While you may not have recognized it was happening, the last time you ordered from a fast food restaurant there is a good chance you experienced cross-selling.

Cross-selling is a well established and highly effective marketing practice utilized by a wide variety of industries, ranging from financial institutions to fast food restaurants. When you cross-sell related products and services to your existing customers, you are making a smart decision. Developing a systematic approach to cross-selling brings in additional revenue with relatively low expense and effort.

Marketers wrack their brains and develop expensive advertising campaigns solely designed to get prospects to focus on their offers. When you cross-sell to existing customers, you don’t have to compete for their attention.

The key elements that make cross-selling work are trust and convenience. Your customers already possess a degree of trust in your company, and this can be converted into additional sales that are not directly related to their existing products.

On the web, the most successful cross-sellers are Amazon and e-Bay. They have mastered the art through sophisticated software to qualify your search and offer you other topic related items.

For instance, when you search for a "saxophone" on e-Bay, you'll notice that the left side navigation bar offers you other instruments, jewelry, collectibles and other related products.

When you search for a "Bob Marley book" on Amazon, you'll notice that they offer you links to other related searches such as Peter Tosh, Bob Marley live, reggae, religion and a link on how to organize your music with cd walls and towers as well as other cross-selling incentives.

This is the power of dynamic websites where cross-selling plays a pivotal role in the customer's buying decision.

And just think about it, Amazon and e-Bay have their websites doing the sales pitches for them - it doesn't cost them more money to sell you on more items - you're on their site, you have a specific reason for being there, and so they have your full attention and are using that opportunity to ask you ..."would you like fries with that?"

At Blade, we believe that failing to implement effective cross-selling programs are a disservice to a client's customer base as it leaves the backdoor open to the competition. Contact us for a cross-selling consultation.

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