When the MacDonald’s guy politely asks you “ Would you like to have French fries with that?” at the time you are about to make a payment for the Cheese Burger you wish to eat , the French fries amount to a cross-sell! This small question gives them a whopping 4 million kilograms of fries sale globally every day ! Yes you read it right. That’s the beauty of cross-selling!
You twist the above example a little and you will know what up-selling is all about when the guy at the other end of the counter persuades you to upgrade your order of a Regular- size plain chicken pizza to a Large -version with cheese-burst base and extra toppings with Coke and garlic bread at 20% off the original price!
We really can’t trace the history behind the evolution of these conjoined twin terms of cross-sell and up-sell. But frankly speaking these were always dwelling in the street-smart wisdom of the retailer next door.
Open the Sunday Morning special edition of any newspaper and you would be flooded with brochures and pamphlets of the big boys as well as local vendors , seen at loggerheads , in an attempt to woe their prospective buyers into buying their products and services ranging from basic to premium plans of data usage, pre-paid and post-paid mobile rentals, TV cable connections and beauty-parlour services, to name a few! This is the best form of comparative analytics to show-case all the value-added things you can grab at an additional- but- minimal-not-so-pinching- rise- in-price to help you notch up one level high and upgrade!
Go to a super-market or any departmental store and you would realize cross-selling and up-selling are the basic sales techniques on which these models of business survive and thrive-upon. It is not sheer co-incidence that products like jam-butter-bread-and-cheese-and-eggs are set on shelves next to each other. There’s good amount of study of consumer mindset that goes into it. These are strategically and intentionally placed together to demonstrate value proposition of butter-cheese-jam trio to the customer who stepped in to grab a quick single loaf of bread! And same is the rationale behind wide array of super-saver combo offers on display that lead the customer to do impulsive purchases. The “You have saved Rupees 799 on the MRP of Rupees 4569” adds a grin to the buyers’ faces and an increase in AOV(Average Order Value) of the enterprise!
The presence of cross-selling and up-selling encompasses a wide arena of industries from insurance to finance and banking to e-retailing giants! Top-up loans at preferential rates of interest on your existing ones and a Credit Card that is pushed as a complementary offer on your newly opened Savings Account are disguised ways of accelerating revenues from the existing customer-base! You don’t even have to submit any additional documents of proof to prove your identity and financial soundness! And a sign on the dotted line and click on the “I Agree” button by the customer is what it takes to seal a deal! Does it not amount to a win-win situation for both the parties?
But with the advance of AI and Machine Learning these sales strategies have been taken to an altogether new height. With its data mining techniques and Predictive Scoring it traces down to the minutest details of customers’ past purchase behaviours and demographics, their tastes and preferences, the price-range and kind of brand they opt for, their channel preferences ,frequency and timing of online presence and so forth to design best customer profile with the likelihood of highest conversion rate. The footfalls and traffic can be easily transmitted into actual revenue generation by introducing right options to right people at the right time! Appropriate recommendations along-with dynamic pricing accelerates overall sales turnover at virtually no extra cost or investment of acquiring a new customer!
In an ultra-competitive world where the pressure on revenues is soaring and margins are getting squeezed continuously it is pragmatic to use the prerogative of the emerging AI solutions. It paves the road for better inventory planning solutions, robust stock management and optimizing resources including warehouse space in addition to more RoI from marketing activities. Your sales and marketing team is better equipped to propel the sales targets and sync their strategies to get maximum output as AI gives them analytics with military precision and astounding speed and generates relevant metrics. It is otherwise next to impossible to draw accurate inferences and strategize the sales policy out of mammoth client- database with manual intervention which these conglomerates have!
With our Cross-Selling and Up-Selling solutions we ensure that you do not turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to what your end-user needs, as one of the marketing gurus has rightly said,” Markets are conversations”, and we help you hear those!
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