Tag: upselling crossselling CRM software

Lead Management Best Practices That Really Drive Conversions

The sales cycle has changed in the last decade or so. Today most businesses are online. The Covid-19 pandemic has compelled the rest to bring their businesses online. And a large part of the sales process is also done online.

The internet and mobile proliferation have made your customers much more informed today. They also research and acquire information about your company and products from various sources. Salespeople are no longer the gatekeeper of information. As per Gartner, when considering a purchase, B2B buyers spend 27 percent of their time researching. In the same study, 77 percent of them classify their purchases as “complex or difficult.”

Customer expectations have also changed. They want your Salespeople to solve their problems, not sell the products/services. They want to understand how your product or service will help them. And they want personalized solutions specific to their problems.

This means it is getting harder and harder for your salespeople to get “foot in the door” or speed up and close a deal. But, you can accelerate the ‘path to purchase’ by engaging with your leads and understanding their needs.

That’s why lead management and lead nurturing are critical to build trust and make a prospect buy from you.

Lead Management Strategy Best Practices

Here are some of the lead management best practices to help you convert more leads into customers:

1. Carefully define your buyer persona- Your product/service is the perfect solution for someone out there. The better you get to know your ideal buyer, the better you can find it.

Why?

If you know who the ideal buyer of your product/service is, you can plan and focus all your efforts on finding them. And the more qualified that lead is, the easier it is to convert them.

Steps to build a buyer persona-

  • Look at your past customer data.
  • Which leads convert more often?
  • Identify what they all have in common?
  • Use the information to create a buyer persona.
  • Reach out to them through your marketing channels.

2. Meticulously plan your nurturing programs- Not all leads will convert instantly. You need to nurture them so that when they are ready to buy, they buy from you. Build a lead scoring system to categorize leads based on their potential for conversions. Create nurturing programs for each lead category to effectively drive them through your sales funnel. Pass it on to your Sales Teams when the lead is ready.

3. Get leads from your leads- Lead generation is an expensive process. Now not all leads will convert into business. But they may know someone who is in need of your product/service. The same holds for leads that have converted. Yes, ask for referrals.

  • Create a referral program
  • Offer a reward for referrals
  • Communicate this to your customers and leads
  • Ask your Salespersons to check with their leads for referrals

4. Choose a good lead management software- The software will be the core of your lead management process. And it should do all the things you need to convert leads into customers.

Steps to choose the best lead management software-

  • Decide whether you need a lead management software, a CRM, or a Customer Lifecycle Management Platform
  • Identify your needs
  • Research and create a list of top 3 or 5 software that best meets your needs
  • Compare and then pick the one that best meets your needs
  • Don’t just go by pricing but also look for their customer support and response time

5. Drive collaboration across your business- Conversions are not just a Sales responsibility. All your teams must come together to help Sales convert leads into customers. The Sales Team must be armed with all information on leads to know them better.

  • Encourage sharing of information between various teams
  • Involve other teams while building the lead management processes and buyer persona
  • Integrate Marketing & Sales teams

You can significantly improve your lead conversions and sales by taking the best practices-driven approach towards lead management. But effective lead management must begin with a robust strategy. We have written an eBook to help small business owners like you build a powerful lead management strategy that drives conversions and ensures that nothing falls through the cracks. You can download it from the link below.

Download Lead Management eBook

What Is Lead Management in CRM?

Lead management using a CRM platform can make almost any sales team better at converting leads into deals. We get a lot of questions from small business owners about lead management in CRM. Many people ask, “What is sales lead management in CRM” or as some people ask “What is customer lead management”. In this article, we’ll answer these and many similar questions.

Lead Management Definition

A lead is a person or business who may become a customer or a client. Companies use a variety of methods to generate leads including advertising, direct marketing, networking, outbound calls, website inquiries, email marketing, and social media marketing, etc. The sales process begins when a sales executive qualifies and places the lead data into a company’s sales pipeline. He then contacts the lead through email/call/personal visit etc., to understand his requirement, informs the prospective customer about his product/service, and eventually persuades him to buy the product or service. The lead-to-customer conversion process may happen instantly or may take days, weeks, or even months, depending on various factors such as the lead’s decision-making process, buying need and urgency, etc.

The entire process from finding or generating a lead to pursuing and completing a purchase is defined as Lead Management.

