The cross-selling strategy sales platform
Cross-selling is defined by Harvard Business Review as “the practice of offering current customers products or services that complement those they have already purchased, thereby increasing the value of their shopping basket” (Harvard Business Review, 2021).
This strategy is not simply about selling additional products or services, but is based on a deep understanding of customer needs, preferences and behaviors. Cross-selling can turn a transaction into an opportunity, boosting company growth and revenues.
However, an effective cross-selling strategy can only be implemented with the support of a well-established sales platform. Within an organization, a sales platform is a set of tools, technologies and processes that enable the efficient management of sales transactions, the analysis of customer data and the implementation of cross-selling strategies. It plays a central role in the success of the cross-selling approach, as it provides the information needed across channels to target customers accurately.
The distinction between a cross-selling and an up-selling strategy
Implementing a cross-selling strategy enables you to cross-sell, i.e. to offer complementary products to customers in order to increase their shopping baskets by creating a new need. To do this, it is important to identify the products or services suitable for cross-selling, as well as the target customers and their buying patterns, so as to intervene at the right moment.
In contrast, up-selling, often described as “moving upmarket”, consists in offering the customer a higher-end product or service than the one he or she had originally intended to buy.
The up-selling strategy consists in increasing the customer’s purchase basket by buying a product with more added value and, consequently, a higher price, whereas the cross-selling strategy consists in increasing the purchase basket by buying products that complement the original product.
To implement either of these strategies, it’s important to have a high-performance sales platform to automate suggestions according to customer profile and buying habits. This applies to both B2C and B2B customers.
The challenges of cross-selling in a B2B context with a multi-subsidiary, multi-activity group - illustration of a case study
Illustrating a use case
To illustrate, let’s look at a concrete case: an industrial group made up of several subsidiaries, wishes to set up a platform to increase its sales using the cross-selling method. Initially, the plan was to set up a new company in the form of an economic interest group (EIG) to pool the resources needed to deliver this service.
However, in this group, subsidiaries had different sales platforms, which complicated
- the customer journey and increased customer resistance to additional sales
- Customer relationship management and data recovery
- coordination between entities and harmonization of processes.
The EIG would therefore like to set up a single sales platform for all companies, enabling customers to order
- several products,
- from different companies,
- on a single sales platform.
To achieve this, it’s important to differentiate between objectives and means.
The objectives are to
- increase revenues,
- satisfy customers
- and limit operating costs.
The means are
- the tools and data used,
- the skills required
- and the distribution of value (particularly in a complex context with the integration of subsidiary product sales).
Implementing a tool is not an objective, but a means to an end. Similarly, the distribution of value between subsidiaries and the EIG is an important issue, but one that concerns the back office more than the end customer.
A. Objectives
- Margin – Increase turonver and margin
- Customer satisfaction – Increase customer satisfaction
- Costs – Limit the cost-to-save ratio
B. Means
- Tools and data – Equip sales forces and desilter systems to reduce response time to customer requests and improve customer knowledge.
- Skills – Promote customer service skills across all offerings to improve customer acquisition and increase cross-selling.
- Finance – Clarify the distribution of added value in the context of cross-selling (allocation of margins, growth targets).
To secure a project of this kind, you need to take a number of rigorous steps:
- Risk identification and control/coverage
- Questioning the existing model
- Review of operating modes between subsidiaries
- Drawing up a macro-planning schedule
- Evolution of target architectures and decommissioning of existing architecture
- Data migration and updating
- Modeling of existing and target processes with business units
- Pooling of processes between entities
- Target and transitional scenarios
- Technical design
- Functional design
- Implementation of a single billing model to facilitate customer purchasing (target: a single order = a single payment)
- Drawing up a training plan for teams (especially sales teams)
