10 Effective ways to upsell Salesforce® to existing customers

When many companies look to increase their revenue, it's important to work with your most valuable potential market: your current customers. Given that acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 25 times more than retaining a current one, working on upselling and cross-selling is a much more profitable way to grow your business.

This article brings together in a concentrated form our many years of experience in upselling existing customers who use Salesforce. For your convenience, we have formulated 10 life hacks on how to carry out an upsell. 

But first, we want to answer the question: “Why is it important to do upsells?”

Thus, we understand how important it is to give due attention to the process of upselling and to establish it.

Here are our 10 life hacks of Salesforce® upsells: 

1. Imagine that that is your business, review all business processes and identify what can be improved;
2. Read the reviews to the customer service in the internet. Try to find zones where you can enhance the situation;
3. Conduct a brainstorm with the team. Formulate a list of suggestions with the estimates. Keep in mind the ROI of the suggestion and present issues that are in the top to the customer;
4. Analyze project status as invited unbiased manager, identify project organization issues. Prepare a plan of reorganization and present it to the customer;
5. Review existing third-party integrations, prepare demo on real customer data of tool from Salesforce Products (for example Marketing Cloud, Pardot, etc);
6. Conduct Project Retrospective, identify the positives and negatives of previous iterations, document them and propose changes;
7. Ask customers regarding problems and suggestions, request written feedback;
8. Is there a need for documentation? Identify the zones where documentation is needed, prepare document structure and present to the customer (Requirements, QA test-cases, User guides, etc);
9. Are there zones that can be tested using automation testing? Prepare scenarios and budget;
10. Review all Release notes for implemented products and present to the customer new features.

And a couple more advices. You better do this during upsells:

• All Demonstrations should be executed using terms, images, branding from the customer project to look and feel that this material is for him;
• Support information about features with additional materials with articles and videos from Salesforce and similar implementations from competitors;
• Strive to translate all offers into value for the client in business language, as well as technical ones, such as CI / CD, etc;
• Qualitatively prepare for upselling: answer ROI questions, how much it costs, what terms, what will improve in the client’s business from such an innovation, draw understandable diagrams;
• Invite experts (experienced consultants and Salesforce specialists);
• Remember about features which are not implemented in Salesforce and track the timeline of their release;
• Listen to the irritating, unsatisfied customer representative, try to address their pain (propose additional business analyst, QA, etc);
• Study the experience of the colleagues on other projects;
• Wait for the right moment to Upsale, such as when a customer has decided to make a purchase or has reached a milestone, such as having been a customer for a year;
• Make a short introduction and ask if you're interested or not;
• Be cool, don’t look like you vitally need this upsale, tell that just by chance.

Remember that there is no need to impose anything. To successfully make upsells, it is important not to sell the product, but to solve the client's problem.