What Is Sales Lead Management And Why It Matters?

The definition of lead management above pretty much explains what is lead management. The entire process from getting a business inquiry to converting that inquiry into a purchase is called sales lead management.

Good lead management will help you determine where your leads are coming from and which leads are converting. This will help you track sources with higher conversion potential so you can focus your efforts and spend your resources appropriately.

An effective Lead Management is important to you because-

  • A lot of effort and resources go into generating leads.
  • Wastage of leads means lost sales opportunities.
  • Lead management drives conversions.
  • Lead management helps you automate many of your tasks and save hours of repetitive work.
  • It drives efficiency in Sales Teams.

And more important lead management!

Steps for setting up successful lead management

Setting up a robust lead management process is the first step towards your success. Here’s how to do it-

Step 1: Identify Your Leads

  • Who are your potential clients?
  • Where to find them.
  • Build your buyer persona, including their needs and wants, and the ways they engage (online/offline) with your company.

Step 2: Build a Lead Scoring System

  • Assign points based on lead source, buying stage, industry, and revenue potential
  • Add points that have positive scores and subtract from negative ones
  • Categorize your leads based on their potential of conversions, for example, high, moderate, and low

Step 3: Create a Lead Nurturing Process

  • Plan lead nurturing process for each lead type identified in the above process
  • Your lead nurturing process must factor in buying stage of the lead, their information needs, and buying urgency

Step 4: Assign Leads to the Sales Team

  • Assign leads, that are ready for your Sales pitch, to your Sales Reps
  • Your Lead Management Software lets you automate this process
  • Provide your salesperson with all the information they need to know your lead, their needs, and buying stage

Step 5: Evaluate & Optimize

  • Periodically review your lead management process
  • Check conversion rates and identify bottlenecks
  • Tweak your lead generation process when required

Want To Build A Powerful Customer Lead Management Strategy That Converts Leads Better And Faster?

We have written an eBook to help small business owners like you manage your leads effectively and convert more of them into paying customers.

Download Lead Management eBook

How to use emails with Lifecycle Marketing to drive business growth?

Email can be an effective way for small and medium businesses to drive their sales. Emails offer higher conversion rates, are more cost-effective than other marketing tactics, and are easy to monitor and measure. And, with today’s marketing technology, it is also easy to use email more strategically and automate the entire process.

Lifecycle Marketing To Drive Business Growth

But if you think that just sending emails every week or an abandoned cart email is going to give you dividends then you are in for a huge disappointment. Why? Because we live in the world of personalized experiences and engagements. The one-size-fits-all strategy is dated. Your customers are ready to pay a premium for personalized experiences. Your customers are at different stages in their lifecycle. Each one of them has unique needs.

You need to understand those needs and your emails and its contents need to cater to those needs. Then and only then it will be effective and drive your ROI.

In short, you need to use Lifecycle Marketing with your email marketing campaigns.

What is Lifecycle Marketing? And how do I use emails with it?

Before understanding Lifecycle Marketing, let’s pause and first understand the customer lifecycle. The customer lifecycle describes the various stages your customer goes through when they are associated with your company. It starts with the first time they know about your company- like seeing your ad or hearing about your company from a friend or a colleague. The customer lifecycle continues till the customer has some relationship with your company or drops off and moves to your competitor.

Customer Lifecycle

The customer lifecycle is designed to help businesses address their customer’s specific needs as they progress from being a prospect to a buyer to a brand advocate. The customer lifecycle is not linear and it also includes leads that didn’t convert, customers who moved to other brands, and more.

Marketing based on a customer’s lifecycle stage and needs is called Lifecycle Marketing. And to use Lifecycle Marketing successfully with email marketing, you need to create email campaigns based on lifecycle stages of the customer.

To be used with Lifecycle Marketing, the email campaigns must be designed as per the industry, buyer personas, and your specific goals. It allows you to send a chain of emails to nurture your prospects and help them move to the next stage of the life cycle. Businesses use Lifecycle Marketing with email campaigns to educate prospects, influence the buying decision, connect with lost customers, retain existing ones and get repeat business.

What are the stages of the customer lifecycle journey?

