Cien’s Growth Essentials Series:  The Secret to Cross-Selling Success

By Rob Kall, CEO & Co-Founder, Cien.ai

“Yes, I suspect only the UK team really knows how to sell the product…”

– PE-Backed B2B Company CRO

What is Cross-Selling?

Companies are always trying to find ways to grow faster. And often the goal is to just get more customers. But many times selling more to your existing customer base is a faster and easier way to accelerate growth. This type of selling can be broken down into 3 main categories:

1. Renewal – Selling the same product again, for a similar amount for a new period (e.g., an annual subscription).

2. Upselling – Selling more of the same product than you previously had sold (e.g., selling 10 more A widgets to a customer who already bought 5).

3. Cross-selling – Selling a different product to an existing customer (e.g. selling B widgets to a customer who already has bought A widgets).

Doing More Cross-Selling Sounds Obvious – So Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?

There are two main reasons why cross-selling may not be working well in a company:

1.      The reps are not attempting to cross-sell

2.      The reps are attempting but failing to cross-sell

The former is often due to scenarios where multiple sales teams are handling different customer segments (perhaps from a recent acquisition) where each team is not comfortable selling products they “don’t know well”. Another reason can be that a product is not applicable to a segment of the customer base. Some of that can be fixed, and some – it’s important to understand what the potential maximum penetration of a product is.

The second issue is also common. Reps are pushing a particular product deal in but that causes fewer deals to be won or the product to be removed before the deal is won. This can be due to low perceived value, non-competitiveness of that product, or ineffective pricing and packaging.

As one PE back CRO with a global sales force told us after we found that cross-selling was non-existent for a particular product family: “Yes, I suspect only the UK team really knows how to sell that product…”         

What Does Success Look Like?

Transformation plans to solve GTM Problems always revolve around understanding what’s been going on. There are multiple challenges when analyzing cross-selling. E.g. even a company with just a few products may have hundreds of SKUs (i.e. small variations of the same product like color or size). The solution is to analyze “product families”, and we recommend consolidating to less than 10. Second, it is important to understand when a product was included in a deal, and what the outcome was. It can also be helpful to understand how including a deal changes the propensity of a deal to be won, how much time it takes to sell the product vs. when it is not included, and other factors.

When you can answer those questions, the solution is usually a set of fairly simple sales process changes, additional training, new pricing, etc. Then the key is to monitor rep behaviors and outcomes to ensure those changes had the desired results.

Done right, a cross-selling transformation can be a massive growth accelerator.

About The Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series

This article is part of our Growth Essentials Series, inspired by our work with B2B business leaders, growth consultants, and PE operating partners. These articles focus on the non-technical aspects of improving GTM performance. If you want to dig in on the technical details of how to measure the concepts we use here, please refer to our “Practical RevOps Analytics Series”.