How Can Being Aggressive Be Positive?

We didn’t want to start right out of the gate by scaring you away with the word aggressive, so we thought it prudent to explain ourselves. When we say be aggressive with your sales force mentality and strategy, we mean to be bold.

In order for your sales force to be bold, they must be emboldened by your leadership, your mission, and the product or services you provide. Some of the best salespeople in the world will tell you that they aren’t good at sales; they just believe in what they are selling.

When your sales force believes in your company and believes in what it provides and what it means to the community and the world at large, they will strive to reach as many new consumers as possible.

Therefore, you want your sales force to be aggressive in their ambition, motivation, and belief. In doing so, they will not only provide you with increased revenues, but they will better take care of your customers.

How Does Upselling Take Care of Our Customers?

Giving someone what they want is not always the same thing as giving them what they need. This wisdom applies in many different contexts, especially sales. A customer may think they only need a certain product, but a skilled salesman that takes the time to understand their needs can discover that they actually need far more.

Too often, companies shy away from upselling because they believe it will leave the customer believing they are being sold something they don’t need when more often than not, the opposite is true.

For example, say your company offers wireless services and devices. A customer may come in who is not very familiar with the technology and tells you they just want to get an old-school flip phone. After some conversation and relationship building, your sales force discovers the customer is prone to falling. What is in the best interest of the customer?

Sure, buying the flip phone may be more affordable and within the comfort zone of the customer, but a new smartphone coupled with a smartwatch with fall detection and automatic emergency calling would better serve the customer's needs.

At the end of the day, this amounts to an upsell, but upselling was not the goal. The goal was to ensure the customer got the best product for their needs and not just their wants. This is a bold sales mentality at its finest.

Instead of feeling ripped off, your customer is going to be thankful that your company looked beyond their wants, identified their needs, and met those needs. The customer wins, and the company wins!

Upselling vs. Cross-Selling

In the example above, we actually mentioned two different sales practices — upselling and cross-selling. The two are closely related cousins, but they are not one and the same.

Upselling focuses on providing customers with a more premium or advanced option of the product or service they are purchasing, and cross-selling completes that product or service with complimentary accessories or services.

In the above example, we identified that the customer had a need beyond what they wanted. The smartphone was the better choice due to its proneness to falls. Purchasing the smartphone was an upsell.

However, our salesperson in this example also coupled that smartphone with a smartwatch capable of automatically detecting falls and notifying emergency services. The smartwatch sale was a cross-sell.

Simple, right? We think so too!

The Five Long-Term Benefits of Upselling

Now that we’ve taken a look at why upselling is an important element of customer care, let’s look at five of the long-term benefits your company will experience from upselling.

Customer Satisfaction

When customers know that your company and its sales force puts forth the extra effort to ensure they not only get what they want but what they need, their satisfaction will be through the roof.

Our customer in the wireless store is going to be very thankful if they need help and can’t get to their phone to call for assistance, but help comes anyway because of the automated fall detection and emergency services notification that happens.

When customers are satisfied, they tend to tell their friends and families about their experience. They may even go as far as leaving you a positive review on Google or Yelp. High customer satisfaction is directly linked to customer retention and brand loyalty.

As you know, it is far more expensive to seek out prospective customers and convert them into paying customers than it is to retain existing business. If you aren’t retaining customers and just as much is going out the back door as is coming in the front door, you are essentially stuck in the mud spinning proverbial wheels.

Customer Retention

As such, customer retention is a long-term benefit of upselling. In addition to being highly satisfied, the more engrossed a customer becomes in your company’s architecture, the least likely they are to leave.

Sometimes this is due to outright laziness or reluctance, but far more often, it is the result of satisfaction. Many wise salespersons have said that business is less about selling a tangible product and more about selling relationships.

When customers develop trust in your company, they also develop loyalty. This loyalty results in your retaining their business for many years to come.

Increased Revenue

The P word is not a dirty word — profits. It’s no secret to anyone (whether they are in business or not) that businesses exist to provide a product or service and to make a profit. You know that, your competitors know that, and your customers know that.

Consumers want a good deal and value, but they also understand you need to make a profit. Without profits, you can’t innovate. You can’t expand. You can’t hire additional employees that essentially contribute to economic growth for entire communities and nations.

Therefore, increased revenues and profits are a significant long-term benefit of upselling. You work hard for each customer and each sale. With upselling, you capitalize on every customer contact and maximize its potential.

Innovation

As we just mentioned, increased revenues and profits from upselling give way to greater space to innovate. Without innovation, your company cannot survive. What’s more, without innovation, our society cannot continue its forward momentum.

Far too often, we hear people complain about the rapidness of technological advancement. Have you ever heard a person say, “As soon as I buy a computer, it’s outdated and obsolete the next day”?

Sure you have. To be honest, we’ve probably said it ourselves. While that is an enormously hyperbolic statement to make, it is true that technology, and even the construct of modern society, is advancing at an unprecedented rate. And that’s not a bad thing.

Innovation is what led to the invention of the steam engine, the printing press, electricity, the light bulb, airplanes, computers, the internet, microwaves, smartphones, and so on. Innovation tends to make life easier, healthier, and more robust.

Upselling is one very big ticket that gets you a front-row seat on the innovation bullet train!

Success

What we have essentially been talking about all along is long-term growth and success. All of the long-term benefits of upselling culminate into sustainable success.

You didn’t start and build your business to be a short-term hustle. You wanted it to grow from a one-man garage operation to a multi-state, multinational empire. That requires sustainable success and growth.

This cannot be achieved by being satisfied with the bare minimum, and that means you and your sales force must be aggressively seeking what is above and beyond. Upselling means you long for more than average, for more than mediocre.

Being successful in the long term means your employees will have job security, their families will have health insurance and food on the table, and your customers will possess products and services from a company they can depend on for years to come.

In other words, your success reaches out and touches millions of lives in ways you never dreamed of.

Wrapping It All Up

As you can see, upselling is a vital element of your business's success and signals to your consumers that taking care of them is far more important than just giving them what they want. At the end of the day, they may decide to refuse or ignore your sales force's recommendations, but they will still respect and honor the fact that you had their best interest in mind.

Upselling has been a sales method utilized by businesses and entrepreneurs for generations and even millennia. Make it, and cross-selling, a staple of your sales force methodology, and you will soon reap many rewards for it.

How We Can Help

AwesomeCX specializes in providing customer support and services to companies and their customers. Our business model takes a customer-focused approach to provide high-end exceptional customer experiences through customer service.

When customers call in with an issue or concern, it is a wonderful chance for your company to shine and even make additional sales. Even though they may be calls for service, they are also moments for opportunity.

As your trusted customer experience outsourcing partner, we will make it our mission to provide your customers with the same level of care and attention as your own team. Therefore, we will view ourselves as an extension of your company.

Connect with us and discover how we can help you take your business beyond the garage, city, state, or even nation you operate in today and help you build the empire you’ve always dreamed of!

Sources:

What's the difference between upselling & cross-selling? [2018] | BigCommerce

What Is Upselling? Tips and Examples | Indeed.com

The Value of Keeping the Right Customers | Harvard Business Review