Up-selling and cross-selling are often confused with each other and knowing the difference will assist you hugely in your sales journey.
Both offer tremendous benefit to a business as they can generate greater profits by providing multiple products related to the main product line, or multiple versions of the same product, each with varying degrees of profitability.
For example, let’s say you run a print and copy shop and someone has just ordered a new stack of business cards, a brilliant up-sell would be to show the customer the better stock paper available. This could be using a 450-gram card like paper, as opposed to the basic 350-gram.
This could also be a silk finish, matt finish, or spot UV. All these increase your profit on the initial deal, which is an up-sell.
A great cross-sell would be adding some letter headed paper to the order, a pop-up banner, flyers or compliment slips. Simply by saying something like, ‘most of our recent customers have found that a new pop up banner works brilliantly with their new business cards, shall I add one of these to your order’.
This increases the order value quite massively, typically business cards run at around £40 for basic quality stock, and £80 for Spot UV and silk finish. Pop up banners traditionally are approx £100.
By up-selling and cross-selling you have turned a £40 order into a potential £180 order, that’s almost 5 times the value.
Make a list of all the services you offer which can be up-sold and cross-sold, and the next time you pitch your product be sure to introduce these two options.
At first, it may feel uncomfortable, maybe even cheeky, but this is just a muscle that’s not used to being flexed, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
Do you want to find out more about increasing your sales ability? Head over to my online sales training platform ‘Sales On Demand’ EXPLORE MORE HERE >>