3 Strategies to Help You Identify Upsell Opportunities Using Salesforce

Sales are all about big numbers – the bigger the better. But one number you don’t want to see climb and grow is your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

It’s no secret that getting a new customer is much harder and more expensive than selling to a current customer. Each dollar in revenue from someone who already does business with you has a lower CAC than a dollar from a new company – as much as 76% lower. 

That means growing sales revenue isn’t always about capturing new customers but capturing new business in the form of upselling.

Upsell opportunities are the lifeblood of account-based selling. Whether you’re working with a current customer to provide more value, or you’re finding ways to boost your current deal and grow opportunity size, using an account plan to upsell is a must.

And yet, to say that many customers focus too much on new customer acquisition (with those higher CAC) and not enough on upselling opportunities is an understatement.

If you want to get better at capturing all of this untapped potential, then learning how to hunt for treasure with Salesforce is your next step. 

Here are three Salesforce strategies that will help you upsell like a champ.

1. Use Cross-Filters to ID Accounts with Missing Opportunities 

In Salesforce, you have the basic capability of filtering account information. Most of the time, when you’re using filters that cut across different categories, you’re looking for some kind of data that you already have, like the products/services you’re currently selling.

You can use the same features to find the data you don’t have: products/services that your customers aren’t being sold.

For example, let’s say you offer a product/service called Product X. You have another offering that goes well with it (or is a more valuable version) called Product Z. You can set up cross-filters that look for open opportunities that 

a.) are more likely to close, and 

b.) have a higher potential value. 

Salesforce will give you opportunities that reflect the criteria you provide. In general, accounts that are more likely to spend a lot on Product X would be more willing to spend on Product Z, too, but you can use whatever criteria you think best fit potential upsells.

You can find more information on how to use this process specifically at the Salesforce Developers blog.

2. Find the Most Engaged Customer

Upsell opportunities are also presented by customers who really, really like working with you.

Ever been to an NFL game? Maybe you have – maybe you’re a diehard fan, and you never miss a game. You also buy jerseys, attend fan events, read newsletters, boo your general manager on draft day, and so on. Who do you think your favorite franchise is going to target first when they’re looking to sell, say, VIP season tickets? 

You. Why? Because they know you’re more likely to pay because you’re as engaged as you can be.

The more engaged your customers are with the product or service you’ve sold them, the more likely they are to at least be receptive to getting more value. 

When you’re defining who qualifies as an engaged customer, you’re trying to answer questions such as:

1. How often are they using your product?
2. How much of your product/service are they using? Are they utilizing every feature? Only some? Maybe just one or two?
3. What percentage of their team is using your product/service? Is adoption widespread, or limited to just one team or business unit?

Accounts that have everyone on their team using every feature of your product/service on a daily basis are about as ripe as you can get for upsell opportunities. This isn’t to say that under-engaged customers wouldn’t sign up for more, but that’s not as likely.

Chances are, you’ve built strong customer success relationships with your most engaged accounts (learn how to easily do that with our relationship mapping tool). These relationships make it easier for your sales team to pitch new upsell opportunities and have them actually close. 

 3. Use an App to Identify White Space in an Account

“White space” sounds like a horror movie set in Alaska, but in sales, it has a much more pleasant meaning. It is the opportunity for new revenue in an account.

White space contains all the deals you could make but haven’t pursued…yet. If you can explore the white space, you can find those deals and capture that account-based selling Holy Grail: a company’s total share of wallet.

Of course, you probably won’t get 100% share of wallet for every account. But if you shoot for the moon, and miss, you still wind up in space, right?

The best way to do this is to use an opportunity visualization app. An app like this provides more automated and advanced insights beyond what Salesforce can do by itself. 

You can use opportunity visualization to produce white space reports, which give you a detailed look at the accounts with the best potential. The process is a lot less time-intensive and much more user-friendly than doing it yourself manually with the core CRM features. Plus, it gives you a deeper look into your prospects.

The Salesforce app we’ve developed that performs this vital feature is in our key account management product, CRUSH. 

Visualizing opportunity potential is a game-changer on so many levels. The most important is having all of this treasure-hunting technology at your fingertips, within Salesforce. 

No matter what methods you use, looking for upsell opportunities is a major part of why account-based selling is so important. Only by taking a comprehensive approach toward key accounts can you find the fruit that’s ripe for the pickin’. If finding upsell opportunities and diving into the white space isn’t a part of your account management strategy, it should be.

With these three strategies, you’ll be off to a great start. Learn how you can enhance your account-planning strategy in Salesforce with Prolifiq CRUSH.