Share
Share
Almost every company sees the benefits of cross-selling additional products and services to their customers. In addition to increasing revenue, when done right, cross-selling can also:
- Increase customer “stickiness” and reduce customer churn
- Improve margins — by both avoiding the cost of new customer acquisition and by identifying opportunities to streamline customer service
- Support advanced AI-driven recommendation engines
- Lock out competitors
With all these advantages, it’s no wonder most organizations are already working to cross-sell products and services. However, many organizations struggle to do so effectively. Why is that? In this article, we’ll talk about why organizations struggle with cross-selling and how Profisee can super-charge your cross-selling efforts.
Harvard Business Review: Data Readiness for the AI Revolution
Why Do Organizations Struggle With Cross-Selling?
Siloed Data
Many organizations have multiple customer-facing sales teams, independent business units or separate product lines. The need for specialization sometimes drives these realities, but just as likely are a result of past mergers or acquisitions.
Data about your existing customers spans multiple systems. For example, you may have:
- Customers in your CRM
- Customers and purchase history in your accounting platform
- Customers, products and ship-to locations in your ERP
- Customer outreach in a marketing automation platform or customer data platform
Further complicating things, these systems and data siloes are often replicated for each business line or product family. It’s clear that this disparate data needs to be aggregated to enable effective cross-selling. But because the data is often inconsistent, incomplete, duplicated and inaccurate, simply pulling all the data into an enterprise data warehouse or data lake is not enough.
Customer Complexity
As a B2B organization, your customers themselves are often highly complex. The companies you do business with constantly change and evolve through relocations, acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures and legal entity restructuring.
For example, your organization may have had a long-standing relationship selling DuroFit™ sealants in support of DuPont’s production of Dacron and Lycra. In 2004, this part of DuPont’s business was sold to Koch Industries as a wholly owned subsidiary called Invista. This kind of corporate change presents both a threat and an opportunity.
As a potential threat, Koch Industries — the new parent company — has a favorable relationship with your top competitor. As an opportunity, there may be ways to expand your relationship with Koch by selling products to sibling subsidiaries, such as Georgia-Pacific.
The net impact is there is no reliable, complete record of the total customer relationship across customer parents, children and siblings, or across your own internal lines of business or product families.
The Cost of Low-Quality Customer Data
With all these challenges, many organizations’ cross-selling efforts are largely ad-hoc, based on the sales organization’s “gut feel,” or worse, based upon incomplete and inaccurate customer insights. The net impact is:
- Missed opportunities to expand revenue: Marketing and sales teams across business lines are unaware of potential cross-sell opportunities, which means they miss opportunities to grow deals with additional products and services and find it impossible to simply identifying high-probability cross business line sales pursuits.
- Inconsistent interactions across customer teams: By not understanding which cross-business-line product and services are already acquired by the customer, independent teams do not understand the total customer relationship, are often unaware of each other’s actions, are unaware of the customer’s total value to the business and engage in uncoordinated activities. This can lead to customer frustration, poor customer service, and potentially even customer churn.
- High SG&A, lower margin: Selling to and servicing existing customers is always more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. For business-to-business organizations, new customer acquisition costs can range from $1,000 to over $20,000.
- Emerging customer needs fulfilled by competitors: Without effective cross-marketing and cross-selling, your customers are likely not aware of your full portfolio of product and service offerings. For this reason, emerging customer needs may be fulfilled by competitors in your market. This not only results in lost revenue, but also can introduce competitors that create future pricing pressure or ultimately even lead to customer churn.
To grow revenues in a competitive market, reduce SG&A, increase margins and prevent customer churn, it’s imperative to cross-sell. However, even with this as a known imperative, many organizations struggle to cross-sell effectively.
Breaking Through Cross-Sell Challenges
The key to effective cross-selling is unraveling complex customers and their relationships—even when the data necessary to do so is siloed, incomplete, inaccurate or duplicated. This is where Profisee comes in.
Profisee brings adaptive fuzzy matching to resolve complex commercial identities, even when key information such as Tax ID or DUNS number are missing or incorrect. Profisee can enrich mastered customer data with third-party data providers such as Dun & Bradstreet to unravel the constantly changing tangle of corporate mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and divestitures, creating a single, reliable source of truth for your customers, as well as their corporate children, siblings and parents at any point in time.
Even with best-in-class matching and configurable rules, there will be times when data stewards may need to review proposed or recommended data remediation. Thankfully, you can easily configure Profisee with key data quality or proposed data change confidence thresholds to automatically trigger workflows and data review or remediation actions from the data experts across your organization and business lines.
Supercharge Your Cross-selling Efforts with Profisee
The unique capabilities of Profisee’s advanced, adaptive MDM platform are the key to helping your organization super-charge your cross-selling efforts. With complete, timely and accurate information on your existing customer base and the products and services they own, you’ll be able to clearly identify opportunities for selling additional products. Your marketing and sales teams will be empowered to increase cross-selling efficiently and effectively as well.
Effective cross-selling has significant impacts. Companies that effectively cross-sell can increase customer lifetime value, increase customer profitability, reduce customer churn and gain competitive advantage.
Visit our use case library to learn more about how Profisee can work with your organization to super-charge your cross-selling efforts.
Explore MDM Use Cases
