How to Identify Cross-Selling Opportunities in Your ABM Funnel

One of the main levers of revenue growth is selling to your existing customer base. This applies to all business-to-business verticals. Here are five account-based tactics for generating more cross-selling opportunities.

Start with Segmentation

The most promising prospects for cross-selling opportunities are those who have already infused your product or service into their life. How does your organization measure this today?

Tools such as Mixpanel and event-based analytics tools allow you to measure product usage. Integrate this data into your CRM to run a report on the most active users of your product.=

If you don’t have a tool that can help you understand product usage, account-based scoring is another mechanism for prioritizing accounts. Firmographic, demographic, and web analytics data can help you score each company based on the variables that are indicative of good upsell opportunities.

Install Behavior-Based Nudges

Your product development team can have a strong influence on cross-selling. =

For software companies, here are a couple of nudges your product team can engineer into the experience:

1. Tooltips or grayed-out features within the product can signal to prospects that there is additional functionality at different tiers. Use this functionality sparingly, though—you don’t want your customers to think that they have to keep paying more money to access vital features.
2. Free trials, demos, or samples can also be used to nudge a customer into a cross-sell. If your customer is performing a task in your product that indicates that they are a good upsell opportunity, use automated email and ad-targeting workflows to encourage them to sign up for a trial or demo of your product. 

Sales reps are short on time. Make their lives easier by ensuring the account owner receives email or SMS notifications when their customer account is visiting your website or is visiting certain parts of your application. 

Email signature marketing is another hot tactic. Given that your sales team is sending out dozens of emails every day, each email sent is an opportunity to share a cross-sell-related offer or educational asset. 

Sigstr (recently bought by Terminus) is one platform that allows marketers to continuously refresh email signatures for everyone in the organization, and they can create specific email signatures that may lead to more customers learning about other products you're selling.

Launch Cross-Departmental Campaigns

Collaboration is at the core of account-based marketing (ABM).

Every ABM campaign doesn’t have to include only your marketing and sales departments. Your customer success team and partners/affiliates can have a strong role in growing existing-customer sales as well.

Develop cross-selling strategies with your sales and customer success teams. If your customer success team has recurring discussions with your end users, use these discussions as an opportunity for your account managers (or customer success managers) to introduce new products, betas, case studies, and functionalities that your end users can explore.

Collaborative campaigns don’t have to end with your employees. Your partners, resellers, and customer evangelists are also good candidates to team up with for your next cross-selling ABM campaign.

Leverage Social Proof

Social proof is one of the most impactful ways you can establish credibility for your solution.

In building cross-selling strategies, use social proof to share case studies, testimonials, or compelling stats—for example, perhaps 70 percent of customers in similar situations are already using the prospective solution.

One of the best ways to run a successful cross-selling strategy is by mining existing customer data, building a compelling business case for your product, collaborating with all of your departments (and partners), and engineering a logical trajectory so that customers buy more as they see more value from your product.