What is Upselling?

What is Upselling?

Upselling is a selling technique where the seller tries to sell or pitch a higher-value product that is similar to the product which the customer intends to purchase at the moment. This increases the value of the transactions and helps improve the average revenue per transaction. 

This is usually done by proposing a higher version of the product or a similar product with more features compared to the current product under consideration for purchase. The seller tries to drive the customer to understand the value of the higher-priced products so that they purchase them. 



An example of Upselling

Let us take the same Laptop purchase example discussed in our last post on Cross-selling.

Assume that you went to purchase a Laptop from an electronics store. The seller asked about your need for buying the laptop. You explained to him that you need it for your work. The seller tries to understand your context deeper by trying to delve deeper. He inquires about the type of work you would do. He gets to know that you are a Software Engineer and would require a higher-end version of the laptop in the future for better performance. 

Then the seller tries to propose to you to buy an enhanced version of the laptop with more features and capabilities compared to the one which you had initially planned. He tries to explain to you the features of the higher-priced laptop and the value which you may get buying it. You find the discussion convincing enough to purchase the higher-value laptop and finally purchase it. 

This way the seller was able to improve his revenue of the transaction and you as a customer were also able to derive a better deal in terms of value.


How does Upselling help?

  • Upselling helps to increase the revenue of the organization
  • Upselling helps the customer to get more value out of his purchase transaction. Customers usually agree to purchase the higher version of the product keeping their context and future in mind. Many customers buy high-value products by foreseeing the future Return on Investment (RoI).
  • Upselling also helps the seller build a better relationship with their customers.
  • Upselling is usually easier compared to another selling technique of Cross-selling. This is because customers are more likely to purchase a similar yet high-value and high-priced product compared to buying an add-on product which happens in the case of cross-selling. 


 How to generate B2B Leads organically?

If you are into a business involving B2B clients, then you have landed at the right post. In this article, we will explore how you can generate B2B leads for your business via organic approaches.

Here is what you can do to get organic B2B leads…

    


 

1. Linkedin Outreach

Join Linkedin groups in your similar domain or groups having people with similar profiles as your ideal customer profile. Next, send them a connection request to add to your network. After a few days of the connection, you may send them a cold message for a short discovery call. You may be required to warm up your connection a bit for a few days with your LinkedIn posts to avoid getting ignored when you send a cold message.


2. Business Marketplace/Forums

If you sell a known B2B product that is not too complex to understand and doesn’t require an elevator pitch, then you may try this. Look out for joining various online marketplaces and forums dealing with B2B businesses. You will find B2B buyers and sellers in these marketplaces who are genuinely looking for both buy and sell business opportunities.


3. Join professional networking platforms

If you are a startup or building any B2B products for startups, then you may join professional networking platforms such as angel.co or other startup networking platforms. Try to network with various startup founders and executives to create a connection and get business opportunities.


4. In-person Business conferences

You may look out for various offline/In-person business conferences being organized in your Industry domain by various media houses, industry bodies, trade unions, government, etc. These conferences are attended by the leaders and executives of various companies with the sole motive of networking with fellow business leaders for business opportunities.


5. Cold Outreach like Cold Emails, Cold Calling

You may reach out to various businesses via Cold emails and Cold calls. If you are dealing with small and medium businesses, then you may get their contacts from various online business directories as well as their websites. If you are dealing with a large organization, then you may have to work a bit more to get the contact details of their stakeholders. 


6. Inbound Marketing/Content Marketing

Create the content on the topics around your business. This will attract readers who might be interested in your business. You may create content on Blogs, Social Media, Youtube, write Industry research papers, Whitepapers, Case studies, ebooks, etc. Ensure to write content that is useful to the readers having your ideal customer persona. 

Also, an important element of content marketing is to build distribution. If you do not plan out distribution well, then you may create high-quality content, but there won’t be anybody to read those contents immediately. This creates a longer feedback loop. So, whenever you create content, try to distribute it at more and more channels in order to reach more readers instantly.


7. Short Video Marketing 

In recent years, usage of short video apps such as Tiktok, Reels, Youtube shorts has skyrocketed making them yet another largest marketing channel. Short video platforms were initially apt for B2C products, however, in the recent past, it is becoming equally good for B2B business opportunities. You can make short video clips about your products to attract more B2B leads.

Also, read- Instagram Reels Ideas for Small Businesses


8. Tender Marketplaces/Portals/Blogs

There are some marketplaces that regularly publish tenders of government as well as public companies. This brings you a good opportunity to directly go ahead and bid on existing business opportunities without going through the hassles of business development efforts. 

Also read one of our case studies on How to get Organic leads using Social Media


I hope you liked reading this post. If you are interested in trying out CRM software for your business to track your leads, do check out ToolsonCloud CRM. It comes with a free plan for startups.



Which sales metrics should I track for my business?

If you run a business or are a Sales Leader in your organization, then you might have come across this question often.

Which Sales metrics should you track may vary depending on the line of business you operate in. Based on your industry vertical, certain sales metrics would be extremely important for you to track while the same metrics might not make any sense for someone in another industry.

