Are you overlooking up-selling opportunities with your existing clients?

When working at growing their business, most IT Solution Providers and Managed Service Providers (MSP) naturally concentrate their sales and marketing efforts on finding new clients.

Adding a new client will mean additional revenue and typically, the beginning of a relationship with a new client is a great time to sell them on a broad range of your products and services.

But focusing exclusively on new clients in your sales and marketing efforts can be a mistake. There are a wealth of sales opportunities right under your nose—with your existing client base!

“I didn’t know you did that!”

It’s easy to overlook your existing clients when you’re looking for new opportunities. After all, if a client was interested in buying from you they already have the relationship with you, so wouldn’t they just have asked?

Many of us have the experience of a client informing us they’ve bought a new telephone system or a new printer from a third-party supplier, and when we politely ask them why they didn’t consider us for the sale, they reply with the familiar phrase “I didn’t know you did that!”.

So, don’t assume that your existing clients know about or understand all the products and services they could sell you.

Up-selling to existing clients

To avoid overlooking potential sales opportunities with existing clients, I’d recommend putting together a selling matrix.

Within an Excel spreadsheet, a Google sheet or even on a plain old piece of paper, draw two axis.

On the top axis list all the products and services you typically sell to clients. Things like IT Support contracts, Off-Site Backup, Disaster Recovery, E-Mail Filtering, Anti-Virus, and so on.

Then, on the left axis list all of your existing clients by name.

Finally, mark off those services that your client has already bought or is currently buying from you—leaving you with a clear idea of those services they are NOT buying from you.

Marketing Campaigns

The products or services your clients are NOT buying from you should help you form the basis of one or more marketing campaigns.

For instance, if you spot that the majority of your existing clients are not buying email security services from you, then you should concentrate your marketing efforts on explaining why email security is a good idea for all businesses to implement.

Share this marketing with your existing clients. Follow-up with them by telephone and email. Bring the service up during meetings with the client. Make sure they are aware of what the product or service is, and why it would benefit them to buy it from you.

You probably already have a high level of trust with your client, so giving them the opportunity to buy more from you will generate more revenue than you may have considered. And the marketing campaigns that you produce can easily be modified to use when trying to attract new clients too—an added bonus!

Conclusion

It’s a mistake to overlook the importance of additional revenue that can be generated from up-selling to your existing clients. Selling additional products and services to your existing clients is typically easier than selling to new clients, as you have already built a trusted relationship with those clients.

Don’t assume that your existing clients know about your products and services. Make sure they are aware of how these other products and services can benefit their business and help them grow. Build an upsales matrix to help you quickly highlight those products and services you sell which many of your clients don’t already use.

Up-selling to existing clients should be something that all IT businesses do as a matter of course. To ignore up sales opportunities is to leave money on the table.