Discover the secrets to boosting your sales with B2B cross-selling and upselling strategies in this article by Business Consultant, Dan Cakora. Retaining existing customers is key, and Vendavo solutions can revolutionize your approach. Explore actionable steps and unleash the power of profitability and customer satisfaction.
You’ve likely heard it costs more to land a new customer than it does to retain the customers you already have. Behind that idea sits truly eye-opening stats that validate the impact of cross-sell and upsell techniques:
- Depending on your industry, acquiring a new customer is 5X – 25X more expensive than retaining an existing one.
- You have a 14X higher probability of selling to happy existing customers than a new customer.
While I’m not suggesting you eliminate new prospect outreach entirely, the facts can’t be ignored. Current customers are your best source of new business. It’s therefore in your best interest to strategically cross-sell and upsell into existing accounts. There are three great methods you can implement but before we dive into each, consider how they differ:
To successfully cross sell into existing accounts, you’ll first want to find and group customers who purchase similarly. Then, compute the average spend profile by product family (PF) for each customer/peer group.
In the below example, you can see that the company has three groups that purchase differently across product families. With known averages for each, you can compare the purchasing behavior of an individual customer in a group to the rest of the peer group average spend profile and compute differences. Your available opportunities lie within that delta.
In product family 1, the individual customer spends 10% whereas the average customer spends 20%. This is a clear unit up sell opportunity. In product family 2, the individual isn’t buying any of this type from you whereas their peers are spending 50%. This is a cross sell opportunity, also called whitespace. In product family 3, the individual customer is buying much more than the average customer in that group. There is no opportunity here but that’s okay. You certainly don’t want to ask them to buy less.
When products of the same family are linked by SKUs and the keys that tie them together, you can see how they fall on the good, better, best continuum, like this simple illustration shows.
For effective B2B upsell scenarios, you’ll want to offer an upgrade to a best or better product to a customer who is purchasing a good product, for example. To ensure this happens consistently, you can include prompts for your sales team at the time of quote, order entry, or point of sale.
4 Strategies for Increasing B2B Cross-sell and Upsell
How can you get started on your B2B cross-sell and upsell strategies? Take these four actions.
1. Deep Customer Intelligence: The Foundation of Strategic Growth
Understanding your B2B customers requires more than basic transaction data. Modern cross-selling success depends on building comprehensive customer profiles that combine purchase history, industry trends, and competitive intelligence.
By analyzing both internal data (sales history, service interactions, contract terms) and external factors (market position, growth trajectory, industry challenges), you can identify precise moments when additional solutions would benefit your customers most. This intelligence becomes your compass for targeting the right opportunities at the right time.
2. Precision Targeting: Defining Actionable Growth Missions
Broad-stroke approaches rarely succeed in B2B environments. Instead, segment your opportunities into specific, achievable missions based on customer characteristics and potential value.
For example, target manufacturing clients who could benefit from complementary maintenance services or focus on customers using basic software versions who are ready to upgrade to premium features. This targeted approach allows your teams to develop specialized expertise and messaging for each distinct opportunity.
3. Pragmatic Execution: Starting with Available Resources
Many B2B organizations fall into the trap of waiting for perfect conditions before launching cross-sell initiatives. The reality is that most companies already have enough data and insights to begin. Start with your existing CRM data, sales team knowledge, and customer feedback. These resources can help you identify immediate opportunities while you develop more sophisticated data capabilities. The key is to begin generating insights and revenue that can fund more advanced initiatives.
4. Scalable Success: Building Your Cross-sell Engine
Transform initial successes into a repeatable model by documenting what works and standardizing your approach. This might include creating playbooks for different customer segments, establishing clear handoff procedures between teams, and developing metrics to track success. As you scale, focus on building capabilities that support long-term growth, such as automated opportunity identification and standardized proposal processes.
Ready to improve your upsell and cross-sell strategies? Take your sales game to the next level with Vendavo Sales Optimizer. Discover how this powerful solution can streamline your analysis, calculations, and generate valuable opportunities for your sales team.
How Vendavo Solutions Help
While the basics of implementing cross sell and up sell opportunities are simple enough, performing the analysis and calculations is tough for most companies to do once, let alone on an ongoing basis and in response to changing market conditions. The primary reason is they are trying to do it in Excel.!
B2B companies that try to calculate good-fit cross-sell and upsell opportunities in Excel will quickly find their vlookups, index match match, xlookups or whatever they are doing to pull data together from multiple sources returns no results. Often, there are more rows than Excel can handle and, even if it can, you won’t see the white space (described above) in results. Excel isn’t custom-built for this purpose, but pricing software will do the heavy lifting.
Vendavo Sales Optimizer will perform the groupings needed for B2B cross-sell strategies, do the calculations, and generate the applicable opportunity for every customer for your sales team to follow up on. They can be alerted to add it to a quote or an order, for example, or they have the option to dismiss it.
For up sell opportunities, Vendavo Pricepoint operationalizes the rules that define good, better, best and delivers value based pricing based on various attributes and other factors.