Identifying cross-sell opportunities across a customer base

For most B2B companies the least expensive growth available is selling more of what they already do to customers who already trust them. It is also routinely missed. Account managers know their own accounts, not the whole base. Service lines sit in separate teams with separate systems. Nobody is positioned to see the pattern, so the pattern goes unseen.

Build the whitespace map from invoices

The starting point is a simple matrix: customers down the side, products or service lines across the top, filled in from what has actually been invoiced. Use the ERP for this rather than CRM fields, which tend to record what someone once hoped to sell. The empty cells are the whitespace. They are candidates, not opportunities. Most of them are empty for a good reason.

Narrow the list with evidence

Four kinds of evidence separate a real opportunity from an empty cell.

• Lookalikes. Customers of similar size and sector who already buy the combination. If most comparable customers take both services, the one that takes only one is worth a conversation.
• Timing. A contract renewal approaching, order frequency rising, a new site opening, a run of support requests in an area another service line addresses.
• Relationship. Recent contact, prompt payment and a clean delivery record. A customer with open complaints is not a cross-sell target this quarter.
• Capacity. Whether the business can deliver the additional work in that region with the people it has.

Rank by profit, not revenue

Some cross-sells add revenue and dilute margin, particularly where the additional service is bought on price or is costly to deliver at the customer’s locations. Ranking opportunities by expected contribution, using cost-to-serve data from the ERP, produces a different and better list than ranking by deal size.

Give the account manager the reasoning

A list of names with scores gets ignored. Each opportunity should arrive with its case: why this customer, why now, what evidence supports it and a suggested next step. The account manager can then agree, or disagree with reasons, and either response is useful. Record what happened afterwards, whether won, lost or not relevant, so the next list can be judged against results rather than optimism.

Keep people in control of the contact

Finding the opportunity can be automated. Contacting the customer should not be, at least not without approval. The relationship belongs to the account team, and a poorly timed automated approach costs more than the opportunity is worth. The same applies to data: the analysis should respect who is permitted to see which accounts.

Customer opportunity analysis of this kind is one of the two core uses of RevGen. For the wider picture, see connecting corporate strategy to CRM and ERP data.