Everyday companies are finding innovative ways to leverage technology for more effective cross-selling in the field. What methods have been proven successful?

Your products and services are constantly evolving to keep up with customer demands. And as your product catalog improves, your sales team must learn and retain new information — which is easier said than done.

Still, aligning internal communication and strengthening your salespeople’s product knowledge is imperative to give your clients a customized, enhanced experience with your brand.

The need is obvious. Meeting it is anything but. For this conundrum, technology can come to the rescue. Let’s focus on how technology can be leveraged for cross-selling opportunities, specifically.  

Arm Your Customer Success Team with Better Insights

From a customer success standpoint, cross-selling requires strong communication from reps in the field. It’s important for all members of the team to know what’s happening so the continued communication is flawless and cross-selling opportunities can be taken advantage of in a timely manner.

By launching a mobile application, you can sync field notes with a marketing automation tool to capture sales activity and discover cross-selling opportunities:

  • Analyze trends in product activity
  • Log product quotes sent through integrations like Salesforce
  • Capture product viewing data activity

By monitoring these insights, not only can your customer service team track global actions, they can use data for customized cross-selling. In fact, according to Accenture, when customer success teams offer relevant recommendations or remember business conversations, they’re 75% more likely to cross-sell or upsell a company and 73% of sales teams acknowledge that cross-departmental collaboration is absolutely critical to their overall sales process.

Equip Frontline Employees with Relevant Information

Well-versed salespeople not only sign more customers, but they close higher value deals with more products associated with them.

In order to create a frontline of prepared and able salespeople, you need to eliminate the “sales default effect,” or the habit of only selling a small segment of products due to a limited product repertoire. In order to break the “sales default effect,” a sales team must have easy access to the latest pieces of marketing collateral.

The solution seems simple.

But, studies show that about 80% of content created by the marketing team goes unused by salespeople.

Not only does this render the material a waste of money and time, it means your sales team may be misinformed, and not able to sell to the best of their ability. Also, this means your marketing ROI is reduced. With improved tools and content, your sales team can pitch stronger, more robust product bundles.

Increase Customization Through Mobile Apps

You can spend countless hours preparing for a meeting, but even the most prepared teams can fall victim to the twists and turns a sales call can take. Having technology on your side can help your sales team pivot and become instantly informed on topics that may arise unexpectedly.

Find a solution that allows your team to create interactive experience that promotes related or recommended content based on a customer’s current buying habits. Not only does this type of intelligence make it easier for your team to access important marketing materials, it allows them to customize products to a client’s purchasing behavior in real-time.

According to Salesforce, high-performing sales teams are 2.8 times more likely to say their sales organizations have become hyper-focused on personalizing customer interactions over the past 12–18 months than underperforming teams.

Using technology to predict buying behavior is one way to personalize the sales experience and stay ahead of the competition.

Move Away from Websites

It’s time to say goodbye to websites for field sales. The disadvantages of websites as a sales tool are plentiful.

  • Issues arise with unreliable internet
  • Slow loading pages are a bad user experience
  • Websites make it difficult to send multiple files by email
  • Websites are not designed to be a sales-specific tool
  • Website analytics are not sales-specific

Mobilizing large product datasets from internal systems into an easy to use app will help your team access crucial information whether they are online or offline. Sales enablement tools also make it easy to track and report activities in the field, when cross-sells are most likely to occur.

Websites don’t share the same capabilities.

With stronger sales enablement tools, companies can now combine internal and external data, communication and strategy for more effective cross-selling techniques.

Want to see what a cross-selling app looks like in action? Get a demo of Bigtincan FatStax!