Step 6 Leveraging your sales by upselling

This is the sixth step in our 8-step series on Lifecycle Marketing. In step five, we covered how you can follow up with your customers after a sale. 

You’ve generated leads and carefully nurtured them through the sales process. With your innovative follow-up campaign, you’re well on your way to creating long-term, ‘wowed’ customers. Why not build on it?

A happy customer is already familiar with you and your business, and over time you’ve gotten to know them as well. Surely there are some other products and services your company offers that they could use. Why not let your customers know about them?

In a nutshell, value is what upselling is all about. 

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not about trying to squeeze every last penny out of your customers. True, upselling can make your customers a more valuable asset to you, but it also provides you an opportunity to make yourself more valuable to them.

Upselling builds on the previous steps of Lifecycle Marketing. By generating quality leads, you can create a profile of your customers. Combined with the information you generated from your follow-up efforts and the insight you gained from analyzing their buying habits, you can develop a fairly detailed idea about what additional products you can offer to them. 

Listening to your customer’s feedback can provide you an excellent opportunity to upsell. For example, if you’re a running a graphics design firm, and your customer isn’t getting the exposure they’d wanted from the flyers you’ve designed, you can remind them that your company can also produce larger banners or other products that might better suit their needs. 

Even if you’ve done your homework, upselling carries some risks. Badly handled upselling can create the impression that you’re more concerned about your bottom line than you are with your customer’s satisfaction. It’s important to keep in mind that you’re trying to maximize the value your customer receives.

As with everything, there is a time and place to offer new products. Listen for the appropriate cues, and make sure the product you’re offering is one that will fit the customer’s needs and their budget. It’s important to remain positive throughout the sales process. You can quickly undo much of the goodwill you’ve generated during the previous steps of the Lifecycle Marketing process if you try to pressure a customer into purchasing a product they don’t want. On the other hand, offering just the right product at the right time with the idea of providing extra value can not only provide you with a satisfied customer, but can help sustain and grow your revenue.

We’re almost through the Lifecycle. In the next step of our series, we’ll discuss ways to get testimonials. After all, word of mouth is often the best marketing tool of all.