Upselling is hard in any industry. But with financial advisors it seems especially so, because clients are quick to say no when offering them something new and more expensive. But that’s to be expected. After all, you’re talking about someone’s life savings. There is an alternative to upselling your products, however.
To build trust and loyalty with your customers, you need to cross-sell instead. Cross-selling is marketing additional products to existing customers, and it’s often practiced in the financial services industry. While upselling occurs when you increase a customer’s value by encouraging them to add services or purchase a more expensive package, cross-selling allows you to increase your profits while continuing to foster a bond with your clients. Let’s talk about the top five ways to increase your profits through cross-selling and why they’re so effective.
5 Ways to Increase Profits Through Cross-Selling
- Automated Follow-ups
- Lead Management Systems
- Remarketing
- Email Campaigns
- Sales Analytics
1. Automate Follow-Ups to Reach More Clients
It’s hard for financial advisors to maximize their value to existing clients, while juggling new prospects on a day-to-day basis. Clients want to feel you understand their needs. By automating your follow-up, you ensure strong communication with your clients in the ways they prefer. Most automated follow-ups can be set up in just a few clicks.
Synchronize all your communications, calls, texts, and emails to inform people of new product announcements, early bird discounts, upgrade offers or any other news you’d like to share. Schedule them ahead of time, assign groups of contacts to each campaign and have them delivered automatically. Automation lets you stay in touch in the background while you focus on other business growth opportunities in real time.
2. Lead Management Systems Build Trust
When Financial Advisors forget important details about their clients, it can break their trust. Trust has become the single most important factor for success in recent years, as more businesses are flocking to online structures.
A lead management system enables you to build trust and create long-lasting relationships with your clients. Lead management systems increase close ratios by helping you to consistently respond to leads in a timely manner. You can put in pertinent information about their family, lifestyle, hobbies or anything else clients may find to be important to their lives.
The ability to score and rate leads quickly and easily saves you time, money, and hassle. With a lead database you can find out what’s working and what customer information you can use to build the trust your clients deserve.
3. Remarket Your Clients To Increase Profitability
Your practice could experience a loss or gain in customers at any point in time. But, the more engaged your clients are in your business, the more resources you have available to you in the long term. Remarketing to your clients lets you check in with them regularly to see if their needs have changed. See if they’re willing to try a new product or service.
Offer them a free trial or a packaged deal showing them the immediate discount they could receive if they decide to buy. Create folders or filters to set up a campaign targeting clients who are more likely to respond to your cross-selling strategies. This will invite more referrals and increase your profit per client.
4. Email Marketing Campaigns Save Time and Money
Investing in marketing is not intuitive for most Financial Service advisors. It’s often the last thing they do to build awareness or increase client spend. And the Financial Service businesses who do invest in marketing spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But Marketing doesn’t have to be costly.
There are plenty of opportunities to get ahead of the competition and new technology has made marketing more accessible and cheaper to do. Look around and you’ll see a multitude of business-to-business services that have marketing technology built into their daily communications. Take emails for example. With templated email marketing campaigns, you can deliver automated emails based on triggers, saving you hours of manual work and personnel costs.
Studies show that using a system with customizable email templates saves over twenty-seven minutes a day per person. That’s 117 work hours a year! Email templates let you cross-sell your clients with ease, all while spending more time building your customer base over the phone and in person.
5. Use Sales Analytics to Find Out What Works For You
Most small businesses do not know their ideal customer. Financial Advisors are no exception. There are a vast amount of people with different backgrounds looking for Financial services, but if you have a model customer in mind, you can target the people most likely to buy from you.
With access to sales analytics, you can build and filter reports based on specific information. This helps you figure out who would be more interested in your services and who wouldn’t. From acquisition to close, running reports lets you see appointments booked and their results. And best of all, you can see which cross-selling techniques have worked in the past, so your team can apply them in the future.
Cross-Selling Techniques Grow Your Practice
There are a lot of cross-selling opportunities to improve your practice’s profitability. Find a proven system to set yourself up for success. Scale your sales processes to focus on growth and focus on the most profitable strategies for your practice. The more you use a system built for your specific needs, the more effective your customer interactions will be and the more profitable they’ll become.
Download an infographic of the above article here. What techniques do you use when cross-selling or up-selling your clients? We love hearing new ideas! Drop us a note at feedback@dyl.com