Each stage is important in Lifecycle Marketing, and that’s why a basic understanding of each stage helps. Here a 4 key stages in a customer’s lifecycle-

  • Awareness – When your prospect first learns about your company and products/services
  • Evaluation – When the prospects evaluate your offerings and decide on whether to buy or not
  • Purchase – When they make a purchase and become your customer
  • Advocacy – When a satisfied customer is willing to refer your company to family, friends, and others

While there are 4 stages in a customer lifecycle, while designing your email marketing campaigns to go along with Lifecycle Marketing, you may break your customers into something simple like prospects, customers, and advocates. You might label those groups something different like new, existing, and lapsed. It doesn’t really matter so long as you divide them as per a strategy.

Customer Lifecycle Journey

Is using Lifecycle Marketing with email campaigns effective?

Absolutely as numbers tell us:

Retain Customer

Lifecycle email marketing offers various benefits to businesses including-

  • Drive sales by helping you in lead nurturing and conversions
  • Helps in upselling and cross-selling
  • Improves customer retentions and as the above graphic shows customer retention means more business
  • Gets your repeat customers
  • Improves brand loyalty
  • Enhances customer engagement and experiences

Strategy for using Lifecycle Marketing with email campaigns

Let’s consider the various lifecycle stages and discuss the email strategy for each:

1. Awareness

Most small businesses get it wrong by expecting a customer who just saw your ad or found your website on Google or any other search engine to buy immediately. Then they worry about low conversions from prospects.

It’s not that simple. Some new prospects can buy on their first visit. Others would like to know more about your company and its products and services. It usually takes multiple experiences with your brand before prospects are ready to buy.

At the awareness stage, your goal should not be to sell but to cater to the specific needs of the visitor and nurture them. You can use welcome emails to nurture first-time visitors who have subscribed to your company’s blog or opened an account. The welcome emails should contain information about your company and the problem your products/services solve.

Welcome emails are highly effective-

  • 76% of customers expect a welcome email immediately after subscribing to your list.
  • Customers who get a welcome email engage 33% more with the brand

Here’s a welcome email from Casper. Look how smartly they talk about their products without being salesy. It introduces you to the products and then provides a link for you to know more.

Casper Hello Dreamer

TAKEAWAY TIP

Whether you’re an online business or have a physical store, it is important to collect the email addresses of prospects who visit your store for the first time. Offer something free such as an eBook, product sample, and free tool, etc., in exchange for the email. Your lifecycle email marketing strategy depends on building a list of emails of your prospects and customers.

2. Evaluation

You’ve got the customer to the second stage of the lifecycle. This stage is important as your customer will evaluate your products/services, map its features with her needs and compare it to the competitors. It is a good strategy to help them make a decision. Share with them your product brochure and videos, case studies, customer testimonials, and comparison sheets, etc. For B2C businesses, discounts and free gifts also play a big role in influencing the customer’s decision and nudge her to buy your product/service.

Evaluation

TAKEAWAY TIP

Call To Actions (CTAs) are important in every email you send. Ensure that it is clear and visible in your email copy. Give it prominence by adding color and other design elements.

3. Purchase

Your prospects have bought from you. What next? Plenty to do. Now is the time to come good on your promise. Show your customers that you care for them and don’t want to just sell.

Here’s what you can do-

  • Immediately send a ‘ThankYou’ email with the invoice, delivery information, customer support details, and return policy.
  • Cross-sell relevant products in the next email.
  • Inform them about new features in the product.
  • Take feedback about the products.
  • Nudge them to buy again with a discount offer/free gift.
Purchase

Cart abandonments

Cart abandonment is a common situation in online business. In cart abandonment, the prospect adds a product to the cart and then leaves the website without completing the purchase. The cart abandonment rate is as high as 75%. This can happen for several reasons including the prospect reconsidering his buying decision, payment process not working, prospect not sure about the security of the website and so not wanting to risk sharing credit card details, and more.

An abandoned cart email is an effective way to get the lost sales. And they are very effective.

Cart Abandonment

To encourage customers to complete the purchase, you can automate abandonment emails. Send the emails two to three times, one after the cart abandonment happens and the other after some intervals. Your cart abandonment email should inquire the reason for cart abandonment, offer an alternative process if available, access to customer support, and some encouragement in the form of free shipping or discount.

Fab

TAKEAWAY TIP

Don’t leave your customers after their first purchase. Keep engaging with them so that you continue to occupy their mind space and they turn to you whenever they need your products/services.