Nevertheless, there are certain Sales Metrics that are Industry agnostic and can help you measure sales performance irrespective of the line of business.

Here are the top 5 sales metrics you can track in your business


Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

1. Conversion Rate

This refers to the number of leads that got converted to successful deal wins. Monitoring this metric will help you to channelize your effort on the leads which have a high probability of conversion so that you can improve your revenue faster.


2. Average Sales Cycle duration

This refers to the average time it takes for your sales team to move a prospect from the opportunity creation stage to final deal closure. Monitoring this metric and aiming it to keep lower helps you to close more sales in a lesser amount of time. If you want, you can go more granular by monitoring the duration of each sales stage so that you get a flag whenever a deal is stuck in a certain stage for longer than usual.


3. Average Deal Value

This measures the average revenue you are bringing with every deal win. Over time, you should try to increase the average deal value and aim to grow the high-value accounts. This can be a powerful level you can use to pull up your revenue with the same amount of effort.


4. Topline & Bottomline Growth

These metrics help you visualize your revenue (Topline) and margin (Bottomline) growth over a period of time say monthly, quarterly or yearly. When you see the growth in numbers, it gives a clear and quantified validation of your growth.


5. Average Customer Lifetime value

This is an often ignored metric and people tend to associate it only with Saas businesses, but this is extremely important for any kind of business. Whenever you notice your average customer lifetime value is dropping then it’s a clear flag that there is something wrong with your offering which is leading to customer churn. This helps you focus on nurturing & retention efforts.


By the way,

If you liked reading this post, feel free to check out our tool at - ToolsonCloud CRM, where you can create wonderful custom sales reports and visualize your sales performance in real-time.

Moreover, it’s free.


How to drive CRM adoption in Sales teams?

You invested a lot of time as well as money trying to implement a CRM solution across your organization but it ended up as a failed project.

How does it feel? It doesn’t sound cool. Isn’t it?

But this is often the case with many organizations who are unable to derive value from their CRM implementation even after making huge investment in this regard. The biggest reason for CRM project failure is low CRM adoption among the end users of the system. If sales leaders can lead their team to adopt CRM faster, they can quickly start reaping tangible benefits out of their CRM implementation. 


Photo by Mikael Blomkvist from Pexels


Here is what you can do to drive CRM adoption within your sales team:

By the way if you are still looking for a CRM software for your sales team, do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.


1. Keep team involved from the beginning

When you are implementing a CRM solution in your organization, try to involve the end users from the beginning. Listen to their challenges, ask for feedback, implement their feedback. This way you make them a stakeholder in the implementation. When you respect others’ input, they tend to associate themselves as a part of the project. They tend to own it end to end. This way you stand lesser chances of failure since the end users are going to drive it in future on their own.


2. Choose an easy to use CRM

One reason why users tend to avoid using a CRM is due to the complexity of using it. The objective of implementing a CRM is to make the lives of the sales team simpler and easier rather than making it more complex by asking them to use a hard to use CRM. Always ensure to take trial of the CRM software and test its usability and user experience before making a final purchase.


3. Provide adequate Training

If the end users are not familiar with the terminologies, various stages and workflows in a CRM, they would hardly use it to maximum potential. Always provide adequate training to your end users on the various functions of a CRM and the purpose of using it. Making people familiar with the basic controls and letting them know the purpose of using it makes it much easier for driving faster adoption.


4. Provide appropriate user guide

When you are providing training, the users may tend to forget it overtime unless and until they are actually using it. Conducting regular CRM training sessions may not be feasible for numerous reasons. Assigning a peer to help a new employee to learn the tool may not bring out consistent knowledge transfer. This problem can be solved if you have a well documented User guide. It can serve the purpose of looking up for some on-demand information or clarification which the end user may have. You may request your CRM vendor to provide the same or may also refer to the knowledge base section of the respective product page such as we have it for ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.


5. Establish easy to follow CRM processes

Often the sales team tends to think of a CRM to be a database rather than a modern tool to manage your sales process. This ideology may prevent them from updating their sales activities in real time and they will end up updating the tool once in a while just to keep the data in place. This way the CRM system will end up reflecting stale and unusable data for the sales leaders to analyze and get insights as to where they can step in for certain tangible help. To solve this, you may need to establish well defined guidelines and processes which can serve as a single stop blueprint for your team to follow.


6. Create CRM Advocates

Creating CRM advocates or ambassadors from the end user of the tool is always helpful. Modern marketing revolves a lot around influencer marketing. You are much more likely to religiously try a new product if you were told about its benefit by an influencer having a similar background as yours. Your sales team will be able to appreciate the value of crm implementation only when they start using it. They will religiously use it for sometime only when you have CRM ambassadors from the team guiding them on the best practices and effective utilization of the tools.


7. Reward early practitioners

Getting the sales team to adopt a new tool can be tough. But it can be made easier if you start rewarding those early adopters who shall be setting up a benchmark and advocating best practices to peers. Reward the users who religiously update the tool and keep the status up to date. Reward the users whose CRM data is clean and is of high quality to derive fruitful insights out of it.


