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How do I Close New Customers and Boost Upsell and Cross-sell Opportunities? | MAXIMIZER CRM
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How do I close new customers and boost upsell and cross-sell opportunities? Discover how to close more sales by maximizing upsell and cross-sell opportunities using data targeting tactics and CRM
Introduction In the modern marketing and sales environment, sales are driven by information: content consumed by would-be buyers researching potential purchases, and the intelligence gathered by marketing teams, which Sales can use to propose the best product or service. These two streams of information fuel the inbound marketing process. Prospects absorb new pieces of content as they progress through their buying journey, and you then use the information revealed by these potential buyers to gain further insights into their needs and interests. Crucially, for you and your company, this information gives you the ammunition you need to successfully interact with your modern customer. Consumer behaviour has changed in recent years. Prospects are now well educated prior to a sales call, with a wealth of information at their fingertips. As a result, your sales reps no-longer need to recite product features and benefits. In fact, when your sales person picks up the phone, they should approach the lead as a consultant, helping the prospect make sense of the information they have gathered via your inbound marketing approach. Nurturing a prospect (providing them with the information they want, when they want it – supporting their need to answer their research questions) is critical to your company’s success in the digital age. Customers are
in control and only welcome a sales conversation when they feel they have gleaned the required knowledge about their options. Indeed, according to Hubspot, 50% of leads are not sales-ready when they’ve completed only one interaction with your website1. Nurturing requires deep insight into your existing customer journeys, and then you use this information to support the content search and identification of similar prospects. This can be achieved through the collation of accurate and accessible data from two principal sources: inbound marketing interactions recorded by Marketing Automation Software, and existing customer data analytics, available via a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, which provides information about your existing customer characteristics, pain-points, traits and patterns of consumer behaviour. This particularly applies to your most profitable customers. With access to such information, salespeople can successfully meet the high expectations consumers have, and make an excellent first impression. Identifying pain-points and insights is not just for new customers, however. Existing customers in your database can themselves be an untapped vein of new revenue and should not be ignored. It is easier, faster and less expensive to sell existing customers new products and services, often at a Hubspot, The Definitive Blueprint: Lead Management, 2015
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higher margin, than to win new customers. Cross-selling, in effect, turns existing customers into prospects for different products and services (without all the work of raising your brand awareness and then winning their confidence and trust, while eliciting their personal data). Upselling takes them to a higher level of spend and, ideally, margin. Using data-based insight to identify these sales opportunities enables Sales to take a more informed and tailored approach when the time is right. The key to better engagement of both prospective and existing customers is close coordination between the marketing and sales teams. This approach is supported best with defined processes and the right technical infrastructure, namely marketing automation and a properly configured CRM solution. With these tools, it is easier for your company to recognise prospects’ pain points, identify upsell or cross-sell opportunities, develop a Single Customer View (SCV), manage customer engagement effectively and align marketing and sales activities, which all ultimately result in a higher Return on Investment (ROI).
How to use insight, data and a Single Customer View (SCV) to engage buying decision-makers The importance of customer engagement It is clear that behavioural data is extremely useful in dealing with prospective customers and new opportunities with existing customers. It is therefore vital to use the deep intelligence you have captured within your CRM, on all of your existing clients, to know when and how best to approach these customers and others like them. When it comes to managing customer engagement, the content flow that is produced by an inbound marketing approach needs to be constantly analyzed and applied to marketing and sales strategies. By analyzing the journey customers have taken, from initial enquiry to sales, your marketing team can then replicate that content journey using nurturing campaigns. According to Customer Champions, a customer relationship consultant, two thirds of the issues customers have with companies results from poor
THE FOUR KEY FACTORS BEHIND SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: 1. Customer engagement exists in a full spectrum of experiences – encompassing every interaction from the start of the journey to the ongoing relationship 2. It needs to be results driven – it is vital to know who your most profitable customers are to ensure you are targeting the right profiles when it comes to spending time and effort on prospects and current customers 3. It happens anytime/anywhere – modern customers expect the same high level of experience across all platforms, dealing with all departments, when it suits them 4. It is considered mutually beneficial and it is truly customer driven – the better the relationship, the more chance a company has to drive upsell and cross-sell opportunities, whilst the customer gets a more enjoyable and complete experience.
