Sales Logic

Meridith:

Hey, this is Meridith Elliot Powell. And welcome to another episode of sales logic. It is 9:00 AM Eastern Saturday morning, and it is time to talk sales hanging out here with my co-host Mark Hunter, how you doing mark?

Mark:

I’m doing good. You’re already up in selling I’m up in cell. So Hey, let’s do the show. Shall we?

Meridith:

All right. Let’s hit the, uh, the video in

Speaker 3:

Prospect with integrity. We will get customers who have integrity. Integrity is the foundation from which everything is built

Speaker 4:

Value, But at the end of the day, sales is a relationship business. It is a people business. It is emotional business.

Speaker 5:

This

Speaker 6:

Is sales logic.

Meridith:

All right, we are back alive. Um, anyway, I am a bit of a, uh, I am a bit of a crazy person this morning, trying to deal with all this nuts. So weather trying to, uh, deal with flight delays and get to a speaking engagement. What are you gone on this morning, mark?

Mark:

Well, I’ve, uh, I’ve had one coaching call already and at eight 30, I’ve got a dash off to another thing, but for you, let’s see you live in one city, but it’s nine o’clock in the morning and you’re already in another city sitting in the Delta crown. So you get the award for getting up early, cuz I did trade an email with you. I did trade an email with you at like four 30 or five 30 this morning. So I

Meridith:

Knew you, I gotta do what we gotta do, right. That’s right. All right. So let me just take it to the top and let’s talk a little bit about how the show works every week we come to you talking sales, one of our, um, our favorite subjects. We cover a, uh, question from you, the audience it’s the best part of the show. We’ve got a hot topic, a uh, a key takeaway and we are gonna recommend, uh, a book. So mark, what is on tap for today? I love the fact that, um, oh gosh, I’m not gonna pronounce your name, uh, correctly, so I’m not even gonna try it, but you are right let’s party. So mark let’s party,

Mark:

Hey, let’s go. Uh, the topic today is the power of the upsell. When, what it is, why it matters and how to do it. The question let’s jump into the question right now. It comes from Hank in Biloxi, Mississippi. It’s been two years since our sales team has been out face to face with customers and we have more than dropped the ball on doing our cross sales and up sales. The last two years has been about keeping our above water. Now we need to get back with it. What’s the best way to get my sales team conditioned to upsell and cross sell again because that’s where the money’s made the money’s in the upsell

Meridith:

Big time. Um, well, let’s talk about it this way. I mean, mark, I don’t know how you feel about this, but I just hate the word upsell. I hate the word upsell. I hate the word cross sell. The first thing you need to do is let’s take it off, um, the table because if you wanna condition your team to do the upsell, you have to help them realize that the upsell is as or more beneficial to the customer than it is, uh, for your organization. You have to really believe that, you know, here’s the importance of it is number one, help the team understand the why, because once you have sold one product to a customer, they trust you. They believe in you. They believe you are going to have their back. So if you are not uncovering more needs, you’re risking breaking trust with the customer

Mark:

Spot on with that because the cheapest customer will ever get is the one who we already have. Now I don’t mean cheap in terms of cheap. What I mean is that we’ve gone through the effort to acquire them as a customer. So it only makes sense to service them. And the other piece is this. We don’t close a deal. We open a relationship and stop and think about that. I’m gonna encourage everybody to really stop and think about that because really, if I open a relationship, I wanna be able to continue to provide them and help them and help them do better at whatever it is that they need to do better in what better way than to help provide them with additional services or products that I can provide for them.

Meridith:

Yeah. I’d also say that, you know, Hank, you need to start by really, um, feeling out whether the team feels trained. Do they feel comfortable? Do they have the, um, talking points and things that they need? I mean, you know, let’s assume that mark is my customer and it’s time to upsell mark. You can’t just assume that I’m skilled to do that. You need to talk about opening lines. If I haven’t been face to face, uh, with mark in two years and I haven’t had an upsell convers agent with him in two years, how am I gonna open that? You know, how, what are you gonna do to tell me to make that phone call? What does that look like? Brainstorm what types of questions I should be asking mark to uncover those needs. And then how would I cl and take action in essence, what I’m talking about is if you wanna condition that team to ups sell it is time to do the unthinkable. It is time to role play.

