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.