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relationship management (resulting in a lack of trust)2, so it is vitally important to engage with customers effectively and consistently. Crucial to good customer engagement is the creation of a Single Customer View (SCV). A SCV database is a holistic and consistent representation of the data collected by a company about its customers, giving the organization much better ability to analyse past behaviour to get a better idea of who to target and how best to personalize interactions in the future3 . Implementing a SCV is especially relevant in the modern era, when you must engage with customers across multiple platforms, including the ever-evolving world of social media. Customers expect all interactions to be consistent, regardless of the channel they are using, and for their history and preferences to be reflected in each interaction and communication with your company. A SCV is critical because today’s consumers are not short of options and have a firm idea of what they want when they’re prepared to make a purchasing decision. This means that companies must have timely and accurate information on the principal buyer and even relevant stakeholders, to ensure consistency of messaging and approach, across all communication channels 4 . To successfully implement a SCV you need to avoid fragmented views of your customer data, otherwise you risk failing to recognize the same individuals on different platforms. The easiest way to manage this is via a CRM solution. A CRM provides a visual SCV containing all of your customer data, accessible at all times to all teams, including servicing information. CRM software helps you keep information up-to-date, so sales people know which is the latest piece of content a prospect has downloaded, or whether a complaint from
an existing customer has been resolved, so you can then approach then with an upsell opportunity, etc. This information must be available via your company’s CRM 24/7, and be accessed anywhere, on any web-enabled device. Combining marketing automation, which is key to feeding this process, with a CRM solution makes it easier for management to analyse, review and map the customer journey more accurately, for improved lead generation and sales conversion rates.
Targeting prospects Prospecting for new customers in the age of content marketing should not consist of a series of mass-marketing blanket campaigns. During the research stage, potential customers provide intelligence on themselves by consuming the content you promoted via various marketing channels. Each instance of an inbound customer engagement, such as a query, download, page visit (to a specific blog, for instance) reveals information on the customers’ interests, needs, preferences, even price thresholds and, crucially, their pain points. By using this information you can then build up a profile of the individual and, in the case of a Business to Business (B2B) buyer, their company, and determine which customer segment they fit into. As explored in a previous whitepaper, this data can also be used to identify how profitable a prospect potentially could be and, therefore, how much investment is warranted in acquiring their business. Your company needs to create customer personas for your most profitable customers – the ones you should be targeting. Customer personas will help shape the specific messaging you use for prospects that fall into each of your Customer Champions, Increasing sales to current customers, 2015
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Atom Insight, Why a single customer view is essential, April 2012
Aberdeen Group, Marketing and sales performance: the roadmap to revenue and its tollgates, April 2014
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customer segments. You can then use existing customer data to gauge what has previously worked and not worked, and which prospects are worth pursuing, looking at clients of a similar profile and honing your approach based on this information. This customer intelligence is what can make a major difference in the success of further, usually automated, marketing communications and eventually a live sales call. The intelligence garnered also arms your sales people with information they need to make a relevant sales pitch, rather than a coldcall. Crucially, while a traditional outbound sales call only involves the approach of a single person, the digital content fuelling an inbound strategy can inform and engage a number of stakeholders and influencers. This can be important for winning buy-in through to the close of a deal, throughout an organization, further improving the probability that an informed sales approach at the right time will succeed. The end result will be an increased sales conversion rate, leading to better ROI and improved profitability for your business.
Finding new opportunities by upselling and cross-selling to existing customers In certain circumstances, an existing customer can become a prospect when there is the opportunity to sell them a new product or service. This is when the SCV database becomes invaluable for identifying these potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Plus, if the product or service is significantly different from their previous purchase, then you can more effectively target and engage this customer using the information you already hold on them regarding their preferred communication channels and content.
However, if you indiscriminately try to sell more to existing customers, you could, in fact, be wasting both your marketing budget and sales resource. You have to make sure you focus your efforts on your most profitable clients, using Customer Lifetime Value data to guide you. According to a study in the Harvard Business Review, a significant sub-set of cross-buyers are unprofitable. The report found that one in five cross buying customers are not profitable, accounting for 70% of a company’s total ‘customer loss’, and the more cross-buying a customer does the loss incurred by your company is potentially greater5 . Although marketers tend to be intensely focussed on lead generation, they should not leave upselling solely to the sales department. This eliminates the possibility of using the inbound content constantly being generated in a range of areas to drive more from your existing customer base 6 . In order to successfully act on opportunities, there are a number of steps that need to be taken. These include: segmenting your emails to include messaging for customers; encouraging a customer presence on social media; using your product pages to cross-sell; creating a customer home base on your blog; and having customer specific demos 7. Additionally, for effective cross-selling and upselling, Software Advice, a Gartner company, found there are three key points: 1) Listen for cues and respond appropriately (nurturing) 2) Focus on providing maximum value 3) Pay close attention to timing and context8 .
