Three Reasons Why Up-selling Fails

Upselling has been an integral part of sales strategy since beginning. Specially when we talk about the current e-business environment which is full of competition, at times upselling and cross selling is the only profitable sales while initial sales is on breakeven price to acquire customer.

Many businesses fail to upsell because they fail to understand this fact that upselling is much different than new acquisitions. Here we put in three very important factors or reasons due to which a business fail to upsell.

– First: and the most important reason is the shift in your sales person/team behavior from welcoming to ignorant once sales is closed. Usually sales people are burdened with huge number of financial and non-financial KPIs which makes them suddenly cut off communication and assistance to customers once they close the sales. This creates a very negative impression on customer and he perceive all future selling attempts negative. Swift transfer from sales to service teams is hold immense importance.

– Second: we as customers, expect something good to happen as soon as we pay for any product/service. Giving early results or wins to customers is a key activity to keep your customers confident and comfortable for upselling. At times, specially in services, giving early results is very difficult and in such cases keep a good and beneficial level of communication with customer plays an alternate role.

– Third: The right time to upsell can never be fixed in terms of days or activities. The right time to approach a customer for upsell is when your product/service is delivering a satisfactory perception to your customer. Pitching an angry customer, or even a neutral customer will hardly result in sales. Many companies make SOPs of upsell based on time period irrespective of considering customer satisfaction level which ultimately result in failure.

Concluding, upselling is an important channel of sales if executed properly. Generally speaking, if you have a swift transformation from sales to services, if you are giving early results to customers and if you are approaching your customers at right time then you can expect a good proportion of sales from upselling activity.