What Is Upselling & How To Upsell Without Annoying Your Customers

Often you will see that people associate upselling with an underhanded telesales technique that tricks the customers into spending more money than they had planned to. But what people do not realize is the upselling can do great things for your business without altering or ruining your brand. Furthermore, it helps you to make better relationships with your customers and boosts overall customer loyalty.

So, What is upselling & how to upsell without annoying your customers?

For SaaS companies, upselling is basically selling an upgrade of your service that offers more features, allows for more users, provides training and assistance on how to use the product, and so on.  For physical product sales, Upselling can also include a more expensive version of the same product while dealing in physical product sales (e.g. the same car, but with heated seats and a sunroof), or an extended warranty.

Another term that is closely related to upselling is cross-selling. Now cross-selling is all about selling an additional, different product to a current customer, but one that is probably related to their first purchase.

If you really want to Upsell your services in SaaS without annoying your customers then you need to provide them with something that is genuinely valuable to them as an individual.

Benefits Of Upselling

1. Helps In Developing Deeper And Valuable Customer Relationships:

When you are doing upselling to your customers, you are not just focusing and trying to get more monetary returns. But you are also trying to provide value to them.

Customers will always appreciate your efforts when you offer upsells that are useful and relevant to each individual. Moreover, they will not see your offer as some scheme to get them to cough up more cash.

One of the biggest factors in building customer loyalty is to provide genuine value to your customers. As a result of your effort, those loyal customers pay off in the form of repeat purchasers that keep coming back to your brand and spend many times more per visit than a first-time customer.

2. Upselling Is Easier And Profitable Than Selling To New Customers:

According to the research conducted by Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5-20%. However, the probability of selling to an existing customer can be up to 70%. 

You save significantly on your marketing and selling costs by upselling to your existing customers. In fact, one research study of SaaS companies found that it costs around $1.18 to earn $1 from new customers, while on the other side it only costs $0.28 to earn $1 through upsells as of 2018. 

Focus on increasing lifetime customer value and sell easier if you want to build customer loyalty.

Top Tips To Successfully Upsell Your Customers

1. Align Your Upsell’s To The Customer Needs And Goals:

You cannot upsell all your customers the same way as each one of the customers is unique. Let’s take a look at an example. You are a SaaS company that is offering three plans: the basic plan allows five users, the standard plan allows 20, and the pro plan allows 100. If you are dealing with a customer who only has 10 employees, then do not try to upsell them to the pro plan as they would only be interested in buying the standard plan.

To make your upselling right, you need to get into your customer’s head and try answering these questions:

What are their company goals?

What are your customer’s current needs, and what do they foresee as future needs?

Where exactly does your product or service offering fit into their goals?

How do their past purchases affect their future needs?

NeoDove is a great automated tool to collect customer data and concise it in one place. By doing so, your sales team can know more about the customer and target them accordingly while upselling. It saves time and efforts of the sales team and leads to quick selling.

When you align your upsells to the individual customer, you show that you are paying attention to their needs and not just focussing on your own revenue goals. As a result, it will build customer loyalty, and make them more likely to purchase the upsell.

2. Fully Onboard Customers Before Promoting Upsells:

You might wonder how many upsells do your customers have to wade through in order to complete their first purchase from you. But if you bombard each new customer with a lot of upsells before they even make their first purchase, then there is a high possibility that they may decide to leave without buying anything from you. 

This turns out to be very annoying for the customer if the upsells are not 100% relevant to them and their described needs.

Therefore, it is very important to get through that first purchase before you offer any upsells further. If you are thinking that a relevant upsell must be presented during the purchase process, then make sure you only offer one upsell at that time, and that it is truly valuable to the customer and addresses his needs perfectly.

3. Segment Your Customers To Find More Relevant Upsells:

Since we all know that each customer is a unique individual, therefore they probably fit into related segments. Focus on creating relevant customer personas. It is an excellent way to segment your upsells to the right customers.

For example, if we again take a look at the Saas example referred above. The SaaS company with three different plans depending on how many users are needed. Now you can segment customers based on how many users they have. By doing so, you will instantly know who you can offer an upsell to and make your sales accordingly.

4. Offer Upsell Bundles:

This is a perfect combination of upselling and cross-selling that works very well for different types of businesses. It is quite obvious that a brand that sells physical products can easily offer bundles that create savings for customers. But ultimately it is increasing the total purchase value and resulting in increased revenues for the company.

Similarly, brands that sell services or SaaS companies can offer relevant bundles to their customers as well. Everyone likes to save. So selling in bundles makes the customer more interested in purchasing and he saves some money as well, but the end result for the company is monetary gains by upselling bundles to many customers.

Also Read : What Is Upselling & How To Upsell Without Annoying Your Customers

Takeaway

when done right, is a great way to promote your services and increase revenue for your company. It's the current customers who are the lifeblood of your company and when you genuinely offer services that are relevant to their needs, you create value for them. However, relevance is key. Make sure if you want to upsell your services in SaaS without annoying customers make sure you are able to solve a current problem and is relevant to their needs, To maintain a healthy relationship with customers you should know when to stop pitching and instead focus only on creating value.