4. Advocacy

When a customer has been with you for some time and is positively responding to your emails then it’s time to take her to the next stage of the life cycle. ‘Advocacy’ is the last stage of the life cycle but is the most important as customers in this stage have a multiplier effect on your sales. They are ready to refer you to their family, friends, and others in their personal network.

To make the most from this stage, you need an attractive referral program that incentivizes your customers to refer.

You can further incentivize loyalty by offering your best customers exclusive and early access to your new launches, premium content, loyalty bonuses, and more. People like VIP treatment. Make your loyal customers feel special.

Advocacy

TAKEAWAY TIP

Always enable social media sharing of the referral programs. Encourage your customers to share the referral link on their social media accounts. You can also create ’embed links’ for your customers to add in their email signatures, blogs or websites, etc.

Bring back lost customers

Every business loses customers for one reason or another. But, you should try and win them back. You can send an automated email reminding them about your association, the product/service they bought and end with an incentive.

Bring Back Lost Customers

Lifecycle Marketing with email campaigns: tips & tricks

  • Write good email copies. It should be clear, simple, and free from grammatical errors. Design it well.
  • Use both discounts and non-discount type incentives (free shipping, exclusive or early access, etc).
  • Create urgency with your emails and offers.
  • Always give priority to your customer’s needs. Lifecycle email marketing is about them. Not your business goals.

Lifecycle Marketing Needs Customer Lifecycle Management Software

To run successful Lifecycle Marketing campaigns while combining them with email marketing you would need CLM software. For high-converting successful Lifecycle Marketing emails, you need 2 things- one, information on your customer’s lifecycle and her needs, and second, a software to send automated emails. While an email automation software or a CRM is good at sending automated emails but won’t be able to provide you with information on the customer lifecycle stage and her needs.

And that’s why we’ve built ConvergeHub, a Customer Lifecycle Management CRM that does both. It allows you to manage your entire business, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Billing and provides you with detailed information on a customer’s lifecycle stage and her needs. You can use the customer data to then build your lifecycle email marketing strategy, create emails using the various available templates and automate your emails. All with one software!

You can check out various CRM features offered by ConvergeHub here.

We are also offering a 14-day free trial where you can set up ConvergeHub and test it for real-life scenarios. Get the free trial here.

How Customer Lifecycle Marketing Drives Profitability For Small Businesses?

The old marketing mix of four Ps: product, price, placement, and promotion has now become obsolete in itself.

The new marketing mix has two Es- engagement and experience- along with the four Ps mentioned above. And the two Es today have much more influence than the 4Ps. Why? Because customers are willing to pay more for outstanding experiences.

Take the example of Netflix and Amazon Prime. Netflix is more expensive than Amazon Prime. But, according to USAtoday, Netflix has over 200 million subscribers and Amazon Prime has more than 150 million subscribers worldwide. Netflix scores over Prime in experience and engagement and is today the preferred choice of viewers.

Your customer too has changed. She’s more informed, demanding and fickle. Marketing to the ‘new customer’ through the classic sales funnel is also obsolete. Because it stops at customer purchase and tells you little about customer needs to drive experience and engagement. What about her post-purchase journey? What about getting repeat business from her?

If you too, like many other small business owners and marketers are worried about how to impress and influence the ‘new customer’ then you need to add Customer Lifecycle Marketing to your core business strategy.

Customer Lifecycle Marketing may look like a strategy suited to enterprises but it is equally helpful to small businesses. Also, the barriers to adopting CLM (Customer Lifecycle Marketing) such as costs, infrastructure and expertise has greatly reduced over the years, due to availability of technologies, making it suitable for small businesses. Today any SMB can use CLM and greatly benefit from it.

What does Customer Lifecycle Marketing mean?

Let’s begin by understanding the customer lifecycle. The lifecycle starts the first time your customer engages with the brand and continues till she stays with you. The lifecycle can be broken down into 5 stages- Reach, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention and Loyalty.

Customer Lifecycle Marketing is to interact, engage and provide positive experiences to the customers at the various stages of her journey. Your customer will have different needs at different stages and your marketing and business needs to cater to those needs. This focus on lead engagement, conversion, retention and loyalty is Customer Lifecycle Marketing or Client Lifecycle Marketing.

The graphic below beautifully explains the marketing response at various stages of customer lifecycle.

