Cross-selling and Up-selling! how effective they can be?

Sales representatives are always looking for new ways to sell more products to their customers. In fact, selling techniques such as, Cross-selling and Up-selling have been on the market for several years now. Cross-selling is a marketing term for the practice of suggesting related products or services to a customer to whatever products or services they are already buying. As an example, sales representatives usually tend to offer fitting chairs when selling a table to a customer. Up-selling on the other hand is the practice of suggesting to a customer or prospect a product of better quality and of higher price than that of interest.

These selling techniques have evolved thanks to the advancements in technology. In fact, with the introduction of IT tools that are able to analyze consumer behavior, consumers are presented with products and services that are more likely to fit their specific needs therefore increasing the sales representatives’ conversion rate. This phenomenon expanded with e-commerce and is now seeing an expansion with the development of m-commerce and the increase in the number of tablets.

However, sales representatives must use Cross-selling and Up-selling with caution when introducing a product/service other than the one interesting the customer as it could encourage indecisiveness. In fact, presenting unrelated products, showing out of stock products, cluttering the buyer with products at every step of the buying process could prevent the customer from going through with the sale. Moreover, if the sale corresponds to a large amount, it may be wise to close the first sale before suggesting to the buyer to engage in other purchases. This leads to the fact that, the more personalized Cross-selling and Up-selling are, the more likely they are to generate interest.

To summarize, Cross-selling and Up-selling are great sales tools to increase the average customer spending but they should be used wisely and only in specific circumstances.

The Valomnia Sales solution will offer the sales representatives, on its next release, the opportunity to use Cross-selling and Up-selling in order to increase their conversion rate.

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