What if you could increase your revenue by up to 30% without finding a single new customer?
Upselling and cross-selling techniques can generate 10-30% of a company’s revenue, according to a Forrester Research survey of sales professionals. That’s a significant chunk, and it’s more attainable than you might think.
Industry leaders widely agree that selling to existing customers is far more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.
Businesses that deepen customer relationships stand to gain the most from upselling and cross-selling strategies. Some 80% of value creation at successful companies comes from generating new revenue with existing customers, according to McKinsey. And losing just one customer may require finding three new ones to make up for that lost value.
This isn’t just about boosting short-term sales — it’s about long-term profitability and business growth. Companies that master these techniques increase customer engagement, strengthen brand loyalty and even enhance business valuation (think higher Net Promoter Scores).
Here are eight tested strategies that can help you make the most of upselling and cross-selling:
1. Create Bundle Offers
There are many ways to bundle products to incentivize customers and increase your average order value. Among them are:
- Pure bundling: Products are only available as a set. Great for products in your catalog that you notice are commonly purchased together.
- Mixed bundling: A curated mix of items sold together that might include add-ons or like-to-haves to encourage customers to explore complementary products.
- DIY/Custom bundling: Customers choose their own mix of products and receive a discount so they get exactly what they want.
- Seasonal bundling: Limited-time offers on seasonal products to boost revenue during specific times.
- Clearance bundling: Target the slow sellers or surplus inventory to move them off your shelves.
One example might be a janitorial distributor offering a deep cleaning kit that includes popular supplies like floor cleaner, carpet care, mops, gloves and spray bottles to simplify ordering for customers, help you move more inventory and provide your customers cost savings to increase loyalty.
2. Analyze Territory-Level Sales Trends
When you understand which products sell best in different geographic regions, you can spot opportunities to bundle and suggest related products. For instance, each spring, a construction materials distributor notices that certain regions are inundated with roofing orders due to heavy hail and rain. The distributor chooses to upsell a higher-end, more durable shingle option to provide better protection. Next, they cross-sell weather proofing underlayment, roof sealant and gutter systems to contractors likely to need them for the job.
3. Add Premium Subscriptions
Tiered subscription services are a great option for frequent buyers. Offering a basic, mid-level and premium-level subscription can naturally guide customers into tiers based on their needs and your promises of perks like faster delivery, priority support and bulk discounts.
Say you’re a plumbing supplies distributor. You could upsell a customer into a platinum tier to receive a 10% discount, next-day delivery, dedicated order management and access to new product launches or promotions. Subscriptions can increase customer retention and satisfaction while providing more predictable revenue for you.
4. Offer Limited-Time Promotions
Urgency and scarcity are textbook psychological selling strategies, so upselling and cross-selling offers that include FOMO (fear of missing out) may be good options to boost sales.
For example, a medical supply distributor could prep for flu season with a 30-day limited-time promotion that cross-sells vaccines with alcohol swabs and sharps containers, plus upsell discounted PPE kits if a customer buys in bulk.
5. Use Personalized Recommendations
Personalization wins sales. Just look at how Amazon changed the ecommerce game with their “frequently bought together” (upselling) and “discover similar items” (cross-selling) sections on product pages. Take advantage of your customer profiles and purchase history data to tailor your product recommendations online. Offline, train sales reps on upselling premium-quality versions of what customers are already buying.
6. Develop an Experience-Led Growth Strategy
When the whole company prioritizes customer satisfaction, it boosts cross- and upselling naturally. An experience-led growth strategy begins with a financial goal and works backward to prioritize and design customer-centric experiences that nurture long-term relationships and reduce churn. Companies that increase customer satisfaction by 20% see immediate financial benefits, such as increasing cross-sell rates by 15-25% and boosting wallet share by 5-10%, according to McKinsey.
7. Identify Account-Specific Strategies
To maximize sales opportunities, analyze your accounts’ sales history and purchasing patterns, including their ship-to locations and order frequency. With this data, sales teams can propose opportunities to procurement directors and executives managing multiple locations.
Help customers consolidate orders across sites with volume-based discounts or a bulk-purchasing agreement with tiered discounts. You can also make it easier to reorder known quantities every three months by saving past orders and enabling reorder with a single click.
Consider value-added upsells that save customers time and money, like an industrial parts distributor providing on-site assembly service for ordered parts.
8. Automate AI Recommendations
AI isn’t replacing real sales conversations — it’s helping to initiate and enhance them. With thousands of different products in your catalog, AI can analyze customer data, identify patterns, and automate product suggestions to drive sales.
When integrated with your CRM and business intelligence platform, AI can boost conversion rates by suggesting the right products at the right time. With this information, sales reps can make data-driven decisions to proactively recommend complementary products or send restock reminders before the customers even realize they need them.
The Bottom Line
In the past, distributors struggled to find effective upselling and cross-selling strategies due to their vast product catalogs and a lack of visibility into customer purchasing patterns. But now, technology has changed the game.
To put your upselling and cross-selling plan into action, you need to have the right tools. I recommend a distribution-specific CRM and BI that integrates with ERP data and your ecommerce platform so sales teams can leverage data effectively. A platform that integrates AI can further accelerate your efforts by providing your team with timely, relevant recommendations based on customers’ individual order history. Once adopted, be sure to train your sales team so online purchase insights guide offline sales strategies.
With those tools and strategies in place, that 10%-30% revenue bump is within your reach.
Todd Daubenberger is the Chief Revenue Officer for White Cup, a leading CRM and business intelligence platform. He has more than 25 years of sales leadership experience, including more than 20 years in sales and sales leadership positions at Epicor.