Driving profitability with Customer Lifecycle Marketing

Customer retention is mission-critical for business growth. CLM improves loyalty through engagement and increases the odds that your customers will make repeat purchases.

Loyal customers not only buy more but are actually your brand ambassadors. They promote your brand to their friends, family and others in their network. In short, they are precious to your company. And the more loyal customers you have the better it is for your business.

Sharpening your CLM strategy

How do you effectively do lifecycle marketing? The best way to approach customer lifecycle marketing is to track your customer’s behavior and react in real-time. Focussing on a customer’s behaviour is simply the most effective way to drive customer experiences and drive conversions. To enable this, your business today has plenty of choice in marketing technologies. These can help you create an integrated marketing strategy to engage audiences through personalized messaging leveraging various channels-

  • Email Marketing- You can run drip marketing campaigns that can automatically send a series of emails on a schedule based on various customer triggers or behaviour. For example, if an existing customer hasn’t made a purchase from you or engaged with your brand for a long time then you can send an email with a discount offer to encourage him to place an order. Similarly, you can create email campaigns for various customer behavior such as those with abandoned carts, people who have just purchased and also for people who have contacted customer support to resolve any of their problems.
  • Digital Ads- Google or Facebook ads are not only helpful in introducing your brand to your target audience but also in lead conversion. You can engage with the leads who have visited your website and not placed an order through retargeting ads. Considering that 97% of shoppers who visit your website for the first time leave without buying anything, that’s a huge opportunity. Retargeting ads follow and remind your visitors of your products and services, based on their browsing history on your website, after they leave it without buying. It allows you to follow them on other websites and show them relevant ads. Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, all allow you to run retargeting campaigns.
  • Omnichannel Experience and Personalization- Majority of businesses are today online. Most of them have a website and many have mobile apps and other customer touchpoints. Today technologies allow you to offer your visitors an omnichannel and personalized experience. Omnichannel experience means providing your visitors with a seamless experience whether they are engaging with you on your website, app or visiting your brick and mortar store. Likewise, personalization has become advanced to allow your visitors to continue from where they left. You can today watch a movie or web series on ‘Netflix’ left midway from exactly where you left off the other day.
  • Mobile- Your customer’s smartphone or mobile phone is an important tool in the buying journey. She’s using her smartphone to research and shop for your products. You can directly engage with your customers on their mobile phone through text messages and push notifications if she has downloaded your app. Mobile communication creates urgency and triggers instant action such as clicking on the link to visit your website or app. You can use text and notifications for various communications like discounts and deals, product recommendations, cart abandonment reminders, and feedback etc.

Customer Lifecycle Marketing tactics

Your Customer Lifecycle Marketing tactics will vary depending on the lifecycle stage and customer behavior. It is recommended to use the CLM tactics to encourage your customers to move to the next stage. For example, every tactic targeted towards prospects should be to turn them into customers and the tactics targeted towards existing customers must encourage them to buy more.

Lifecycle Stage

Behaviour

Tactics

Channel

DiscoveryProspect signs up for a newsletter, downloads a content piece or registers on your websiteIntroduce her to your brand, tell her the problem you are solving and how to make a purchase. Also inform her about any discounts.Welcome email, SMS and push notifications
AcquisitionProspect places an order and is now your customerInform her about delivery timeline, order details, return policy and post-sales service. Also try upselling and cross selling other products.Email, SMS and push Notifications
AbandonmentProspect adds a product to her cart but leaves without buyingCheck if she’s facing problems placing an order. Follow to persuade her to complete the purchase.Retargeting ads, Emails, SMS and push notifications
Post PurchaseCustomers has not visited your store or made a purchase for a long timeAsk for feedback on the last purchase, check if she has engaged with customer support and inform her about latest discounts and dealsEmail
LoyaltyCustomer has been loyal to your brand for a long time and repeatedly made purchasesIntroduce her to your referral program and encourage her to refer her friends and family membersEmail, Social media

Here’s a quick checklist to drive your Customer Lifecycle Marketing program:

  • Measure customer loyalty by monitoring the percentage of customers that make repeat purchases from your company.
  • Encourage every prospect who visits your store or site to subscribe to your communications- email/mobile/direct mail etc. This will help you engage with them otherwise they are lost.
  • Run a weekly or a monthly newsletter and share it with all your contact lists. This will help your brand occupy the customer’s mindspace.
  • Focus on the messaging. Be helpful not salesy. Your message should be compatible with the channel and encourage visitors to visit your website or store.
  • Make your customers feel special. Loyalty programs, asking for testimonials and publishing them on their website, exclusive deals and premium content are some of the ways to show your appreciation.
  • Focus on customers contacting your customer support. Solve their problems at the earliest. Train your executives to identify signs of losing a customer or opportunities to upsell and cross sell.

