If Tata Group can sell salt, car & even insurance, can you sell multiple products to your existing customer? Here’s the mental model of upsell & cross-sell 👇
1/ Selling more of what you already are selling.
One way to think – adding more use cases for an existing customer. A classic example of how every telecom operator (Jio/ airtel) tries to sell an OTT bundle (Jio + Netflix) every time a customer buys a new sim card or ports between telecom operators.
2/ Find more “users” with “same customer”
Take Slack for example, as the company grows, more engineers will be added to Slack so it’s penetrating into the engineering ICP. Plus, the value of slack grows exponentially when it is used in collaboration with engineering, product, design, sales and analytics.
3/ Selling a new product or feature to existing customer.
Most of you aren’t selling extremely different categories to the same customer. Most Indian ecosystem consumer/ SaaS brands haven’t really evolved to that state.
I will only focus on “extension feature selling” as a core cross-sell problem statement. For example, Urban company is trying to make a new offering to all its customers who use Urban Company for hair cut & grooming.
The first mistake most product owners make is they assume what they have built as a “cross sell” product is something their existing customers “need” or “want”.
You need to avoid this confirmation bias by speaking to your target existing customers and if they have these use cases. Once you get enough validation, the next line of question should be – what will it take for them to switch from their current product to the new offering you have built? – go deeper into the switching cost; this is going to be your core marketing pitch on the product to cross-sell this new “feature”.
Think of this whole journey of cross-sell as finding the right “feature-customer-fit” (similar to product market fit).
That means we’ll need 3 things.
1/ Nail the marketing pitch.
2/ Pick a target segment of existing customers.
3/ Ensure your cross-sell feature delivers on its promise.