Blog To Add To What They Already Have

Sales people who upsell and cross-sell say doing that adds up to 30% to their revenue, Sophia Bernazzani of Hubspot relates. Cross-selling, she explains, encourages the purchase of an “extra” in conjunction with the primary product, while up-selling offers an upgraded version of the product a prospect has just agreed to purchase.

This very wisdom can be applied to online content marketing. In fact, “after-the-fact” online selling is a perfect goal in creating blog content. By tying the “extra” benefit to something online prospects have already demonstrated is important to them (as shown by the very fact they’ve arrived at your blog!) you can demonstrate how adding a service or product (or downloading a usage guide) can enhance the benefit of what they already own.

“The typical sales process involves several stages, beginning with the pre-approach and ending with customer service,” Libraries explains in the course “Customer relationships and Selling Strategies”. The four basic sales strategies, the article goes on to explain, include:

• script-based selling
• needs-satisfaction selling
• consultative selling
• strategic-partner selling

In an after-the-fact (up-selling) situation, the presentation (the blog post) “shows how the offering satisfies the needs identified earlier”. The blog post reviews the FEBA (feature, evidence, benefit, and agreement), reaffirming the wisdom of the prospect’s choice of the existing product or service, showing how the added information, service feature, or product will enhance the benefit.

“Having a larger number of choices makes people feel that they can exercise more control over what they buy. And consumers like the promise of choice: the greater the number of options, the greater the likelihood of finding something that’s perfect for them,” Sheena Iyengar and Kanika Agrawal assert in The Art of Choosing.

Can business blogs help potential clients and customers make better, sometimes complex, decisions? A possible path to achieving that precise result, we have found at Say It For You, involves suggesting questions readers can ask themselves while choosing among many options for adding to products they already own or to services they already use. (Do they want greater ease of use? Better functionality? Additional future capabilities?)

Use content marketing to show how your product or service helps customers use what they already have!