Mark:

And when you role play, one of the easiest ways to do it is you and I both have a friend who has a consulting business and he has a grid. And I can’t remember the name that he calls it, but he, he lists across the top. All of the services that his consulting agency provides and down the left hand side, they list all the clients and they begin to do a check, check, check, check, check for all of the respective services. And the idea being is that if they have a client and they look at it and they go, wait a minute, wait a minute. I see this client. We provide them these services and this client’s in a similar type of business. We should be providing them the same services. It becomes a great, easy reference tool for you to begin to determine where are the best opportunities that I can help you with. Now we’ve lost Meredith here for just a moment, but she’s gonna be back with us. So let me just go ahead and continue this conversation because what this is about, it’s about helping identify what are the best opportunities for us to be able to help you better, Mary you’re back welcome

Meridith:

I’m back. I’m not exactly sure what happened other than the fact that I would say that, uh, the Delta lounge has pretty weak, uh, wifi. I think that’s, I think that’s what’s going on here. So, um, so I’m not really sure what you said in the last minute, but thanks for, oh,

Mark:

It was really good. It was really good. Don’t worry. I didn’t, I didn’t talk about you in negative terms at all. So, Hey, let, let’s talk about this. What should the manage your do? In other words, one of the things that I always contend is it’s easy for people to say, oh, we need to upsell, but if you don’t inspect what you expect, why should you ever expect it? So from a management standpoint, I think you gotta make it part like you were saying, role play. You’ve gotta train on it. You’ve gotta make the conversation. Part of weekly sales meetings

Meridith:

AB absolutely change the goals too, to, um, to make some of the goals, a new don’t don’t just have a sales goal, have part of the sales goal, be new member acquisition. I mean, new client acquisition and part of the sales goal, be client depth and expansion. So make sure that sales people are being measured on, um, on expanding existing relationships. Another thing that you need to do is really help them choose the right prospect list to go back through their customers and present to you 20 or 30, maybe even 50, that they’re gonna focus on in order to do that, that way, you’re able to see what the are thinking. Are they choosing the best customers? Is it the right alignment? So really getting that piece figured out. Yeah.

Mark:

Thi this is where it really comes down to, you need to take your existing customers and make sure you bucketize them. I use that term a lot bucketize them, but, but list them by industry type ICP, ideal customer profile, cuz then that’s gonna help you. You you’re gonna identify very quickly, just like our friend does in, in, in his consulting agency, he can quickly identify, wow, this client should have this additional service. This client should have this additional. And it becomes very, very easy to say, oh, now this makes sense where I should be going. Cuz here’s the whole thing sales people will always do. What is the easiest activity out there? You as a sales manager have to make it easy for them to identify. And like we were saying earlier, what are the questions that they need to be asking to get that conversation going to be understand, to make it easy for them to add on and increase the opportunity for us to help you as a client?

Meridith:

Yeah, absolutely. I also think that you have to help sales people or this is, you know, if you’re like mark and I, and you’re more of an individual operator what’s in it for you. I mean, mark said it beautifully when he said that you keep this customer you’ll ever get is the one you already have. They already know like, and trust you, you have done the heavy lifting you have done the hardest part. The hardest part is identifying the right target market. The hardest part is getting in the door. The hardest part is that first conversation and that first sale, why would you walk away at this point? If I bought something from you and I was happy with you, I am ready to buy other things. So whether it’s you as the individual or helping your sales team, understand that, tell them this is gonna be the fastest way to reach your goal.

Mark:

See this really picks up on what you always talk about. The follow up the sale is made the follow up. Well, the sale is made the follow up. You follow up to get the initial sale and then you keep following up and you continue to provide them with additional services. You never let go of a client. This is where one thing that I ID test is when sales teams have this very defined delineation, okay, you, you acquire the customer, but as soon as you acquire ’em, they go someplace else and they go over to customer service or they go customer support, whatever that’s fine. But then customer service and customer support has to be trained,

Meridith:

Right?

