Taking the PANE out of SELLING

Contributor: Pilkington

Expert: Bill Osmond


Over the past month the media has been awash with seemingly conflicting reports relating to the length of the recession. According to the Halifax, house prices went up by 1.6 per cent in September, quoting lower prices and rock bottom interest rates as fuelling the demand. New car sales were also up by 11.4 per cent and retailers such as Tesco and Primark posted profits.

If these ‘green shoots’ are true, then as sales people we must be thinking about maximising opportunities. Six months ago, the prospect of cross-selling or up-selling might have been over-ambitious or simply inappropriate – instead all efforts were put into achieving the sale.

Sales managers are clearly keen for their teams to take every opportunity to up-sell, however the pressure put on sales teams can sometimes result in poor execution of the task. When entering a sales situation, the client may be showing interest in “Product A”, the sales person identifies a need for the product and the client agrees to buy “Product A”. The sales person suddenly remembers to up-sell and blurts out “would you also be interested in ‘Product B’?”

The result is that the client thinks: “I have just committed to buying ‘Product A’, which matches my needs. Product B, seems to be an extra, which I had not thought about and certainly not budgeted for, so NO THANKS”. It is the same scenario when cross-selling. Introducing something else after having sold the first product or element to the service pretty much always gets the same result – unless the salesperson is lucky!

So what is missing? To up-sell or cross-sell, the sales strategy must not simply be ‘add on’ options. It is important to use questions that develop more than one product need in the customer’s mind. When trying to up-sell and cross-sell, the customer must have a need for everything they are buying – i.e. being sold.

In conclusion, to up-sell it is important to develop existing levels of purchase. To do this, a need to buy more must be created, rather than more being offered! To cross-sell, a salesperson must create a need for a customer to buy another product from their range.
For more information about Pilkington visit: www.pilkington.co.uk. For more information about Phoenix Training visit: www.phoenix-training.co.uk. If you have a sales area you’d like Bill to tackle email: Pilkington@communiquepr.co.uk.