One of my friends went to a local electronics shop to buy a new laptop and came out with more stuff that he planned to buy
. He not only came home with expensive laptop that he budgeted for but also the handful of things like printer, pen drive, two-year service agreement, antivirus software etc for his small business. Behind this was the sales associate who used his up selling and cross selling skills to entice my friend to buy all these things. Even my friend was also very happy and delighted to get these great deals. Sales associate was aware that how he needs to interact with him, which questions to ask, how to respond to his answers. He listened to his customer and then sold his products through cross selling up selling by understanding his need. Most of the time we see that customers feel comfortable when they buy the certain product and even the sales associate dont feel to sell more products to them. But what if sales associate start offering solutions that subtly up-sell and cross-sell for you?
This is what all sales associate try to do. The most important thing for the sales associate when he/she interact with the customer is to understand their needs like for what they have visited you store and after that consider their unspoken need. If any customer comes to you and ask you for the laptop and you also know that user also makes lot of presentations at quarterly board meetings. After this you offer the customer with 22-inch laptop and tell them that our customer will be happy if you create PowerPoint displays in this system. This type of interaction solves the users spoken as well as unspoken need. Along with this if sales staff also sells other related products which are necessary with laptop. But for all this sales associates need to be trained so that they can sell not only the product which customer demand but also the related products. They need to be given proper training to polish their cross sell up sell skills. The sales staff should also drop any pre-conceived ideas about what they think customers want because buy the same product 99 times doesn't mean they won't same product 100th time also. Always upgrade the sales team with the product features, benefits and their related products so that it becomes easy for them to sell.