Mark:

How do they upsell? Cause otherwise it just, it just stops. All they do is they just, they just service. They just the customer, but they never service and support the customer by bringing them additional services. So this is very key. Look at how your organization structure look at how it, how it works and you got to be able to build on it accordingly. So anyway, we got a lot of great feedback coming in, but we should probably kind of shift over to the topic cuz the topic really builds on what Hank was top about the power of the upsell, what it is, why it matters and how to do it. So I got a question for you when you were in the banking industry, how much did you look at what individual customers were worth to a business in other words? Oh yeah. You know, what, how did that look to you as a banker?

Meridith:

You know? Well, first of all, I think it’s really interesting. I mean I was a banker way back in the early two thousands and 1990s. And at that time, the cross sale ratio of a customer was somewhere around two to three products. The average customer had anywhere from two to three products, they had need of up to 14 to 15 products. So our pretend for cross sale was huge and it’s still that ratio today. So, um, so we looked quite a bit at the opportunity, but the biggest problem we had was that our goals never matched client death. Um, and so I think that’s where we would get derailed. I love, um, I love Adam’s uh, quote here. Upselling is really providing your clients with options. In addition to insightful education that you provide them in making a decision to buy from you. What I love about what Adams said here is we’re remember it is not your customer’s responsibility to know what products and services you offer, that they have a full-time job. It’s your job to understand the needs of your customers and match your products and services to what they have going on.

Mark:

That is so spot on. And that starts with the conversation. You’ve got to be able to have of the conversation with them that allows them because in banking, for instance, re reason I brought that up cuz cuz I knew you, I knew you were gonna say that, you know, the traditional customer doesn’t realize all the products and services that that a bank can provide. They, they just don’t. And unless the banker’s willing to have that conversation, not to throw things across the desk at them, but to ask them about their business, ask them about their needs, ask them about their goals. Then you begin to understand what are the products and the services I can line up to it. That same premise applies in every single business for every single salesperson out there.

Meridith:

Absolutely.

Mark:

We are walking at what we are leaving so much business on the table and the way to look at it, we are leaving so much customer potential on the table because you know, the, the customer isn’t gonna achieve their level of success unless you help them.

Meridith:

Absolutely. You know, the other thing, mark, in addition, everything that you’re talking about is we are burning customer relationships by not upselling, just because you brought up banking. I wanna tell you a great story. When I, uh, went into the banking industry, the financial institution, I went to work for, required me to move my accounts to their bank. Makes sense, right? I mean, I was gonna be representing that financial institution. They wanted me to have my money there. And when I moved my deposit, uh, relationship over there, the young woman who was helping me open my accounts, asked me if I’d ever thought about opening an equity line. And I didn’t even know what an equity line was, a line of credit on my house. But she had seen from my application that my house was paid off and that I had quite a bit of a equity in it now, um, I told her, I didn’t know what that was.

Meridith:

She explained it to me. And I was so excited because I had been wanting to remodel my bathroom and I’d been wanting to add on, um, a nice screened porch to the back of my home. But I thought I had to save up the money to do that. The point is I was so at the bank that I had been with, I had been with them for more than 15 years because nobody had ever talked to me about how, I didn’t know what my goals were. Didn’t know what I wanted to do and never had brought up a product or service. So you need to understand when you don’t upsell, when you don’t cross sell. The worst thing that can happen to you is not that a customer doesn’t buy from you. The worst thing that can happen to you is they find out about a product or service they need from somebody else other than you. So I think cross-selling gets a misnomer because it’s not about closing the deal. It’s about exactly what Adam said. Are you providing options? Do they know they could do something and that you are on top of their goals and their opportunities.

Mark:

You are allowing that customer to get to the next level for you when you suddenly realize what this other pro was and you could do it, you could achieve, you were thankful. And then you, like you said, you were upset that your previous bank had not had that conversation with you. So stop and think about this for a moment. This is why I say we do not close a deal. We open a relationship. There are so many opportunities for us out there to be able to cuz we’ve already created trust. Customer’s not gonna buy from you unless there’s that level of trust. So you’ve got that level of trust. You can have that conversation and what’s good is you can actually probe down with them to an even deeper level to come up with even more ways for you to help them this again, you know, again goes back to I, I don’t like sales organizations that have as their objective, it’s strictly new local acquisition, you know, new customers, new, new, new, new, new, new, what are you doing to maximize the opportunities in Europe ability to help existing logos, existing customers?

