How Can Retailers Drive More Sales with Cross-Selling?

Cross-selling refers to a way of increasing sales by advising an additional product to the customer. The goal of this sales approach is to offer more value to the customer while increasing revenue. Here are a few tested strategies to cross-sell and drive more sales.

Start With Your Loyal Customers

It is not easy to cross-sell to every customer who visits your store. There is a learning curve and a new approach to follow to cross-sell successfully. Start with your loyal customers. Get their feedback about your stores, what products they are interested in, and questions related to their interests. This feedback can be used when trying to cross-sell to your best customers.

Perform a Quarterly Business Review

The way to successful cross selling starts with understanding the client’s needs. This will help you position the new service or product you are offering. A quarterly business review (QBR) is an opportunity to look at your business’s existing conditions. Some of the essential things to focus on include:

• What were the issues and success in the last quarter
• How did the business perform in the previous quarter?
• What were the remedies suggested?
• How did your IT solutions perform?

Discussing business pain points in the quarterly business review allows you to plan for the upcoming quarter. These frequent business reviews lead to finding perfect opportunities to cross-sell.

Find the Pairings

To cross-sell successfully, you need to have a complementary and broad selection of products in your store. The salesperson cannot cross-sell every product in the store. Hence, you need to have clear product categories that would help suggest related products to the buyers.

For example, you can have categories like ties and blazers, handbags and shoes, cufflinks and watches, etc. When a buyer picks a product from one category, the salesperson will have a clear idea about suggesting a related product. The salesperson should be able to justify the additional offering and explain the logic.

Make the Offering Relevant

The cross-sell technique only works when the customer feels you are offering an added value to the purchases. The additional product suggestions should be related to the original product and interests of the customers.

You need to build a healthy rapport with the customer that helps increase their confidence in your suggestions. Some customers will share everything like how they plan to use the product. And the salesperson can use this information and opportunity to suggest relevant products.

Offer Discounts for Purchasing More

Many customers fall for discounts. Hence, offering a discount is an excellent way to encourage customers to buy more products than intended. When running an eCommerce store, there are different ways to encourage customers to buy more.

For example, if the total order value is $400 and free shipping is provided over $500, you may convince the customer to buy more products worth $100 to qualify for free shipping.

Cross-selling is the foundation for raising sales and revenue. The tips given in the post help the retailer chart a clear strategy and plan to cross-sell and boost revenue.