You know of course that cross-selling is potentially the most profitable way for your sales team to spend their time - but to maximise its potential, you’ll need at least three things:
- An ever-growing bank of customer insight
Many successful brokers invest plenty of time getting to know their clients, so as to find out exactly what their needs are. Any valuable insight is then added to the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, depending on what you’re using.
Boosting the client relationship in this way may not only increase retention and referrals, but also uncover previously unknown policy needs that can potentially be converted into cross-sales.
- Get the full commitment of your senior team
Your cross-selling programme won’t work without visible support from above. If your directors don’t seem to care much, then nobody else will.
A good way to make this happen is to nominate a ‘Cross-Sales champion’ in the office. He or she will need a clear plan, plus the authority and motivation to ensure that everyone is focused on hitting set monthly targets.
- Offer help and guidance to your team
Some suggested actions include:
- Ensure that every member of your team is confident about the features and benefits of the products that you sell. Plus that they know which products are a natural fit with which client profile.
- Instigate mini policy reviews for any client not currently getting one.
- Add the cross-sale programme as an agenda point to your weekly sales meeting. This is a great opportunity to share success stories as well as to motivate everyone by giving praise to proactive colleagues.
- You can also use your weekly meetings as an opportunity to increase skills and understanding - for example some staff may not know that there are two distinct types of cross-selling situation or that it’s relatively easy to convince a client that they’ll benefit from having all their policies under one roof.
- Enhance the tracking system on your client database.
Ultimately every business knows that cross-selling can be beneficial, but in practice to make it a success you’ll need plenty of patience, effort and teamwork. The investment will almost always be worth it; not only in boosting cross-sales, but in increased retention and referrals as well.