Meridith:

Uh, a absolutely. Um, and, and you know, again, I think if the biggest thing that mark and I want you to take from this podcast today is that upselling is really about helping customers. Once you close that first sale, the sale isn’t over. It’s just beginning. I mean, as mark said, you’re opening the relationship. That was such a great quote, mark.

Mark:

Yeah, he, he, he here’s something. The only good sale is one that leads to the next sale. Think about that for a moment. The only good sale is one that leads to the next sale you want to, when you close this opportunity and I hate that term, closing, closing the deal you want to already be in a position to where you’re beginning to identify additional items, additional services. And you’re doing that because you’ve already got the conversation going. You’ve got them thinking. Now think about this from a business standpoint, your B2B you’re selling into a business. Well, they’ve already got you set up as a vendor. They’ve got you in their list. They’ve got everything already established. It is much easier for them to procure additional products and services from you than it is to. Now, I, now I gotta go through and set up a whole nother vendor.

Mark:

I gotta set up, see you. You’re doing them an incredible service when they can take that existing work that they’ve already done with you and just build on it. So stop and think about this for a moment. Not only is it a law, lower cost of additional sales for you because you’ve got this relationship, but same thing for the customer because now they’re really working more. I, I was, I was with a CRO a couple months ago and we were looking at their top 100 comp their top 100 customers and their, our top 100 customers were some of the fortune 500 companies and fortune 100 companies. And yet when we were looking at total revenue, that company was receiving, the CROs company was receiving, it was Trump change. And we looked at it and we said, we run the risk of being pushed out because looking at this company, there are 30, 40, 50, 60 billion in sales every year.

Mark:

And we’re getting 0.1, one, one, 1% of their business in this industry, unless we increase our footprint, unless we increase our footprint, we will not have a footprint at all. So when we talk about ups selling or cost selling, it’s about becoming of relevant size to your, to your customers, especially in B2B, that they now pay attention to you. They want to work with you. They want to meet with you and you have much deeper and better conversations. So when we talk about what we’re talking, we’re talking about helping you take your business to the next level. And what I just described in terms of fortune 100 companies applies right down to the solopreneur.

Meridith:

Absolutely, absolutely. I love what Jim said. I had it up there for a few moments was that, um, he really encourages team to help first then sell because Jim’s so right. I mean, if you help, it just leads to the sell. That’s what we do. And Adam has a great point here. Cross selling can showcase you not only as a subject matter expert to build that creditability, but also demonstrates you as being a strategic partner to your client’s success. I mean, so, so important. I mean,

Mark:

So spot on, because now you’ve got a bigger seat at the table. You can have a deeper conversation with them. You know, if, if, if you’re providing them additional services additional, you know, what does this get you? This gets you more meetings. This gets you more conversations. You become the dispo, the, the in disposable person. What you wanna do is you wanna be a part of their ecosystem that really they can’t live without you.

Meridith:

That’s absolutely.

Mark:

That’s when you really got to that point that you really want to be at. So, Hey, we should jump over to the book you, you picked out. I I’ve been, you’ve been tasked with the book list the last month, but you’ve picked

Meridith:

Out another, I have been

Mark:

Great book.

Meridith:

Yeah. Have you, um, have you had a chance to read it yet?

Mark:

I have not had a chance. I know Liz and I’ve not had a chance and that’s embarrassing. I hope Liz is not listening to this. I hope she’s not watching

Meridith:

This. She’s gonna slap me. I need to go on and, uh, and write Liz, um, a review, but it’s Liz Wiseman, uh, impact players. And we’ll have a link in the show notes so you can pick it up, but it is a great book. I didn’t carry it with me cuz I only have it in hard back. And I’m on the road for about the next three days. And didn’t wanna be lugging a, a hard back, uh, with me, but Liz wise then impact players. It’s really how to, um, not only attract the best and the brightest, but get those people to be fully engaged in the age of the great resignation. It is full of innovative power techniques to really build not only a strong team, but you can really make it applicable, uh, to say it’s a great read with a lot of tools and a lot of strategies and a lot of things you haven’t heard before.

Mark:

Okay. Liz, forgive me. I haven’t read the book. Okay. Okay. I will make sure I get it done quickly and, and I didn’t wanna make this sound like mayor’s the only one who reads I read, I read. I read. Okay. Hey, let, let’s, uh, jump into the lightning round lightning round top 10 ways. Top 10 upselling strategies.