Harvard Business Review, The Dark Side of Cross-Selling, Denish Shah & V. Kumar, December 2012
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Hubspot, How to use content to drive referrals and upsell customers, Patrick Shea, February 2012
Customer Service Investigator, 3 best practices for upselling and cross-selling in customer service interactions, Karen.D.Schwartz, May 2013 ibid
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Whilst these opportunities can be extremely profitable, a recent survey from AchieveGlobal found more than 40% of consumers get annoyed when companies try to upsell/ cross-sell to them during customer service interactions, highlighting the dangers businesses face, but Smartmoney.com found 15% of customers actually want to hear about upsell offers if it is done properly9 .
USING THE FOLLOWING CALCULATIONS ENABLES YOU TO CALCULATE YOUR LEADS TO REVENUE RATIO:
Understand how to set meaningful targets for leads and revenue Once you know who to target, it’s important to set meaningful Sales and Marketing targets to ensure Sales have the resources and time to follow-up on all leads properly. You can only gauge how well your processes, capturing of data, management of information flow and use of intelligence is performing if you’ve set meaningful targets for your Marketing and Sales teams. The best way to find this out is to calculate your leads to revenue ratio.
1. How many customers do you need to hit your sales target? – Revenue goal divided by average sales per customer 10 2. How many leads do you need to create one customer? – Calculate your sales conversion rate11
Many companies assume ‘marketing’ should only be incorporated when a large enough budget allows for it, usually because the ROI is not predictable. However, all companies should be effectively marketing, measuring the outcome with metrics and analytics, to know what is required by sales to hit their targets. Once you know your conversion rates and what is required (i.e. number of online visitors, number of leads etc.), you can set meaningful targets. But what do you need to measure? According to an article in Forbes, the key marketing metrics that need measuring are: total visits, new sessions, channel specific traffic, bounce rate, total conversions, lead to close ratio, customer retention rate, customer value, cost-per-lead and projected ROI13 .
3. How many visitors do you need to create one lead? – Website traffic visitor-to lead conversion rate12 .
Managing the flow of marketing leads Your company’s lead management should be mapped to your customers’ buying processes. Your lead management should include: data cleansing; lead assignment and distribution; lead scoring, prioritization and qualification; and analyzing the value of your marketing efforts. It is necessary to create some basic reports and dashboards to be able to
Trew Marketing, 3 steps to calculate your Leads-toRevenue Ratio, Rebecca Geier, 2015
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Forbes, 10 online marketing metrics you need to be measuring, Jayson DeMers, August 2014
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ibid
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Aberdeen Group, Marketing and sales performance: the roadmap to revenue and its tollgates, April 2014
ibid
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analyze key metrics, a task that an effectively configured CRM system will enable. The kind of information that you want to know includes: • Where are your best and worst leads coming from? • Where are your leads getting stuck? • How many leads are converted to opportunities14? According to a study published by the Aberdeen Group in March 2014, involving 199 marketing and sales professionals, 77% of respondents rated visibility of lead performance across marketing lead stages as very valuable, while only 43% claimed they could do this effectively! Similarly, on the sales side of the equation, 77% said lead performance visibility across various stages is very valuable but only 41% indicated they in fact do it effectively 15 . Therefore, it is a competitive advantage for you to ensure that these processes are in place. Specific metrics should be used to measure progress over the span of your buyer’s journey. These metrics will help you predict revenue and highlight the points where drop-off/conversion will occur. Metrics that should be measured include: the increase in marketing database, marketing engaged contacts, marketing qualified leads, action leads, sales opportunities and finally progress towards closing the deal16 . Once specific metrics have been outlined (and targets have been set), they need to be aligned via your company’s CRM solution, so that they can be measured in an automated fashion.
