Well-crafted questions are the key to effective upselling. Learn these five excellent ways to add more value and increase each sales opportunity.
“Do you want fries with that?”
Years ago McDonalds made untold millions with that one phrase alone. But, you never hear it anymore. They simply bundled the fries, burger, and drink together. Today, you have to tell the attendant that you don’t want fries.
Brilliant.
Upselling is an excellent way to up the value for the customer and the revenue to your company. It can be an excellent win-win when done properly. In a business setting, however, it’s not as easy as, “Do you want fries with that?”
Instead, upselling should focus on discovering other opportunities once trust has been established. Well-crafted questions are the key to effective upselling. Rather than product-focused upsell questions, make them business focused to reinforce your positioning as a trusted business advisor.
Use these five easy steps to construct consultative upsell questions:
1. Product – Select a specific product or service
2. Feature – List the features of the product or service
3. Benefit – Identify the benefits associated with each feature
4. Issues – Choose the business issues/challenges those benefits resolve
5. Question – Write a question associated with each business issue/challenge
Let’s look at an example for a software solution upsell:
1. Product – 2-year VIP Service Plan
2. Feature – 24/7 tech support with senior-level technician
3. Benefit – Immediate access to resolving software problems
4. Issues – Costly downtime due to software problems
5. Question – When your legacy software system went offline with the standard tech support plan in place, how long did it typically take to get you back online?
Use follow-up questions to uncover their need or want for this item like: What impact did that have on your business? How often did your system go offline? How much did that cost your company? How important is it to your customers that you’re back online quickly?
Once they decide to move forward with the additional service, ask another one of your pre-written upsell questions and go through the process again. If they don’t have a need for that service, you can still move on to your next question, because they might see value in that.
Don’t attempt to sell every product or service on every call. It can get overwhelming to a customer who’s already bought to suffer through another 37 questions. Ask a few relevant questions to test their receptivity and then move on.
You can use this formula for the same product or service over and over again, just by changing the features or benefits. In a short time, you’ll have a set of excellent upsell questions to boost your sales. You’ll be amazed at the opportunities to provide more value for the customer and more revenue for you and your company.