Rachel Serpa — February 7, 2017 Follow @getbaseWe all know that the ultimate goal of sales is getting customers to sign on the dotted line. “Always be closing,” as the saying goes. But perhaps even more important than the close itself is the actual deal value and the promise of revenue growth over time. Consider the following statistics:
– An existing customer has a 60-70% chance of buying again, but the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5-20%.
– Attracting new customers costs 6-7x more than keeping an existing customer.
– 90% of customer value for B2B business is obtained after the initial sale.
Clearly, the ability to upsell your customers both during and after the initial sale can have a major impact on your sales performance. Here are 3 tips to help your team stop leaving money on the table and start driving upsells.
Sync Sales & Support
Have you ever called to upsell a customer only to be greeted by an angry voice on the other end of the line? Your contact currently has an open ticket with support and has been trying to get her issue resolved for a week. How dare you try to upsell her when the solution she’s already paying for doesn’t even work! Ouch.
Unfortunately, these are the types of situations that occur when sales and support teams have limited visibility into customer conversations – it’s nearly impossible to provide award-winning experiences. Worst case scenario, it can even result in customer churn. On the flip side, extended periods of calm waters are key indicators for upsell opportunities.
Ensuring that important information like open and closed tickets is made visible to your reps in your CRM enhances team agility as well as helps reps enter conversations with greater context. Spot an open ticket? Now probably isn’t the time for an upsell. Did an issue just get resolved in an efficient and timely manner? Grow your relationship by giving the customer a quick call just to check in. Smooth sailing? Time to pitch that new add-on!
Stay on Top of Stack Changes
Companies use an average of 7 different business management tools, from CRMs, to marketing automation platforms to help desk software. As the importance of data-driven decision making grows, so does the ability to overcome data silos across the organization and connect the dots between each of these systems.
As such, paying attention to your customers’ technology stacks during the initial sale, as well as staying on top of new additions over time, can introduce upsell opportunities that add value through integration. Not to mention, eliminations from customers’ technology stacks mean the potential for you to step in and fill the void with your own offering.
Sales acceleration software like Datanyze is designed to identify the solutions that companies are already using and alert reps when a change occurs. This type of technology, combined with the ability to create custom fields and track this information in an organized way in your CRM, provides reps with the ammo they need to fuel upsell opportunities.
Spot Prime Points of Influence
You may have heard of the study published in HBR a few years back wherein it was discovered that companies responding to new leads within an hour were 7x more likely to qualify the lead than those that reached out just an hour later, and 60x more likely than those that waited 24+ hours. Clearly, when it comes to sales, timing is everything.
Expecting your reps to have perfect timing is unreasonable, but you can provide them with tools to help them identify prime points of influence and take impactful actions that lead to high-value deals or upsells. One way to do this is with CRM notifications that can be triggered when a prospect or customer takes an action that you have defined as important and warranting immediate follow-up, such as opening an email or replying with positive or negative sentiment.
Another way is to team up with your marketing department. Most marketing teams have customer programs geared at retaining clients and driving upsells; open and unqualified leads are often placed in campaigns dedicated to nurture. Implementing an integration between your company’s CRM system and marketing automation platform allows reps to see when prospects and customers engage with these campaigns. For example, if a prospect or customer clicks multiple times on an email showcasing a particular product that was not covered in the sales cycle, this is the perfect opportunity for a rep to reach out and add on.
Maximize Deal Value
Sales will always be about closing, but placing an emphasis on getting more dollars out of your deals and increasing customer value over time will have a serious impact on your short and long-term performance. Follow these three tips to stop leaving money on the table, and for more advice on how to maximize deal value, download our free white paper: Understanding the New Metrics of Sales.
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