While cross-selling and upselling existing clientele is certainly important, there’s actually a much more holistic (and ambitious) way to approach new business opportunities within your customer base: drive customer lifetime value (CLV). Focusing on driving customer lifetime value won’t ‘just’ help with identifying upselling opportunities—it will facilitate and create deeper human connections with customers and ensure mutually beneficial relationships built on Experience Improvement (XI). Let’s take a closer look.

Casting a Wider Net

Keeping customers around for as long as possible to sell them as much as possible is a great aspiration, but as I’m sure you’re aware, it’s much easier said than done. However, I’ve been advising companies on this very topic for a long time, and while it’s not simple, what follows are a few best practices that can help you continuously and consistently achieve that goal in ways that are mutually beneficial to you and your clients.

First, if you haven’t already, expand the data sources that you use to understand what your customers are saying and how they perceive you. Many of the brands I’ve worked with for a long time are slowly coming to the realization that they cannot  stick solely to surveys or another singular data source to get customer insights and input. And, while surveys will continue to be important, they only give you part of the picture. Expanding your data repertoire to such sources as purchasing data, location-tracking data, web searches, social media, and online reviews is a must.

Next, it’s vital to take the long view when looking at your customer relationships. This may seem like an obvious tip, but you might be surprised at how many brands get caught up in the lure of “what can I sell you today?” without considering what seeds to plant for even more success tomorrow. Equally important is to understand how your competitors view this dynamic and what, if anything, they’re also doing to be proactive when it comes to building lifetime value.

Letting Customers Tell Success Stories

If there’s one thing I loved doing when I was on the client side as a CX program owner, it was telling  stories. I can speak from experience when I say that letting customers do the success storytelling is an amazingly powerful way to build lifetime value with them. Good storytelling can bring numbers to life, further personalize customers’ experiences, and it gets attention because customers and even employees generally relate more to stories told by, well, other customers.

Executives and program stakeholders love customer-told success stories too. Letting customers do the talking helped me gain mindshare, helped me secure budget, and created the sponsorship that I needed to help make my program better. This strategy also helps executives feel a human connection to your CX program; they love to hear stories about how the organization created a meaningfully improved experience for another person.

The Customer Lifetime Value Journey

The tips I’ve outlined here will help you start (or jump-start) your customer lifetime value journey, but how do you keep the ball rolling? What other methods out there can brands and organizations leverage to go beyond ‘just’ cross-selling and upselling?

You can find all of that and more by clicking here and reading my latest point of view article on customer lifetime value. You’ll learn what else your organization needs to do to create Experience Improvement and a more human connection to your existing customers!

Being Mindful

The first tip we can provide for good cross-selling/upselling is to be mindful of what your client expects. This doesn’t ‘just’ apply to your product—it also applies to your relationships with your point(s) of contact and when customers expect you to reach out to them. Knowing that cadence is its own reward, but it also helps clients stay secure in the fact that you respect their time and bandwidth.

Another, deeper factor here is the notion of a holistic customer, which means getting your company’s departments together and working off of a singular, 360-degree view of said customer. Not only does this help your brand deliver a better experience, but it also helps you know what your customer expects, which informs your cross-selling/upselling strategy.

Best Practices

When you’re ready to upsell, make sure you reach the right point of contact. We know; that point sounds obvious, right? But consider that each part of your offering could sound more or less relevant to multiple people. So don’t bother reaching out to finance about your new marketing tool; instead, take the time to figure out who to talk to in marketing (CX tools are great for this legwork). That way, you’ll be able to reach the person who actually cares about a given part of your product, and they’ll appreciate that you did your homework to find them.

Once you find that person, be prepared to quantify your new feature’s business value. Don’t just reach out to clients thinking that they’ll appreciate a new element solely because it’s new—that approach is guaranteed to give off boiler room telemarketer vibes. Rather, focus not just on knowing what your new feature would do, but how it can help your customer specifically. Case studies, proposed use cases, and the like are extremely powerful tools here.

Good Intentions

This approach to cross-selling and upselling takes more time and effort than reactively reaching out to clients every time you have something new… but it’s also a much more successful tactic. Yes, getting the upsell is great, but doing the due diligence that our approach calls for also lets your clients know that you’re genuinely interested in their business success! When you’ve demonstrated that interest, your clients won’t just be quicker to pick up the phone at the same time next month; they’re going to actively anticipate what you come up with next. In other words, cross-selling and upselling the right way meaningfully improves customers’ interactions with your brand, making it simple to strengthen your bottom line and those relationships in a single motion.

Want to read more about how you can inform successful cross-selling and upselling efforts that will positively impact your bottom line? Read the full article by experience expert Jim Katzman here!