Upselling and Cross-Selling: Strategies to Improve Client Relationships and Agency Revenue

Boost client relationships and agency revenue with effective upselling and cross-selling strategies. Discover six key techniques to maximize value.

For many agencies, the most valuable clients aren’t the ones who sign the highest-value agreements at the start of their relationship, but the ones who prove to be a source of repeat business time after time.

To avoid stagnation and maximize your agency’s sustainable, long-term growth, you’ll need to master your approach to cross-selling and upselling techniques.

If you’re looking to forge closer client relationships and bring more revenue into your agency, then this guide is for you. Here’s six cross selling and upselling strategies to draw greater value from every client account.

Segment by Client Satisfaction

One of the best ongoing selling strategies you can use for closer client relationships and successful upsells is to monitor client satisfaction and identify “hot” leads who are more likely to be receptive to your pitches.

Some of the techniques your account managers and sales team can use to gauge client satisfaction include:

• Sending out regular surveys asking your clients to rate their overall satisfaction with their service as well as particular areas of the campaign.
• Inviting constructive criticism through feedback forms and tracking how often this is used by different client contacts.
• Actively gauge how likely your clients are to recommend your service and assign each one a net promoter score (NPS).
• Integrate these data sets and more into a customer segmentation platform to categorize your clients and organize them based on the strength of your working relationship.

By segmenting your clients based on their level of satisfaction, you’ll make it much easier to identify accounts that are ripe for an upsell, and avoid the risk of souring a relationship by account managers jumping the gun.

Match Clients to the Benefits of an Upsell

When you’re developing new service packages or products to expand your agency’s value proposition, it can be easy to focus on the mechanics of how you’ll deliver the service, and lose sight of one of the key principles of sales:

Clients don’t care so much about the features of your service, as how they’re going to benefit them.

When you’re working to convert active clients, you need to be able to communicate a clear, tangible benefit that will help them overcome the challenges that started your working relationship in the first place.

If you have a client who struggles to spread their resources over several different marketing channels, then an email marketing package might help clear their to-do lists and streamline other workflows. For clients facing issues with their existing web hosting and scaling their websites, consider reseller hosting as part of your agency’s offering. This can help your clients overcome some of the technical barriers and free up web maintenance resources at their end.

By making sure you’re intimately familiar with the core benefits attached to each upsell product or service, you’ll make it much easier to identify the needs of your various client accounts and match them to the core benefits of your products and services for a stronger sales pitch.

Find Common Threads in Your Clients’ Strategies

Like any agency, there’s probably certain common traits that are shared by many of your clients, whether that’s because of a specialism you’re actively promoting, or a more passive trend that’s brought a number of similar companies into your sales funnel.

By identifying these common themes and developing your upsell offerings around them, you can give your account management team greater flexibility to pitch upsells to more of their client contacts, get more deals over the line, and increase your revenue.

These shared traits might be related to the kinds of industries you target, for example ecommerce companies that are trying to find the right social media influencers in an oversaturated market. Other times, you might have better luck selling based on recurring pain points that are more related to universal shifts in the market.

Identifying common themes in your clients’ strategies will empower you to develop products or services that have a more universal appeal for your general customer base and focus on being the best at this offering, rather than having to shift your attention from one offering to another while accommodating for different clients’ needs.

Build an Upsell Portfolio

Even when you’ve articulated the core benefits as part of your cross-selling strategies, and adjusted your upselling offerings to match your clients’ strategies, you may still encounter some difficulty and trepidation when trying to get your clients over the line.

To counter this issue, your agency should plan to develop an upsell portfolio that clearly demonstrates the marketing ROI of the services you’re looking to upsell and give your clients an idea of just how valuable additional services could be for them.

Some of the views and datasets to consider using as part of your upsell portfolio might include:

• Full case studies outlining client success stories related to the services you’re planning to upsell.
• Live marketing dashboards that show how well your auxiliary services are benefiting campaigns in progress.
• Highlighting “before and after” snapshots of past clients’ KPIs that illustrate how well your additional services have bolstered their marketing.

Having this kind of objective proof on hand can help fortify your upsell pitches, and make it much easier for your clients to visualize the benefits your service will have on their marketing campaigns.

Let Client Metrics Decide the Level of Pressure

You may have been knocking client goals out of the park for months and developing a great rapport with your clients. However, this can easily be undermined if you’re too impatient to move the needle and fall into the trap of high-pressure upselling.

Even if you’re absolutely desperate to recoup your investment in a new service offering and get some clients over the line, making this too obvious may cause your contacts to feel overwhelmed.

Instead of scatter-gunning your upsell offers whenever you have an opportunity, we recommend monitoring your clients’ metrics closely, and offering to solve clear and current challenges, instead of pitching on the strength of your services’ more general benefits.

By looking for dips in sales, traffic, and other metrics your clients look to for a health check, you’ll make your upsell pitches more naturally attractive, rather than having to resort to more traditional hard sells.

Bundle Your Upsells

Bundling your upsells can be a great method of generating more revenue from every satisfied customer, while using your account managers’ time and resources as efficiently as possible by focusing it on a smaller group of clients.

If, for instance, you have a client who’s interested in social media management upsell, you might want to bundle this with a graphic design or video content production service. If they’re leaning more towards an email marketing service, you might want to attach this to your CRO or landing page design services.

Bundles aren’t always hot sellers, and as we outlined in our previous point, you shouldn’t try to push an additional service that your clients don’t have a real need for.

However, if one service clearly complements another, and you effectively highlight how this bundle makes each included service cheaper, bundling can be a great way to upsell supporting products through the strength of your core services.

Finding Your Cross-selling and Upselling Strategies

Though you may have a lot of value baked into your agency’s services, developing your value proposition is only half the battle. With the right cross-selling and upselling strategies integrated into your business, you’ll be able to unlock the full potential, achieve better results for your clients, and draw more revenue from each account.

We hope that this guide has helped you develop your own roadmap for upselling and cross-selling, and provided some useful insights to create a strategy that works for you.