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| SALES HINTS... |
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It is becoming increasingly difficult to attract new customers. Many companies have responded to this by improving their cross-selling efforts, seeking to boost revenues and broaden relationships with their customers. In theory, it makes perfect sense. In practice, many of these initiatives fail to create sustainable increases in expanding share of the customer wallet. "Cross-selling has a bad name because it is usually done improperly or indelicately. Here are the three major traps to avoid and improve cross-selling initiatives… Trap 1: Salespeople avoid the risk to their pocket in cross-selling. Many salespeople see only risk in cross-selling. They've already made the sale, and there's no upside to them in bringing in another person. Even if there is a referral fee or split commission, most salespeople view cross-selling as simply not worth the risk of losing a great relationship. Solution: Sales managers have got to get their sales teams to stop thinking of cross-selling from the perspective of wanting to sell something, and start seeing it from the perspective of creating value for the buyer. When you create genuine value, relationships strengthen. Trap 2: Salespeople flog products. This often happens when companies increase their product portfolio, sometimes as a result of mergers or acquisitions. Managers tell their salespeople to sell the larger range of products. As a result salespeople pick up the phone and call their existing customers and start rattling off the list of new products, relying on existing relationship to do the deal. Solution: This approach ignores all the consultative selling and questioning, or value creation that the salesperson used to establish the relationship in the first place. Trap 3: The flawed business logic. The value chain starts with the customer and not the sales organisation! If you forget this basic premise, you got it wrong to start with. Too many sales managers pit what is good for the selling organisation against what is good for the buyer. As a result they end up trying to force customers to buy something they don’t necessarily believe they need. Solution: To fix this, salespeople should function as the eyes and ears of the company's value chain. They should work with buyers to identify problems, and then show them how these can addressed by their company. Effective cross-selling begins with a change in mindset. It starts with a switch from thinking about all the products you have and want to sell, to thinking of customers as having an array of needs that should be communicated within the sales organisation. When you build a cross-selling plan around customer problems you can solve, you're coming at cross-selling from a customer perspective, and you will be more successful.
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