Three Things – 26/02/24

the crossfit cross-sell edition

Ask any BD professional, group head, principal or managing partner for their top three wishes, if they could wave a magic wand over the sales and marketing efforts of their firm, and cross-selling will come first or second. Every single time. Why? Because tens of millions of £££’s are left on the physical and/or virtual table EVERY SINGLE DAY due to loss opportunities in an area of specialisation that is not your own.

FMCG companies like Apple and Amazon are brilliant at cross selling. Just think about the Amazon checkout process and the way in which you’re encouraged to consider additional items other customers bought. Ryanair and McDonald’s equally good. Book a Ryanair flight and you’ll be offered insurance, hotels and care hire as part of the buying process.

Law firms and accountants – not so much.

This weeks Three Things focuses on the key ingredients required to master the cross or up sell. Enjoy.

#1. Understand your customer

Don’t attempt to sell a service to someone that they don’t want to buy. Sounds obvious, right? To cross-sell effectively you need to spend time and effort understanding your customer’s business, not just the small part or business unit that you’re currently working on.

How do you achieve this? By being curious (one of these most critical but underutilised skills in professional services – see recent post from top recruiter Seldon Rosser on the topic here) and asking loads of questions. For example:

That’s interesting, tell me more about that?
How does the transaction we’re on sit within the company’s growth roadmap?
I noticed your latest press release on [insert relevant topic here] – what doe that mean for you/your team/your company?

Any useful cross-selling endeavour should have a tangible thread back to a need or preference that has been indicated by the customer.

#2. Identify your key cross-sells

Take a look at what you worked on last year. Did your clients regularly require additional advice outside of your area of expertise? What were they? Now look forward to this year. Are there new regulations and/or technologies that your current clients are going to be impacted by? If so, who within your firm is the expert? Build yourself a map (see LINAR example below) of complementary and analogous services your client base will need and then…….know enough about them to be dangerous!

#3. Know enough to be dangerous

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
Walt Disney

Once you’ve identified your key cross sells it’s time to do some homework. Go and speak to your colleagues with the additional expertise your clients are seeking and get them to give you a crash course in their world. Develop just enough knowledge in their area to be dangerous – that is, to sound to the client like you know what you’re talking about! However, never overstep your capabilities – your aim here is to secure an intro or conversation with your colleague and, you guessed it, cross sell their expertise.