Product-Led Cross-sell

Cross-selling new products to an existing client base helps increase revenue while decreasing marketing costs in a time when customer acquisition costs are getting increasingly high whether you’re reliant on digital ads or on your sales team. Product marketing can enable cross-sell with on-platform communications and prompts that drive interest and bundling that demonstrate product synergies.

My Process

Cross- and up-selling is usually led by Account Managers. However, I noticed that with these new products which targeted users in an organisation (as opposed to buyers/decision makers), there was opportunity to create awareness and interest within the platform. Having this interest of users reinforced our sales pitches to buyers. As in B2B sales, the user and the buyer are usually different people with varying need, I made sure our comms were tailored to showcase suitable benefits depending on the agent’s role.

I started by mapping out how different products in our portfolio work together from user journey and product lifecycle points of view, to discover underlying synergies and use case scenarios I could highlight to convert users.

Then, I identified placements for immediate cross-sell prompts on-platform. I worked with a Product Designer to design customisable product marketing placements for banners and upsell pages within the product that we could repurpose in the future. We wanted to make sure it felt organic and didn’t disturb user experience.

We created 11 on-platform banners and 8 upsell pages to be used rotationally to promote the new services across different placements such as while completing a work order, on the Dashboard or on the page that gets most traffic. I also created similar communications to cross-sell Plentific to the existing clients within the platforms of the two new companies we acquired. Marketing, Sales & Customer Success teams were excited to utilise the space to announce new services or queries in the marketplace. We made it so that the placements would be easily customisable on back-end and live within minutes. I also did segmentation work and had custom properties implemented in tech stack for personalised comms. I also wrote copy and helped develop visual assets. It was a great learning experience to convince stakeholders on why we should allocate development resources here.

Finally, to measure its impact, I built a tracking system with events created, so we saw user interactions with the new launches and set up workflows to notify our Account Managers each time a user showed interest.

Results

Once Segment events created, I tracked analytics on my Mixpanel dashboard and saw that over %35 of all users clicked to learn more. Banners also prove to be instrumental for shifting user behaviour (e.g. verifying your account on Stripe when we switched from Mangopay). Communications provided basis for Account Managers to chat with buyers about the products, claiming the interest shown by users within their organisation.