Learn how to ramp up upselling and cross selling

Next steps…

In order to properly plan and execute your CLM strategies, you would need a Customer Lifecycle Management software that helps you monitor a customer’s behaviour at various stages of her lifecycle and intervene when required. A single platform instead of a stack of tools will help you run customer lifecycle marketing campaigns more effectively by centralizing your customer data, extracting intelligence from it and then driving personalized engagements.

ConvergeHub is a powerful Customer Lifecycle Management CRM that helps you run your entire lifecycle marketing from one platform. The platform allows you to manage your entire business including Sales, Marketing, Customer Support and Invoice from one place. This helps you track your customers’ behavior across her lifecycle and then reach out to him with the right messaging. ConvergeHub supports several digital channels to help you engage your customers in a variety of ways. To know more about ConvergeHub, click here.

Why a CLM Strategy Is More Important Than Ever For Small Businesses

CLM Strategy (Customer Lifecycle Management) isn’t just for enterprises. While it may have a different look than customer lifecycle at enterprises, it is still very important for small and medium businesses to map out their customer journey and build a plan to cater to their needs at various stages. This will help SMBs retain their customers, drive customer satisfaction and encourage brand advocacy.

What is CLM Strategy?

Creating a CLM strategy involves mapping out the customer journey, understanding customer needs at various stages on the journey and then associating them with individual metrics. Small businesses can then measure and track these metrics and get a 360-degree view of overall customer satisfaction.

A CLM strategy ensures that nothing slips through the cracks when it comes to keeping your customers happy. It ensures that your business understands customer needs.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Let’s start by understanding what customer journey means. A customer journey is a complete experience a customer has with your company. It starts with the first moment he interacts with your company and continues till he remains a customer.

The visual representation of this journey is called a customer journey map. It tells you the way a customer generally engages with your company across all touchpoints. Mapping the customer journey helps business leaders gain key insights into common customer needs and pain points to better optimize and personalize the customer experience.

Image Source: columbiaroadcom.medium.com

Importance of CLM Strategy

For small businesses, having a CLM strategy can be a key competitive differentiator in the present times when sales are dropping, sales pipelines are shrinking, and acquiring new customers is tough due to the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In today’s time, the need is to engage with your existing customers and get more business with them. Getting business from existing customers would be far easier and cost-effective than acquiring new customers. Also, the competition is increasing and if your company is not able to keep the customers happy then they may switch to your competitors.

That’s why small businesses must pay attention to the Customer Journey Map and Customer Lifecycle Management to fix or control customer issues before they become a problem and the customer drops out.

Mapping out customer lifecycles and tracking various stages is a great way to assess customer satisfaction and where relationships stand. It is also an excellent way to know how customers rate your company against the competition.

Getting Started With CLM Strategy

You can start your CLM program by first creating a Customer Journey Map. The Customer Journey Map is the first step towards understanding customer interactions and engagements. It is also helpful in ensuring all your employees and departments are on the same page when it comes to keeping the customers happy.

After drawing the Customer Journey Map, you can then associate each touchpoint or lifecycle moment with customer goals and needs, your business goals, your company’s response to customer needs, people responsible to meet the needs, and specific metrics as shown in the ‘Customer Journey Map’ graphic above. These metrics can then be monitored and measured regularly to assess the success of your customer lifecycle management strategy.

CLM Software Is Key

CLM is a complex and continuous process. And small businesses don’t have the luxury to build a specialized team for managing it. More so, in the present business environment, when companies are working with reduced staff and lower budgets.

A CLM software allows businesses like yours to manage entire business operations- Sales, Marketing, Billing, and Customer Support- from one platform. It will help you track the entire lifecycle journey of a customer, right from his first engagement as a lead/inquiry to becoming a customer and beyond. A customer lifecycle management software can help you execute your CLM strategy with minimum effort and costs.

