Upselling & Cross-Selling for Service Reps

Although upselling and cross-selling are two very simple sales techniques that can effectively increase your bottom line, many sales and service reps are hesitant to use them.

Many reps are comfortable with their service jobs and they just don’t want to sell.  They dislike being perceived as ‘pushy’.  Others fear rejection.  If the customer rejects their offer, they feel rejected personally.  And still others simply believe that the customers know best and that they have no business suggesting anything additional to them.

If this is the way your reps feel, I’ve got two scenarios here for you to introduce to them that may change their minds.  Number one.  You rep goes to a sporting goods store and purchases a pair of the latest running shoes for RM399.  At the end of the day, she meets a friend who’s just purchased an identical pair of shoes from the same shop for RM299.  Now, is your rep upset?  Probably.  So she goes back to the shop to complain only to find that if she had purchased two pairs of shoes, like her friend did, she would have paid only RM299 a pair.  So is she still upset?  Probably.  Why?  Because the salesperson should have told her about this and left it up to her to decide whether she wanted to increase the purchase.

It usually doesn’t take long after this for her to realize that if she’d been the salesperson, making the offer would have been providing a service.

Here’s another scenario.  Suppose your rep is invited by a friend to attend a weekend camping trip with a group of people in Johor.  The friend tells your rep what he has to bring along, but he neglects to tell him to bring a swimsuit.  As it turns out, the camping area has a large swimming pool and a nearby waterfall where everybody spends most of their time during the weekend.  Now, is your rep upset?  Probably.  Why?  Because his friend should have told him to bring a swimsuit.  It was wrong for the friend to assume that he should know what to bring.  By not telling him, he did him a disservice.

Again, it shouldn’t take long for your rep to realize that he is the one who knows your products, he’s the one who knows what goes with what, and he’s the one who knows how the customers can save money.  By not sharing this information with customers, he’s doing them an equal disservice.

If your sales and service reps aren’t upselling and cross-selling, find out why and get to work on changing those results.  Upselling and cross-selling not only increase business on your calls, but also keep your customers happy.

Upselling is Upservicing!

It’s lunch time, so you step into your favorite fast-food joint for a quick meal.  You place your order at the counter – double burger and a large Coke – and as the girl keys it into the register she asks you with a smile, “Do you want fries with that?”  Well… yeah.  Now that you mention it.  Who wouldn’t?

You know this scenario and we joke about it.  But pay attention to what the food chains like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway are all doing.  Almost every time you place an order at one of these places, the service people behind the counter offer you something else.  Cheesecake with your coffee?  Why not?  And just because she asked, not only do you enjoy a satisfyingly rich dessert with your caramel macchiato, but she also increased the value of her sale by more than 100%. 

If she cross-sells to every customer, and even if only 5% say yes, what would that mean to her bottom line at the end of every day?  Here’s another thought.  If your sales and service reps were successful at up-selling and cross-selling at 5% of the time or more, what would that mean to your bottom line?

Upselling and cross-selling create superior value for your customers.  And although your reps may hesitate to upsell for fear of sounding ‘pushy’, research shows that most customers appreciate upselling and cross-selling when they feel they are offered additional benefits relevant to their needs.  In fact, since upselling and cross-selling service customer needs, we could think of it as upservicing.

When it’s done right, upselling is no more than a suggestion to an already receptive buyer to enhance the value of the purchase.  Did that cheesecake enhance your Strabucks caramel macchiato experience?  Well then, the girl’s offer to you was great service.

If the suggestion is in line with the customer’s needs, the customer will be receptive.  No guarantee that they’ll buy of course, but they will turn down the offer with a smile.  Of course, there’s still that 5% that will accept and smile even bigger.

Ensure that your reps are more interested in delivering quality service than they are in making an additional sale.  If the focus remains on enhancing customer experience, upselling and cross-selling will be much easier.

Upselling and cross-selling increase your customers’ satisfaction.  Just a small proactive effort on your part conclusively leads to customer loyalty and grows your revenue at the same time.

Upselling and Cross-selling to Your Cutomer Base

A few years back, I conducted a training program in sales presentations for a Japanese manufacturer of digital copiers based here in Kuala Lumpur.  The program was requested by a woman I’ll call Ivy, who had started with the company as a sales rep and worked her way up to regional sales manager in just seven years.

This impressed me, so I asked for her story.  Here’s how she did it. 

Ivy had a sales portfolio of 280 different customers ranging from ground-floor stationery shophouses to multinational corporations.  She had a database filled with details on every one.  In the morning when she arrived at work, she’d check her e-mail, follow up on sales requests and then she’d go through her database and search for customer needs.

For example, she’d calculate how long it would be before one customer started running out of toner and would need another order.  She’d notice that another customer was due for routine service.  She’d locate another customer whose warranty and service agreement were about to expire and she’d find one customer who was probably due for a new machine.  Then she’d call these customers on the phone and visit them in the afternoon.

 “I made it my business to make a sale every day,” she told me.  “Whether it was for something simple like toner, or a big sale like a complete office solution, I was always selling something.”

 And the one thing that enabled her to do that?

 “I knew every customer,” she told me.  “I knew their names, I knew their machines, I knew their dates, and I knew their needs.”  Then she laughed and told me, “I knew their needs before they did.”

Ivy was a master upseller and cross-seller to her existing customer base because she anticipated her customer’s needs.  She knew their businesses and how her products would help them.  She had solutions ready before problems had a chance to surface.

You can leverage your existing customer base, too.  Upselling and cross-selling are valuable sales tools that can make you and your customer happy to be in business together.