The major success component in any cross-selling campaign is relevancy. The right offer at the right time to the right customer. Therefore, it’s important that you keep in mind that cross-selling doesn’t just have to be about upselling your own products; for instance, a cable provider might try to upsell a new customer with a DVR package deal. Cross-selling can also be cross-brand selling, in which two relevant and related enterprises form a mutually beneficial partnership where one brand provides new leads for another. This will dramatically increase the product/service offerings and improve the relevancy to the immediate customer need. The lead seller enhances the customer experience by becoming a “concierge” service, while the lead buyer improves their customer acquisition program while simultaneously controlling their budget.

Success Factor: Only form marketing partnerships with brands that can provide relevant offers/services to your customers.

When it comes to cross-selling relevancy of products and services is the key to success. It would not make sense for the nutritional supplement provider for build a cross-selling campaign with a cell phone provider. Yes, in theory those two businesses might target a similar demographic but the offer is not nearly relevant enough to do well. Especially when timing is factored in. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer; if you were trying to upgrade your cell phone plan would you want to be presented with an offer for vitamins? Sure, you might take vitamins but that offer has nothing to do with the situation you are trying to resolve with your phone company. A non-relevant cross-selling campaign seemingly comes out of nowhere and your target audience isn’t ready to hear what your offer. In fact it will likely be perceived as a distraction.

It does, however, make sense for a nutritional supplement provider to partner with a weight loss home meal delivery company. They both target the same target audience and one’s offer can be used to enhance the value of the other. For example, customers who sign up for 3 months of home meal delivery could be presented with an offer to order 3 months worth of nutritional supplements that would aid in their weight-loss plans. You never want your customers to feel like they are being “sold to” with your cross selling campaign. Relevancy helps ensure that your cross-selling partnerships actually help improve the customer experience!

Success Factor: Know your customer and pre-qualify callers for purchase trigger events.

In addition to being relevant, a successful cross-selling campaign needs to be timely. In order to present the right offers at the right time it’s helpful to craft your message based on a certain trigger event that would spark the need for your product or service. For instance, someone who just purchased their first home might need a new home security system. The first purchase triggered the need of the second, creating a perfect opportunity for your cross-selling partner to provide value when it’s needed.  Or for an existing home owner, the birth of a couple’s first born child may be the trigger for another set of needed services. Your enterprise could actually form multiple partnerships with different brands based on the most common trigger events your customers will experience. That way you ensure that each customer gets the most relevant offer (going back to the first point) for their unique situation AND they get it at the right time.

Without that trigger event, your cross-selling campaign might fall on deaf ears as your partner’s offer has little to do with their current life situation. For instance, if their child is already seven or eight years old and you present them with a offer more suitable to the parents of newborns you have missed your opportunity to connect.

Success Factor:  Engage the product experts – in the case of call transfer programs, transfer the calls to partner product experts.

Customer service teams and sales teams are responsible for very different things within an enterprise and attract very different kinds of people. If you’re asking your customer service call center agents to handle your cross-selling campaign no wonder it’s not profitable! Customer service agents are great at calming down an angry customer, solving service issues, putting a face (and voice) to your brand and so forth. They aren’t necessarily trained to sell; they are supposed to help. But in order to successfully cross-sell someone else’s product you can’t just be a good people person, you have to be a great salesperson. Could your customer service representatives successfully sell one of your enterprise’s products? If the answer is no, how can you expect them to sell on behalf of a company they don’t know?

Call transfer programs through contact centers allow you to transfer the call to the best trained, skilled, and knowledgeable person once a customer has demonstrated interest in your partner’s offer.  By handing off a qualified and interested lead to the right people, your enterprise can avoid training issues, hiring issues aligned with sales skills, and product depth issues.

Nearly 3/4 of all busi­nesses say they invest in cross-selling pro­grams of some kind, but as many as 70% of those programs achieve lower than expected results. Without the right components your cross-selling campaign could be next!

