Cross-selling
Cross-selling: selling additional services or products to what the customer has already bought or wants to buy. Here you can think of the additional sale of a mouse or laptop bag when buying a laptop. Or insurance when buying a new phone or car. Cross-selling is different again from upselling. The upselling technique aims to convince the customer to purchase a more expensive and sophisticated product or service.
Benefits of cross-selling
There are several benefits to cross-selling. Properly deployed cross-selling techniques increase customer satisfaction, sales and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). The CLV becomes especially higher with cross-selling in the case of B2B sales because the customer purchases more. Cross-selling is not only good for your business, but also for the customer. If you reach the customer at the right time in the customer journey, you get the most out of it.
The best time is when the customer is not yet really familiar with your service or product. You approach the customer with the product or service and the additional options through cross-selling. When applied properly, this provides a positive experience for the customer and leads to the purchase of the recommended product. This increases sales, the number of items sold and customer satisfaction.
Disadvantages of cross-selling
As positive as cross-selling can be, it can also have a negative effect on your sales. Logically, this is mainly when cross-selling is not personalized enough. The recommended product or service does need to match the customer and the first product. Obviously, you are not going to recommend flip-flops when buying a ski suit. Not surprisingly, this will drive the customer away rather than make a purchase (again).
Depending on the type of customer, cross-selling is the best or bad option. To know in which customer cross-selling works, you can run a cross-selling campaigns. From these, you measure the data that shows which cross-sales are not at the expense of your profits. In addition, this will bring out which customers you can approach in a different way. Instead of cross-selling, you can then think about upselling.
