Identify and Close “Low Hanging Fruit” Sales Opportunities

Upselling or adding complementary products to the mix your customers currently purchase from you can result in thousands of dollars in incremental revenue from each customer in your base. What would happen to your top-line growth if just 25 percent of your customers added a single additional product to their current purchases?

Increasing your share of your customers’ annual spend also drives greater loyalty and satisfaction from your current customers. Your customers will appreciate the service your provide in bundling their products and adding additional convenience to their operations.

But how do you find those opportunities? We all know they exist—customers who buy product A from us, but not the corresponding product B. What are those products that go together like a hand in a glove? Who are the customers who aren’t buying them? Sales analytics tools, like Sales Management Plus, make it easy for you to hone in on the products and find out who’s not buying what they should.

For example, perhaps you have customers who buy printer ink and toner from you. They probably need paper, too. After all, why would a customer buy ink if they didn’t want to print anything? Unfortunately, not all complementary sales opportunities are as obvious. Perhaps you have customers buying equipment from you at low margins, but there’s great opportunities for higher margin replacement part sales. Maybe you have customers who always buy a commoditized part that doesn’t offer rebates and you have an opportunity to offer them a better deal with another vendor.

With SMP, simply plug in your criteria—show me everyone who is buying product A (ink) but not product B (paper). Run your query and SMP provides you with a list of customers you can immediately target. Even better, SMP provides a robust set of data so you can analyze how much they are currently buying and how much other product they should be buying. You can immediately calculate the amount of new sales opportunities available for your sales team. All without additional spending, prospecting or price-cutting.

Once you profile these upsell and cross-sell opportunities, SMP helps you manage your sales team and help them drive activities aimed at the low-hanging fruit in your customers base. Armed with great data and a sophisticated management system like SMP, your employees will have the confidence to suggest supplemental products in every interaction. These behaviors can include things like:

• Asking the right set of questions for each customer. For example, why is the customer making the purchase and what problems are they trying to solve?
• Tracking interactions so that each sales rep stays focused on your customers’ needs.
• Maintaining corporate knowledge about buying habits, needs and product information to better anticipate upsell opportunities.
• Deliver one-to-one marketing information so that your customers feel as if he or she is the most important customer in your base.
• Develop a list of complementary products and services that meet your customers’ needs and buying patterns.
• Track complementary sales as part of your sales forecast so that no opportunities go overlooked.
• Email regular reminders to customers who need to purchase supplies on a regular basis, like ink, replacement parts, Teflon tape, caulk, wiring, etc.
• Provide and track incentives for any employee who creates a cross-sell opportunity.

Remember to commit time for training your staff on the importance of upselling and cross-selling. Upselling is extremely profitable, but can be hard work. SMP just makes it look easy.