Meridith:

Ready? All right. My favorite upselling strategy is to make a list of your top 10 customers and make a list of your top 10 products. Then do a match. How many products and services your top 10 customers have? I I’m gonna bet you it’s no more than two or three that opens the door to tell you where you need to start the upselling process.

Mark:

I don’t like it. That was what I was gonna share. I wanted to go first. Okay. Anyway. Hey, here’s the next piece. You never end a sale. You never close a sale without already having on the table. At least in your head. What the next strategy, what the next product or service is gonna be because you’ve asked enough questions to get the conversation started.

Meridith:

Yeah. Number one, sell the urgent need. Go ahead and close the deal of the thing that is most important to the customer. Don’t try to upsell while still selling the first product or service because people can’t hear you until you take care of their urgent needs. So might look something like this, mark. We’re gonna go ahead and get that taken care of. I’ve already gotten the operations team on it. Um, as soon as we close that, I’m gonna circle back and we can talk about what’s next for you.

Mark:

And that’s all because what you’re doing is you’re keeping it simple, make it easy for the customer to buy from you once and they’ll come back and buy from you again. Now that doesn’t count, I, that doesn’t count as much here, here. Here’s here’s, here’s the one I wanna share. You always have to be asking yourself, what is the next logical extension from what it is that you sold them? You know, the easiest stuff to additionally sell them is what automatically bolts on go back to, McDonald’s go back to burger king. What do they do? Or burger king are, are they even around more anyway, but you go in and you, you get a burger. What naturally goes with it? Fries and a drink. I know you wouldn’t know that because you don’t do fast food, but it’s the logical extension,

Meridith:

Right? Um, have a set of really great open ended questions, brainstorm them a team so that you’re always prepared that really open the conversation beyond what you’re immediately, um, you know, immediately selling for. So that even in the initial conversation, you’re still looking for upsell opportunities,

Mark:

Go back into your customer database. And who are those customers that you haven’t talked to for six months or a year or two years? And you gotta pick up the phone and reengage with them.

Meridith:

Yeah. Role play, role, play role play. The only way you’re gonna get really good across selling is to role play, uh, the role play, what it looks like to get comfortable with it.

Mark:

If you’re a manager, change the goal structure, change the quota where you put placed reward systems for the upselling and the cross selling the additional items that you sell with the customer.

Meridith:

Focus on it every week. Um, highlight an example.

Mark:

Well, we lost mayor again there. Let me share with you another item. If you turn customers over to customer support or customer service, you have to train them and make it extremely easy for them to be able to cross sell or upsell. Or if they’re not going to get that way, then you need to restructure your organization to the salesperson. Still has some of the responsibility within that customer relationship to be able to keep that going. One more piece that you wanna do from a manager standpoint, it is very easy for managers to always be encouraging. Hey, go get new prospect prospect prospect. Now key piece of prospecting is also getting additional business from existing customers. Hey mayor, I’ve been holding down the Fort.

Meridith:

You have been, you’ve had to, I’ve gotten all four times. That’s

Mark:

Okay.

Meridith:

Let’s close it

Mark:

Down. Why don’t you share one more and then I’ll go ahead and close it down. Okay.

Meridith:

Yeah, absolutely. So my last, uh, thought on, on, on upselling is just do it. Just, just go out the door, try it in your very next conversation. Don’t wait. Just do it because you realize if you don’t upsell, you are gonna break trust with your car customers.

Mark:

Hey, I’m gonna say thank you for listening to sales logic this week. If you like what you hear, subscribe, rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app. If something we’ve said has earned you a single dollar, Hey, please consider telling a friend about our show. It’s how we grow to help you grow. I’m Mark Hunter

Meridith:

And I’m Meredith Elliott Powell.

Mark:

Remember when you sell with confidence and integrity,

Meridith:

Uncertainty suddenly becomes your competitive advantage

Mark:

And the sale becomes logical.

Meridith:

All right, we’ll see you here next week where I will be back in my home office, not popping off every, uh, two minutes for another episode of a sales logic, 9:00 AM Eastern. Please. If you have a question or a topic you want us to cover, reach out at sales logic, podcast.com great this week, and we’ll see you next week.