Upselling Made Easy: 7 Strategies to Increase Your Revenue & Expand Your Accounts

Your agency's success largely depends on your ability to effectively upsell clients.

Upselling happens everywhere. So, from pizza and burger outlets to retail stores and from the auto industry to electronics, everyone attempts to upsell. For example, a diner orders a coffee in a restaurant, but the waiter offers to add flavors such as French Vanilla, Hazelnut, Caramel, or Mocha for a nominal price.

But, with digital agencies, the offerings can be a bit more complex. Before upselling as an agency, you must take into consideration the customers' needs. The agency owners face cutthroat competition, so their objective should be to boost cash flow by offering value to their clients.

A study by Marketing Metrics reveals that the probability of selling something to a prospect is only about 5-20%, while the chance of selling something to an existing customer is 60-70%.

In such a scenario, upselling becomes crucial for the agencies.

What Is Upselling?

Upselling is part of the sales process when a brand offers an upgrade or premium version of the product or services they are selling.

It also includes selling Add-ons that boost the functionality of the existing product.

The objective of upselling is to serve the customers better and meet their pressing needs while boosting revenue for the agency. It should be in alignment with the customer's goals and hopes.

Upselling is mostly relationship-based, and it helps you make loyal customers. It's a two-way process. When a brand is committed to serving the needs and goals of its clients, they offer products and services with additional functionality and premium features.

These premium products, in turn, save time and money for the customers.

How to Upsell a Client?

Here are the seven upselling strategies to expand your accounts and increase revenue.

1. Ditch Phone and Email; Meet In-Person

Most agencies limit their interaction with clients to phone and email due to time constraints and other reasons. However, in such demanding times, it isn't fruitful for your business relationships. Meeting in person has several advantages.

First, people feel uncomfortable discussing many things on phone calls and emails. Later, these things may snowball into bigger issues and lead to customer churn. So, meeting once a month is a healthy practice that promotes customer loyalty. It fosters customer loyalty, which makes upselling easier.

According to a Temkin Group report, loyal customers are five times as likely to repurchase and forgive and seven times as likely to try a new offering.

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2. Proactively Explore Clients' Needs

Frequently meeting your clients in person has many advantages. It allows you to have a deeper interaction with your clients, helping you better understand their needs. There can be many services they need, and you can provide them. Sometimes, people are so busy managing their daily tasks that they hardly have the time and inclination to realize their business needs. But agency owners can easily identify these needs if they're focused on their clients' concerns. Try to identify your client's needs before they proactively realize them.

And sometimes, even the clients need to be aware of the variety of services you offer once you mention them. It's, therefore, necessary to keep an eye on their problems, growth, and business goals. A greater understanding of your client's businesses will tremendously help you upsell. During in-person meetings, your clients might disclose more than you can imagine.

3. Start Your Relationship With a Smaller Project

Experts recommend you refrain from selling high-ticket items in the beginning. It can be overwhelming for the customers. The best way to start your relationship is to choose smaller projects and gradually move up the value ladder as the trust builds.

Here is the step-by-step sales formula Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks, recommends succeeding as a digital agency.

Step-by-Step Formula to Sell Your Digital Agency Services

Here are the four steps to sell your digital marketing services, beginning with offering DashClicks' InstaSites software that builds professional websites within seconds.

Prepare a list of the local businesses, service providers, and shops you want to target. Create professional websites using DashClicks’ InstaSites app for your target audience, and start your sales outreach. Follow these steps:-

1. Set up a small call center comprising 5-10 sales executives using advanced software (such as VoIP for call center).
2. Ask your sales reps to offer custom websites built by InstaSites free of charge to your prospects.
3. Tempt your prospects with preview links to the websites.
4. After three days, call up again to know their feedback about the website preview.
5. Ask their permission to activate the site if they are happy with the preview.
6. After one week, call them again to get their input on the website and offer local listings on some major listing networks.
7. Get these services fulfilled through DashClicks’ white-label fulfillment center.
8. After two weeks, offer SEO or Google Ads services and get them fulfilled through DashClicks.
9. After six weeks, provide social media account management and posting services and fulfill them through DashClicks.

To know more, read the following article:- How to Develop an Irresistible Offer Selling Websites That Takes Seconds to Create?

4. Focus On Complementary Services

You can think of dozens of complementary services. Here is a scenario. You're running Facebook ads for a client, and the analytics revealed that if the web page layout is changed, you can easily increase the conversion rate by 3%. You can offer your complimentary web design services to fix this.

You can pitch for content marketing services if you think your current SEO strategies aren't yielding the desired results. It can be because of the need for good pillar content on the website and external channels such as blog posts, social media channels, popular sites from the same industry, forums, and question-answer sites.

Similarly, if you offer SEO services, you can also offer local SEO, backlink building, SEM, website design & development, and social media services.

These are the best opportunities you can use to increase your revenue.

5. Offer Top-Notch Customer Experience

CX or Customer experience is a big driving factor for repeat purchases. According to Zendex, 51% of B2B companies switch vendors after poor customer service experience.

The same source also reveals that 66% of B2B customers stopped buying after a bad customer service experience. So, if you want to kickstart upselling, ensure that you offer the best customer experience in your niche.

If you strive to achieve a high customer lifetime value (CLV), upselling wouldn't be difficult. All you need to do is consistently show value throughout the post-purchase retention & advocacy stages.

No wonder 45% of companies cite content and experience management as their number one priority, according to Econsultancy's Digital Trends 2018 report.

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6. Set and Measure Customer Expectations

According to Chris Boeckelman, VP of Marketing (Vice President) at Getfeedback Inc., happy customers are your agency's lifeline; to keep them happy, you must set and meet customer expectations. You should fully train your sales and service teams to meet customer expectations.

You can use customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores as a metric to measure it. Though CSAT is a primary metric in the broader customer journey, it is best practice in the beginning.

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It has one more advantage. When you start tracking your CSAT score, the focus of your entire team shifts to customer experience, and each customer interaction gets increased visibility.

7. Involve Your Team Members

Don't restrict upselling to your sales or business development team. Anyone who works on the project should be involved, even if they don't talk directly with the client. Such team members can share their ideas and insights through the accounts manager.

For example, a design guy feels we can improve the user interface to boost engagement and conversion on the website. In that case, they can immediately share it with the accounts manager and suggest their inputs through graphics and illustrations.

Upselling clients is a team effort.

How to Upsell?

The following videos guide you through the art of upselling.

Here is a short video by Chad Kodary in which he shows you how to secure the upsell:-

It's the obvious and natural approach, and it shouldn't sound obnoxious to the customers. The idea is to refrain from charging aggressively. Still, you make decent money through a one-time fee (OTF) and monthly recurring charges.

Here is the five-video series that explains the entire process of upselling digital agency products using InstaSites software:-

Read this article for more tips on upselling:- How I Would Do $100K in Sales in 12 Months if I Had to Start All Over From Scratch

Final Words

As explained above, the primary objective of upselling should be to add value to the services you provide to your clients. Increasing revenue for the agency is secondary. So, upselling should involve offering an irresistible product that addresses your client's pain points and help them faster achieve their business goals. Agencies should learn this valuable skill and use it as a win-win strategy. You boost your income while your clients grow and improve their efficiencies.

Are you ready for upselling?