In my recent client meeting, we began to map out, by client, specific and tactical plans to contact certain clients, what messaging we could use and a justification for the natural progression into the new offering. We effectively created a "flight plan" or roadmap for each client that included potential business opportunities.
If you have not done this kind of project, the summer is a great time to work on this exercise. If business is slow, focus on your client base using the cross-sell/up-sell concept to help them achieve business objectives with new or updated offerings.
If you have multiple vendor product lines, it is critical you map out what logical cross-sells or up-sells are. I guarantee you will find many missed opportunities. I have found that in most organizations, salespeople simply don't see the connections or the applications within the client and therefore miss many sales opportunities. HINT: Use your technical teams to work with the sales teams in creating the flight plans.
Posted by Ken Thoreson on May 21, 2012