ConvergeHub – A Complete Lifecycle Management Software For Small Businesses

ConvergeHub is a complete CLM software that allows small and medium businesses to execute their CLM programs with ease. It automates several repetitive tasks to help you run your programs with minimum labor and with low investments.

You can check out various features offered by ConvergeHub here.

We are also offering a 14-day free trial where you can set up ConvergeHub in your business and test it for real life scenarios. Get the free trial here.

Ramp UP Up-Selling and Cross-Selling With CRM Software

When your customer makes the first purchase from you, you don’t want her to stop there. You would like her to make more purchases, buy more valuable products. In short, you want to up-sell and cross-sell. In whatever business you’re in, cross-selling and up-selling work brilliantly to drive sales and profitability.

In this blog post, we’ll cover-

  1. What is cross-selling and why it’s important?
  2. What is up-selling and why it’s important?
  3. What is the difference between up-selling and cross-selling?
  4. When cross-selling and up-selling work and when they don’t?
  5. How to leverage CRM for cross-selling and up-selling?

And a bonus tip!

If you have not tried up-selling and cross-selling or haven’t had much success with it before then this article is for you. By putting some of the advice discussed in this article into practice, you can really drive more sales, higher revenues, and repeat business.

What cross-selling means…

Cross-selling means selling a different product or service to a customer to increase the value of the sale. When you’re asked if you would like to have fries or a beverage with your burger in a fast-food joint, it is cross-selling. The idea behind cross-selling is to encourage a customer to buy more or spend more than what he would have initially bought or spent.

It is always better to recommend related products or services to the customer while cross-selling so as to keep him focussed on the original sale. So, if a customer buys a bed from you then recommend him mattresses, bedsheets, and pillows, etc. Things which he would need along with the bed.

What up-selling means…

Up-selling means selling a higher-priced alternative product or service to a customer to increase the value of the sale. When you’re asked if you would like to buy a bigger size burger or a combo meal, it is up-selling in action.

Cross-selling and up-selling differences…

Many people get confused between up-selling and cross-selling. In sales and marketing parlance, the two terms are also interchangeably used by many professionals, but they have different meanings. Check the graphic below to understand the difference between cross-selling and up-selling-

what is upselling and cross selling

Image Source- sketchbubble.com

Cross-selling relates to selling more related products or services in addition to the product or service initially selected by the customer whereas up-selling relates to selling a higher value alternative to the product or service initially selected by the customer. In up-selling, you’re selling an expensive item whereas in cross-selling you’re selling more items to the customer. Both techniques help you in increasing the basket or cart value of the customer.

Now that we’ve understood what cross-selling and up-selling means and the difference between the two, let’s move on to the most important part- Why should you cross-sell and up-sell?

Benefits of cross-selling and up-selling

why upselling & crossselling is important

Image Source- adamenfroy.com

While there are many benefits as listed in the above graphic, the key benefits of up-selling and cross-selling includes-

  1. Drive sales and profits by selling more per customer- When you sell more products or services to customers you save on transaction costs, time and efforts. Considering how expensive it is to get a customer, it is better to sell him more than spend money finding another. As the odds of selling to an existing customer are 60-70% and the odds to a new customer are 5-20%, investing your resources in selling to existing customers is more beneficial.
  2. Drive customer lifetime value- If you’re wondering what customer lifetime value means then it is the total amount of money a customer would spend in your business during her lifetime. For example, the CLV of a car buyer can be as high as $100,000 if they buy 3-4 cars in their lifetime. The CLV of a coffee drinker at Starbucks might be even higher depending on the number of cups they purchase in a day. By up-selling and cross-selling, you are increasing the CLV of a customer every time they purchase from you.
  3. Eliminating the competition- Let’s go back to the bed and mattress example we discussed in the cross-selling section above. Now, the customer buys the bed, and you don’t recommend mattresses or pillows. He pays for the bed and the sale ends. The next day or a few weeks later, he feels the need to buy a mattress and pillows. What are the chances that he will come to your store? What if he sees an ad from your competitor and decides to go there? By cross-selling, you are killing the competition then and there without your competitor knowing about it.
  4. Build stronger customer relationships- Bad selling can irritate a customer, good selling impresses her. What is good selling? Good selling is consultative where your sales rep plays the role of advisor. He is not selling, he is solving a customer’s problem by recommending him the right product. Your rep is not only thinking of the immediate needs of the customer but also her future needs. Good selling is the foundation for stronger customer relationships. People want to buy from companies they can trust with solving their problems.

