Driving Cross-selling and Up-selling: Knowing is Half the Battle

It’s no secret: the firms that are the best at selling do things differently than those that aren’t the best.

This dandy of a chart by Aberdeen Group covers a lot of ground, including, getting business developers up to speed and selling fast, keeping the best sellers, and so on.

But what jumps out at me: what the top firms do to maximize cross-selling and up-selling.

In Aberdeen’s report Optimizing Lead-to-Win: Shrinking the Sales Cycle and Focusing Closers on Sealing More Deals, 472 B2B firms assessed themselves on a variety of sales-related success factors.

Here’s the scoop: the 24% of firms that were best-in-class at cross-selling and up-selling were markedly better in these three sales knowledge areas:

Overall product and service knowledge
Understanding clients’ and prospects’ business challenges
Ability to map their offering to those challenges

Average and laggard firms take note: the more you know, the more you sell.

Take the following example:

You deliver an engagement at ACME, Inc. The client loves how you solve Problem A for them. They’ve spent $100,000. They will save $2,000,000 over the next 4 years. Working together was a joy. Everything went swimmingly.

About 3 months later, another VP at your firm says, “I was just talking to the folks at ACME. Didn’t we work with them a few months ago?”

You: “Yes, we did. Went great. Saved them $2,000,000 in revenue by solving Problem A.”

VP: “Did you see that Problem B exists?”

You: “I knew that the situation existed. We studied it. But it’s not my area of focus. Is that a problem we solve?”

VP: “Yes, we do. And we are perhaps the best firm in the world at solving it. For another $100k, we could have saved ACME another $2,000,000.”

You: “Well, if I only knew it was that much of an issue. And if I only knew we solved it.”

Think this isn’t happening at your firm?

Now, it’s not only what you and your sales teams know that can help them sell. They might know something but not take action to do something about it.

But knowledge – knowledge of common customer needs, knowledge of services and products you offer, knowledge of how those services and products solve problems – is where it all starts.

Interested in a learning little more? Listen to my podcast How to Make Rainmaking a Part of Company Culture.

How well is cross-selling working at your company?