Your challenge
Temptation!
In this type of situation, you may be tempted to take the easy way out. Providers often tend to take their current customers for granted. They think that they don’t need 
to put a great deal of effort into need development activities around the additional products or services.
However, reality is quite different. It bites. Cross-selling usually requires providers to handle a full sales cycle. And if the business need to be fulfilled by the additional product or service is somewhat new, providers will have to create a sales cycle from scratch. The only thing that could be simplified, when dealing with existing customers, is regarding the procedural proceedings of the sale. The other selling steps, however, (e.g., unveiling the client’s needs, developing a solution biased towards what you offer, agreeing on the implementation approach, validating the cost-benefit analysis) cannot be overlooked.
As sad as it may seem, taking a shortcut because you are dealing with customers is often doomed to fail, and even if yielding the expected results in terms of revenue generation may well damage consideration, and even jeopardize the sense of loyalty.
Link4LEAD's response
In this context, we strongly recommend that vendors consider dealing with their installed base with the same level of dedication as what they would do when establishing a business relationship with new names.
Offering current customers the opportunity to evaluate their situation with regard to capabilities brought via the use of additional products (or services) will allow vendors to maintain constant attention, and hence, develop loyalty.
Thanks to this approach, existing customers are prone to take a serious look at your offerings, as soon as they see fit after completing the evaluation.
This helps you create ideal conditions to up-sell and cross-sell on your customer base.
Your benefits
Using Link4LEAD approach in this context will help you:
- increase your “share of wallet” and/or the average number of products/services sold per customer
- increase customers’ lifetime value.