I hope you will find these tips useful for you. 

If you are looking for a CRM solution for your team, feel free to try out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. It’s Free!


What is a Sales process and why do I need one?

This is one of the commonly asked questions from sales professionals as well as entrepreneurs who are getting into sales for their startup.

Let us explore more about the Sales process and the need for it in detail


What is a Sales Process?

Sales process refers to the well-defined steps for sales comprising various sales activities which helps in closing the deal thus leading to final conversion. The process of every organization may differ depending upon the industry in which they operate and the complexity of the business. However, there are certain common steps that are part of the sales process which are used as a reference. These are:


  1. Prospecting for Qualified Leads
  2. Pitching them the solution to generate interest
  3. Based on their interest, having further discussions with a detailed presentation, demo, etc.
  4. Negotiation on contract, pricing, and terms & conditions.
  5. Deal Closure
  6. Order, Invoicing, Payment follow-up, etc.

Sales Cycle

Using these steps as a reference, a Sales Manager or an Entrepreneur can easily build their sales process as per the context of their organization structure and process.

Well before we proceed, if you are planning to make use of CRM software to help organize your sales process, feel free to check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.


Why do you need a well-defined Sales Process?

More often we may find a defined sales process is only present in large organizations and not followed religiously in small businesses or startups. When the startups start scaling up, they realize their sales process is too complex to scale fast. This is where they start looking towards building an effective sales process.

Here are some of the reasons why you may need a well-defined sales process…


1. Scalability

When you have defined steps to follow as part of your sales process, it becomes a framework or a blueprint for your team to follow. Your team can just follow the blueprint and easily close the deal faster compared to when each of the sales representatives tries to follow their own approach which might work or might not.


2. Easy to Learn, Train, Mentor

Having a clear process that is followed across the team helps your team to easily learn that and they are equipped to easily train your new joiners to onboard them faster. Otherwise, if there is no process, whenever you assign a mentor to the new joiner, the takeaways will always be different for each new joiner and may lead to misalignment.


3. Low Customer Acquisition Cost

When you have a well-defined process, teams tend to spend less time recreating already validated experiments and focus on what works. This allows them to close more deals in a lesser amount of time which automatically brings down your sales operation cost. Lower the sales operation cost, lower becomes your customer acquisition cost. This way, you will be ready to close more deals with the same amount of sales budget.


4. Better Brand Image and Customer Loyalty

Customers often love organizations that follow a well-structured approach to whatever they do. This also includes how they sell and onboard the customers. If the sales process is streamlined and smooth, the customers will also be able to sense it based on the different sales touchpoints they experienced and how fast they were onboarded. Having a good onboarding experience always helps build a better brand image and customer loyalty. Loyal customers often become evangelists and they refer more customers to you.


I hope you liked reading this post. A good CRM tool always helps the sales team to work on a pre-planned and streamlined sales process. This also helps the sales manager keep track of the state of any particular lead so that they can pitch in to help out the team at the right moment. 


If you are yet to try out a CRM tool for your team, feel free to check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. ToolonCloud CRM allows you to create your own sales process with the help of customizable deal pipelines and stages.


What is Churn Rate?
If you run a subscription based business where you gain monthly or periodically recurring revenue, Churn Rate is one of the important parameters to consider for forecasting your future revenues. This metric is not just a KPI for Sales & Marketing department but also directly impacts Finance department for their future financial forecasts as well as impacts Operations or Delivery department in order to plan for scaling up or scaling down of existing business operations or infrastructure.
Stop committing these 15 Costly Sales Mistakes
I tend to read a lot of books on Sales Methodologies. Now that I have read a numerous materials on Sales, I felt let me share a list of Costly Sales Mistakes or Situations which every sales professional should try to avoid in a Sales Process.

As per my experiences, the following 15 types of sales mistakes should be avoided at any cost:
Guide to get Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Deals

 Heya, Hope you liked reading my previous post on Sales Suspecting. In this article, we shall discuss a detailed guide to understand the Business Process Outsourcing business and how to win BPO deals from the organizations willing to outsource.

Let us get started...

Benefits of Vertical Selling over Horizontal Selling
Are you a Newbie just delving into your Sales Career?
or
Are you a Sales Manager looking for assigning a territory to a newbie in your team?

or
Are you a Newbie startup looking to start with Selling your Product or Solution?


If answer to any of these questions is "Yes", 
Then you should focus on Vertical Selling instead of Horizontal Selling!


Surprised? In this post, I would tell you why is that so!


3 Price Negotiation Mistakes every Salesperson should avoid
Often, Salespersons tend to make mistakes during their Sales Negotiation conversations and tend to lose out on the sales wondering what exactly happened. The lead which they have been following up for many month now is lost just at the last phase of the sales cycle at the time of Sales Negotiation. These are the 3 expensive mistakes which every sales person should avoid at the time of negotiation.