Upselling and cross-selling strategies maximize your revenue potential.
Customer acquisition is at the core of every business. Learn how to effectively upsell and cross-sell at every point of sale.
Whether you do physical retail, offer a service, or sell B2B SaaS software, without customers, no business is possible.
B2B SaaS stands for business-to-business Software-as-a-Service. It encompasses cloud-based software used by businesses for various tasks, such as accounting, office productivity, customer relationship management (CRM), and other work-related activities.
The problem is that finding new customers is really difficult. Most companies these days spend a lot of money on digital advertising and try to piece their network together.
At the same time, there are existing customers who already like you and are committed to buying from you.
Chances are, you haven’t maximized their ability to pay and can offer them some of your extra services or products they might not have even known about.
That’s why savvy business owners say that “the sale doesn’t end” with the agreement of purchase.
So let’s explore two popular ways to increase revenue from your existing customers: upselling and cross-selling.
Meaning of Upselling
Upselling is a sales strategy that involves encouraging customers to buy a higher-end version of a product than what they originally intended to purchase. The result of this is boost in revenue.
This strategy is meant to persuade your customers that their needs and goals would be better met with a version of a product or service that costs more.
As a generator seller, when customers come for a generator that doesn’t make use of 100% copper coil. You can simply persuade them to get a higher version of it which comes with a 100% copper coil.
As a web hosting provider, you can let the users know the merits of Virtual Private Server (VPS) over their intended shared hosting plan. If they agree to buy a VPS plan instead of shared hosting, then you have successfully done Upselling.
Car dealerships, on the other hand, are very skilled upsellers. It’s practically impossible to leave the car lot with the same configuration you expected at the beginning.
Even fast-food restaurants are upselling experts. Have you noticed how a large drink can be double the size of a medium one but only cost 50 cents more?
With a Simple persuasion, customers will see the benefits of getting a higher-end version of the products or services they intended. This will obviously in return lead to more money in your account.
Not everyone will agree or have the funds to get the higher version of the product they intended. As such, your lower-end products will also get purchased. This spreads sales across all your product lines.
Meaning of Cross-Selling
Just like upselling, cross-selling is a popular strategy to increase revenues for your existing customers.
When you cross-sell products, you offer your customers additional items and show them product suggestions that complement what they already have.
As a web hosting provider, you can let existing hosting users know the various hosting addons that will make their hosting and websites better. If they agree to pay for an additional service, then you have successfully done Cross-Selling.
Amazon has been a proponent of cross-selling. They use their “Buy it with” category that’s always highly visible and that allows you to buy all the suggested items with one click.
In a way, cross-selling is seeing all products as bundles that could be sold together, rather than stand-alone SKUs. Often these bundles are also discounted, such as when you get internet and cable TV from the same provider.
Use both a cross-sell and upsell strategy at the same time to offer a more expensive product while suggesting some additional products that would make it even better!
Recommended: How to upsell restaurants
Upselling Vs Cross-Selling in 2022
While cross-selling and upselling resemble different approaches, they really have the same goals.
The goal of upselling and cross-selling are to provide more value to your existing customers while increasing the revenue you get from them.
The difference between the two is that upselling is offering a premium version of the same product while cross-selling is about offering additional products to go with the one you’ve already picked.
If you’re not sure whether to use upselling or cross-selling, do both and look at the data. For some companies, it’s more profitable to upsell if more expensive products have much better profit margins and their customers can afford them.
And most importantly, you can use Vonza to sell your courses via email, SMS, and online community. Sign up today for Vonza’s 30-day free trial, to start enjoying all those benefits.