Ready to up-sell and cross-sell? But what next? How should you do it? Yes, this brings us to our execution part. How to up-sell and cross-sell? Let’s dive into it-

When cross-selling and up-selling work and when they don’t…

Here’s a table that explains when up-selling and cross-selling work and when it leads to failure-

upselling-crossselling-success-factors

Image Source- Amnesty.com

  1. When you upsell, ensure the product or service you recommend caters to the exact needs of your customer and then does more. For example, if a customer is looking for a mobile phone, upselling a Tablet phone doesn’t work.
  2. The prices of your recommended products are important. When cross-selling, recommend products that are much below the price of the main purchase. While up-selling, keep the price difference between the customer’s chosen product and your recommended product to a reasonable level. You can’t sell a Jaguar car to a customer looking for a Ford or Honda. But you can surely sell a higher version of Honda or Ford to him.

Up-selling and cross-selling using a CRM…

Upselling and cross-selling can happen in various ways. In a physical sales engagement, say in a retail store, your Sales rep can personally cross-sell and up-sell during the purchase cycle. But what if you are selling your services online or want to up-sell and cross-sell to customers who have purchased from you in the past. Here’s how you can use CRM software to automate your up-selling and cross-selling efforts-

  • Segment your audience- Customer segmentation based on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) will help you identify the customers with potential for up-selling and cross-selling. This will also help you identify the least profitable customers and help you better allocate your resources towards those customers who are more likely to respond to your up-selling or cross-selling recommendations. A good customer relationship management software will help you easily and quickly segment your customers.
  • Map products & services to each segment- Once you’ve defined your customer segments, review your products and services portfolio, identify and map relevant products to your segments. Your CRM must-have information on the past buying history of your customers. Now based on that information, you can create custom lists to run targeted campaigns to specific customer segments.
  • Identify the best time to up-sell and cross-sell- It is important to give correct advice but equally important is to do it at the right time. Up-selling or cross-selling to a customer who has called you to register a complaint about a faulty product or delay in service delivery will lead to customer dissatisfaction. So, identify the moments when you want to up-sell or cross-sell.
  • Personalize the experience- Yes, no mass messaging please! Sophisticated CRMs and other associated technologies today allow businesses like you to personalize the entire experience and make 1-to-1 selling. You can personalize the experience by tying up your up-selling and cross-selling messaging with the past purchase of the customer or with his last engagement with your brands such as using a free trial, visit the website, or a call to customer support. A CRM can help you personalize your message by making use of the past purchase data of the customer.
  • Incentivize sales teams & customer support- While upselling and cross-selling through emails and other digital modes is important but don’t miss out on live customer engagements. Your sales reps and customer support executives can spot up-sell and cross-sell opportunities while interacting with customers. All they would need is access to customer data available in the CRM. But remember that all customer support engagements are not sales opportunities. Keep these two rules in mind-
  1. Never up-sell or cross-sell to an angry customer. First, solve his problem.
  2. Only sell when there’s an opportunity. Don’t push.

And here comes the bonus tip!

Invest in a Customer Lifecycle Management Software. It will help you up-sell and cross-sell better and solve many of your business worries.

Yeah, you got it right, we’re up-selling here 🙂

ConvergeHub, our Customer Lifecycle Management Software is more than a CRM. It does what the best CRM software does and plenty more. Our software helps you manage your entire business including Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Billing, all from one single platform. With ConvergeHub-

  1. You can empower your sales teams to automate their tasks and convert leads better and faster.
  2. Your Marketing team can automate many of its tasks, harness customer data to run precision campaigns.
  3. Your Customer Support team will have all the customer data to personalize the engagement and also up-sell/cross-sell when there’s an opportunity.
  4. You can automate billing tasks like invoice generation, payment follow ups and reminders etc.
  5. You can get a complete view of your business operations to better manage it.

ConvergeHub is a piece of excellent up-selling advice that checks all the essentials- Needs, Features, Pricing, and Value.

And we offer a 14-day free trial. No credit card needed. Try it for free here and check yourself!

Check various features of ConvergeHub here.
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