Cross-selling became a popular marketing and customer acquisition technique through customer service and sales contact centers back in the 1990s.  In the past ten years it has become a common practice on web sites based on an understanding of consumer insights learned from navigation patterns.  The travel industry, for example, is a huge proponent of cross-selling, both offline and online. For instance, have you ever made reservations at a hotel and been asked if you needed to rent a car or make dinner reservations? Perhaps you were offered a deal to a local tourist attraction simply for being a guest of that particular hotel. Think back to the last time you booked a flight online and the corresponding relevant offers you received in your confirmation email, your “time to check-in” email and even on your boarding pass itself! That is a prime example of cross-selling. You purchased item or service A and that company pulls together a short list of other items or services you might be interested in based on that first purchase. Read the rest of this entry »

SalesPortal’s CEO Saurabh Khetrapal was recently a featured author in the Electronic Retailer Magazine, the official publication of the Electronic Retailing Association. Here is an excerpt from his article, Marketers: Strike When the Iron is Hottest!

While direct marketers are typically well attuned to the potential of upselling and cross selling, the unique moment in time characterized above also lays the foundation for another kind of opportunity: cross-pitching. With cross-pitching, marketers are no longer limited to the ancillary products they have in their arsenal, but instead, they can leverage complementary products and services from other, symbiotic brands. So, for example, a marketer of diet products who is not in the fitness equipment business can give the consumer a chance to double down on her commitment to getting healthy by offering a discount gym membership or the chance to acquire a new-fangled piece of workout gear. This sort of proposition works after the original reason for buying has been committed to; in other words, once the consumer is fully on board. If a consumer is agreeable to the second offer, a warm transfer occurs to the second marketer’s telemarketing environment. All parties then benefit: The originator of the inbound lead is financially rewarded by the lead buyer; the lead buyer is able to leverage the consumer’s new commitment and zeal; and the buyer is afforded a new opportunity to embellish her original commitment.

Under this scenario, the direct marketer essentially has the consumer in a mental space akin to the auto dealer sales manager’s room, with one important distinction: The buyer is not trapped – he has willingly opted in to hear the cross-pitch. This explains in part why, in many instances, more than 20 percent of consumers offered such secondary pitches agree to hear the second offer.

Keys to Success

However, the most successful cross-pitches possess a set of distinct characteristics that direct marketers should be aware of in order to maximize the opportunities these rarified moments of customer compliance afford.  Optimally, such pitches should be:

• Relevant

• Complementary

• Enhances

• Anticipates Need 

• Contains An Incentive

Read Marketers: Strike When the Iron is Hottest! in full here!

Let’s face it, the reason why Membership Clubs sell as upsells in telemarketing calling scripts is because they prey on the consumer’s weakness of accepting that the deal is too good to be true.  “Wow, you mean I can try this unbelievable deal for a full 30 days,… I can use it all I want and if I cancel, I won’t have to pay a dime……I’m in!”

The truth of the matter is that of those poor souls that buy in, many space off the 30 days and end up being charged and thus disgruntled when they end up being charged.  Who do you think they are most disgruntled with?  Perhaps with the primary initial product marketer.

With these negative option clubs, it is the so-called, “breakage” model that makes them highly profitable.  Everybody wins except the consumer, right?  I don’t think so.  The net result is that disgruntled customers actually end up blaming the product marketer for selling it to them in the first place….which not only increases overall return rates of the primary product, but leaves a bad taste in the consumers mouths for ever wanting to do business with you or call on another TV product again.  Thus, the whole industry has begun to suffer.  Why else have call in response rates dropped so dramatically.  Surely the ease of the Internet has had a certain affect for loss of call in traffic, but 3^rd party upsells have also been regulated severely due to their nature on the Web.  So in actuality everybody loses except the “club” companies.

Enough consumers have complained about this that the FTC has become involved and acted on further  law, (Roosevelt), that has caused conversions to these “clubs” to be even more reduced.  Furthermore, the credit card companies have become involved and are enforcing their requirement to gain a re-read of all the credit card #’s a second time for 3^rd party offers.  These two facts have caused a dramatic overall reduction in conversion to these “clubs”.  Of course, none of this would have ever happened if the deals were truly of value from the consumer’s perspective.  There wouldn’t have been massive consumer complaints about such.

