Where You Can Go Wrong with
Upselling on Your WaaS

Upselling is great for 2 reasons:

1. It increases revenue per customer
2. It typically reduces the cost of acquiring a customer

According to two vital WaaS metrics – Customer Lifetime Value and Cost of Customer Acquisition – upselling is a great strategy for real success.

However, selling to existing customers isn’t always easy and there’s a few things that can potentially go wrong.

Dissatisfied Customers

Before you try selling new services to your customers, you need to make sure they’re happy with your original services first. This probably sounds obvious, but it’s easy for many businesses to get this wrong.

Horrible Timing

In some cases the upsell attempt is done during horrible timing.

For example, let’s imagine what could happen if your sales team wasn’t connected to your customer support team. Here’s a possible scenario for you… your sales guy has no clue that his customer he’s just about to call is currently in the middle of a long unsettled support issue. When he contacts the customer to sell add-on services, I’m pretty sure he’d have a less than ideal experience.

I’ve personally had a similar experience to this but from the customer’s perspective.  I recently contracted a company to create an animated video for our company. During the design process we ran into a couple of bumps in the road. When I’d call their support team to resolve them, they insisted on pitching me new services before they were even done taking care of my original issues. I’m calling to complain, and you want to try and sell me something new?! Umm, NO thank you!

Just remember, there’s a good time and bad time to try and upsell your customers.

Hidden Costs

Customers don’t respond well when the extra services you’re providing really should be part of the original offer. If it’s a feature that’s essential to make their website function properly, there’s no reason the customer shouldn’t expect it to be included…and not something that they’ll have to pay extra for.

I’ve seen some services that charge more for an add-on service… and require the customer to buy it. I don’t think that’s how you want to establish your relationships with new customers.

Wrong Offer

Offering an add-on service to a customer is typically more effective if it’s targeted to their specific needs. If the add-on is better fitted to your higher-end customers, focus on selling it to them. Then maybe try and offer a smaller version of it to your lower-end customers if you can.

Probably one of the greatest advantages of having a WaaS solution is that you get to know A LOT about your customers and how/why they use your service. That means you should probably be able to cater specifically to each segment of your market with add-ons that’ll makes sense to them.

In fact, when you try to upsell everything to everyone it’ll most likely work against you. When your offers aren’t specific to your target audience, your prospects start to think that you really don’t understand their needs. This is the last thing you want them thinking…especially about your WaaS! If you’re doing it right, everything about your WaaS should reek you understand them and their needs.