How to ensure your sales and marketing departments are aligned When setting up your lead process, a unified approach for lead generation needs to be created17, so you need to get your sales team
involved straight away. Sales are on the front line, dealing with the prospects that marketing are targeting on a daily basis – they know what customers are looking for and therefore should be involved in the marketing message and process. It is imperative to coordinate your sales and marketing teams’ activities and goals to ensure that inbound-led processes are effective. All employees in both sales and marketing need to be fully informed about strategy and approach to ensure that the two departments complement each other. Marketing needs to feed information to sales and vice versa. Both departments need to be fully aware when a prospect that has been passed to sales is not sales ready, and agree that the prospect must then be picked up again by marketing for further nurturing. A CRM solution will easily facilitate this process by aligning your marketing and sales departments. This is because it is configured specifically to share intelligence and make the right level of support and information accessible to marketing and sales. This will ensure that both departments are set up to exceed sales targets whilst successfully upselling and cross-selling, with the end result being better ROI. According to a 2011 Aberdeen Group study, highly aligned organizations achieved an average of 32% year-on year revenue growth, whilst their less aligned competitors saw a 7% decrease 18 in revenue . This presents a challenge for most organizations however, as according to another study by Forrester, just 8% of 14
Business 2 Community, 3 steps to an optimized sales & marketing Lead flow plan, Jenna Hannington, March 2015
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Aberdeen Group, Marketing and sales performance: the roadmap to revenue and its tollgates, April 2014
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ibid
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Business 2 Community, 3 steps to an optimized sales & marketing Lead flow plan, Jenna Hannington, March 2015
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Aberdeen Group, Marketing and sales performance: the roadmap to revenue and its tollgates, April 2014
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companies say they have tight alignment between Sales and Marketing 19 .
Tapping into CRM to manage your sales pipeline Your sales pipeline involves the individual steps sales people take from the initial point of contact with a potential customer or prospect to qualifying that prospect into a lead and further validating that lead into a sales opportunity, following through different sales stages until closed20. Small changes in your pipeline management can pave the way for substantial changes to top line revenue 21 . Companies not using a sales pipeline either fail to recognize the benefits it provides, or don’t know how to shape their list of sales targets to produce a strong outlook for their company. Rather than the traditional sales pipeline, a ‘deal refinery’ approach is more appropriate, almost turning the normal sales funnel on its head. As prospects begin the process of researching a purchase, they work their way through a buying journey, picking up new information on their planned purchase as they make their way along to become a sales-ready lead and completion of a deal with your company. During the nurturing process, a prospect can drop in and out of the ‘refinery’. When a prospect drops out, further information needs to be made available, so they can be prompted to return to your customer journey and continue the process to prep them for a sales conversation. Sales then have all the intelligence gathered from the marketing nurturing process to move the prospect from ‘pipeline’ to ‘closed’. Implementing a CRM solution to manage your sales pipeline will make a significant difference to your business. Starting with lead nurturing, a vital stage in the marketing and sales process,
CRM allows you to understand what your prospects are looking at, and then automate follow-up interactions such as sending an introductory email thanking them for visiting your website, further content or information that is relevant to them, a similar eBook, or a link to your blog page. Building stronger relationships from the start creates better leads, and better leads create more sales!
Your CRM also helps answer questions about your sales lead processes, such as: How are leads being driven to your website? How many leads are we generating? How many are we losing? And, how much does a lead cost on average? With these answers you can then identify any changes to your approach that need to be made to improve sales operations. By the time a potential customer reaches the stage at which a sales call is appropriate, you will have visibility into the prospect’s progress through the mapped out customer journey and their interests, needs and pain points. The result is a tailored initial call that reflects the comprehensive customer view stored in your CRM database. Throughout the process, all
Act On Software, introduction to integrated marketing: sales and marketing alignment, 2014
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Pipeliner CRM blog, The sales pipeline revealed, June 2014
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CRM Search, Best practices in sales pipeline management, Chuck Shaeffer, 2014
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leads must be tracked to ensure you know where they are in the process. Having a clear process is important, so keep it simple. For example: • lead creation • discovery • validation • proof • commitment • win. Throughout these stages, a key field list can be displayed on your CRM dashboard, which keeps sales focused on completing all the relevant fields. Therefore, before a salesperson picks up the phone, they should know the basics: the lead’s role and responsibilities, what their company offers and so on. This ensures that the salesperson knows what to talk about, allowing increased levels of personalization. The intelligence also enables you to cater to your audience by discussing only relevant information. Critical to tailoring your approach is to understand and identify the needs and pain-points of the prospect. Leads must be shown that your solution can address these. Finally, use your CRM to provide closed loop reporting, whereby you can identify why you are winning new customers and, where you are losing them and why. It could be that a particular sales person is thriving, in which case they can share their knowledge and approach with others. If you are losing opportunities, it is equally important to understand why. Is it because of price? Or is it because of a lack of understanding of prospects’ requirements? All this critical information can be tracked with your CRM, where the reporting function allows you to access everything you need via the dashboard. A sales loop can, in fact, be automated. This can include monthly newsletters, hints and tips about their new products and other products or services they might be interested in, which ensures prospects and customers continually receive information relevant to them. Even leads that got away can be included with email messages such as ‘sorry you didn’t find what you are looking for’. Indeed, automation in CRM is an important function
HOW A GOOD CRM SYSTEM HELPS TO GENERATE SUCCESSFUL SALES: • Creates opportunities/leads • Creates column views, using an all fields search, and adds a search to the toolbar • Exports to Excel for easy reporting • Colouring rules to manage sales process stages • Follow-ups and tasks assigned • Automated pipeline management • Favourite lists to identify new opportunities • Mobile CRM enables anywhere, everywhere.