Here’s a thought, if clubs were so good, why not let people try the clubs for 30 days and only if they call to actually purchase it after the trial, do they keep on being able to use the club.  I won’t bet on that one ever flying.  No club is willing to offer such because very few would buy in!

Here’s another thought.  A better way is to upsell consumers on legitimate products is by cross-pitching them over to relevant, but non-competitive other products.  How do you find those relevant other products?  Go to Sales Portal.  A web based marketplace that brings product marketers together for the purposes of buying and or selling end of call transfers.  To see a demo on how their platform works, go to www.salesportal.com and click on their 3 min. video.  Best of all, it’s absolutely free to register your products on their web site.  Who knows, there might be some perfect matched pairs just waiting for you to join.  If not, be patient, others will find you and your product.

The current controversy over third party upsells – in particular, club memberships — contains a certain irony and some valuable lessons for direct marketers.  On the one hand, the industry has evolved from a single transaction-based model to one that relies increasingly on a relationship and longevity between marketer and consumer.  After all, successful continuity programs rely upon innovative products that deliver on their promises and foster continuing goodwill with the buying public that can last months, even years.

Yet somewhere along the line, some DR practitioners and their supply chain partners allowed greed and the allure of the quick buck to warp the industry.  They started pushing monthly programs with little to no value to the consumer where the rate of practical usage was, in some cases, less than one percent.  These programs rely on what is known as a breakage model, where a lack of consumer redemption – call it benefit – is what creates the profits that can be spread among marketer, telemarketer and/or the referring party, not to mention the originator of the program.  In the process, consumer confidence has turned to ire – ire that has now summoned the threat of increased government regulation.  It is time for the industry to course correct by embracing new business models that dovetail with consumer desires and interests; a premise that is essential to not only survive, but to thrive.

There’s nothing wrong with upselling complementary products or services to the public; they may in fact be welcome in many cases.  For example, many fitness programs sell vitamins, meal replacements and ancillary workout equipment.  The buyer is in a mindset to affect healthy change and often welcomes the opportunity these auxiliary products represent.  Problems arise, however, when buyers view the product being pitched as having little to no relevancy.  While one could argue that the proposition of a buyer’s club that offers discounts is widespread enough in its appeal to have broad relevancy, the consumer’s failure to take advantage of its benefits strongly suggests otherwise.

At the same time, the industry faces a conundrum: because so many direct marketing programs rely on negative cash flow in order to establish a relationship with the consumer, many have come to rely on third-party upsell programs to fortify their revenues and attain profitability.  So what is the industry to do?  The answer lies in seeking alternative sources of incremental revenue that do not rely on a breakage model that effectively cracks consumer confidence.  One such solution involves the concept of cross-pitching™. The key to successful cross-pitching™ is relevancy: the consumer is offered only complementary products or services after the original reason they have called is satisfied.

Take the fitness category referenced earlier.  While many seasoned marketers have already sourced all of their upsells, not every company has.  A strength-training device aimed at aging boomers could be ideally paired with a joint supplement manufacturer.  After the inbound caller’s originating needs are met, the operator would simply employ a soft sell approach by asking the consumer if they are interested in a complementary product.  While a typical cross-sell could require reading a script of 90 to 120 seconds, cross-pitching™ can be executed in a matter of mere seconds.  If the caller says yes, they would then be transferred to the call center of the supplement company.  The second marketer pays a bounty to the originator of the lead for the warm transfer, a fee that is typically far less than they would pay for any other media-generated lead.

When ideally applied, cross-pitching™ creates value for all of the parties involved: the consumer who gains the benefit of a welcome, relevant product; the lead generator, who can now realize incremental revenue for generating the lead; and the lead buyer, who is able to dovetail off the lead generator’s advertising and obtain a qualified prospect.  While other models will no doubt emerge, cross-pitching™ is but one example of an FTC-compliant alternative to suspect third-party upsells that the industry should wholly embrace.