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that means all of this interaction can take place almost effortlessly, leaving Sales to focus on closing deals!
Effective sales management proves successful There are a plethora of case studies that supply evidence of the success a company can have with an effective approach to sales management. Increase in sales, improvement in ROI and better customer engagement is evident. Here are a few examples in which companies have benefited from having a better view of their customers: • Carphone Warehouse – Wanted a more effective marketing strategy to drive improved retention and to identify cross-sell opportunities. Using marketing automation software, Carphone Warehouse knew consumers’ preferences and behavioural patterns with ease, thanks to all the data accumulated in one CRM solution, meaning all marketing efforts are derived from the same hub of data. This resulted in a 10% increase in sales volume and 10% increase in gross profit after one year 22. • Lexus (Toyota) – Lexus wanted a more efficient way to manage its customer database so it could create more targeted communications to segmented customer groups. Using a CRM solution, the company created a centralized marketing database. This assimilated cutomers’ web data and sales data and then turned it into a Single Customer View, which led to intelligent marketing, reporting and analysis. Ultimately, Toyota was able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time via the right channel in order to maximize ROI23 . • Specialty Fashion Group (SFG) – Australia’s largest retailer of women’s
fashion, are using real time reporting to provide their various brands access to customer insights. By streamlining these marketing processes, they were able to deliver targeted communications based on the behaviour of customers. SFG captures a customer’s online behaviour data and merges it with customer data where it can be analyzed and pushed to stores, to be used for upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Since making these changes: • The most recent electronic direct mail campaigns delivered 2,200% ROI • Increase in email member contribution to sales from 32.4% to 45.7% • Average campaign ROI of 1,800%24 .
Conclusion Regardless of your business size, what you’re selling or who you’re selling to, making the most of all your prospect and customer sales opportunities is crucial to achieving better ROI and growing margins. Critical to making the most of opportunities – or even knowing about them – is having an effectively managed sales pipeline that utilises a CRM solution. This then provides a platform for Marketing and Sales to work hand inhand to generate leads, nurture them and successfully convert them into sales. 22
Customer Service interactions, 3 best practices for upselling and cross selling in Customer Service Interactions, Karen Schwartz, May 2013
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Fuel, T-Mobile treat van: all treat no trick
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ibid
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In fact, CRM provides a basis for managing the whole process and ensuring that everyone involved is on the same page and doing their part. Too many companies assume that once they have captured a lead, they either don’t need to focus as much attention on that contact, or the responsibility sits on the shoulders of Sales. In reality, Marketing still has an important role in building ongoing relationships with customers via content-led interactions, especially when sales reps often lack the time to do this relationship-building because they’re busy closing potential sales. By coordinating marketing and sales functions, and using insights gathered from existing customer data, you are effectively managing your customer journey. You can then track each prospect’s or customer’s progress along the buying path via your effectively configured CRM system to maximize every lead.
Whether you are looking to upsell and/ or cross-sell to your most profitable customers or use the information you hold on customers to aid in targeting similar prospects, having a Single Customer View that is accessible via your CRM is essential. Indeed, any company can expect to see a higher ROI if they invest in tools such as marketing automation and CRM. These enable you to utilize your data to build a dialogue with each prospective customer, gaining their trust, bringing other stakeholders into the loop and leading them to consult with your sales team for a more specific solution to their pain-points.
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About Maximizer Maximizer CRM is fueling the growth of businesses around the world. Our CRM solutions come fully loaded with the core Sales, Marketing and Service functionality companies need to optimize sales productivity, accelerate marketing and improve customer service. With flexible on-premise, our cloud and your cloud deployment options, tailored-tofit flexibility, state-of-the art security infrastructure, industry-specific editions and anywhere/ anytime mobile access, Maximizer is the affordable CRM solution of choice. From offices in North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and AsiaPac, and a worldwide network of certified business partners, Maximizer has shipped over one million licenses to more than 120,000 customers worldwide.
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