If you want to increase your average purchase value and sell more to the existing audience you’ve already worked hard to acquire, leveraging contact scoring to increase cross-sells and upsells is the way to go. 

Want to see exactly how (and why) you should use contact scoring to increase cross-selling and upselling and why this is so crucial for your business? Let’s take a look.  

What is the difference between upselling and cross-selling?

Cross-selling and upselling are strategies that every business and salesperson needs to know if they want to sell more to their existing customers and get as much value from each client as possible.

Upselling	Cross-selling
Upselling is the process of trying to sell users items at a higher price point than what they’ve already purchased or what they’re considering purchasing.	Cross-selling is the process of selling a different product(s) to an existing customer based on what they’ve purchased before.
Example:	Example:
Zapier is automation software that connects different third-party apps, and while you can do a lot with their base plans, there are limits. They have several “premium” apps that require upgraded plans, which is a great way to upsell higher plans to existing customers who already use the tool.	Semrush offers a keyword research and SEO optimization suite of tools. Plan upgrade is only useful for adding more team members or tracking more sites, so upselling wouldn’t work. However, they use cross-selling to advertise their content creation platform, where customers can order content like site pages or press releases ready-made.

Why Cross-Selling and Upselling Are So Vital 

There are a few core reasons why all businesses should take advantage of cross-selling and upselling. These include the following:

Your average order value goes up 

This is the simplest and most significant reason cross-selling and upselling are essential to any marketing strategy, including for B2B businesses.

Whether customers are purchasing higher-cost products or additional items, it means that your order values are increasing. 

This can be significant. In 2016, Amazon attributed 35% of their growth to cross-selling. 

It’s easier to sell to existing customers than to acquire new ones

Warm audiences are easier to convert than cold audiences or those who haven’t yet purchased from you.

Focusing on increasing your total purchases from existing customers instead of simply putting all your effort into acquiring new customers can mean faster revenue acceleration before you know it. 

Cross-selling and upselling lead to improved retention

When done correctly, cross-selling and upselling can lead to improved client retention.

You’ll increase the perceived value of your business because they may be working with you to fill several needs at once; this means it would be more difficult to switch to a competitor.

The customer lifetime value is improved 

Your lifetime value (LTV) tells you how valuable the average customer is, and what they purchase and how often are essential factors in the equation here.

It costs anywhere from 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. That’s a crucial metric to consider. And when you retain customers longer, their LTV goes up. 

How can we use lead scoring for upsells and cross-sells?

Enter: Contact scoring.

Contact scoring is the process of looking at different qualities, actions, and behaviors of an individual contact and assigning them a score. This score can assess whether they’re a good fit for cross-selling or upselling opportunities, helping your sales team to identify deals before it’s too late. 

Contact scoring tools can allow you to look at specific data points for existing contacts, including leads and customers, and assign scores based on each. 

You can track data like:

• Have they visited your support center or contacted customer service?
• Are they opening your emails? 
• Have they paused their account for one month?
• How often are they using the tool or reaching account usage limits? 

Quality contact scoring tools can take this information into a strategic sales approach using a co-dynamic method.

Using a co-dynamic method can help you understand who your best prospects and high-value customers are. You can learn more about the customer cycle to optimize it for cross-selling and upselling opportunities. 

The Best Lead Scoring Models to upsell and cross-sell more clients

Contact scoring is only as valuable as the models used to give you those scores, and we’re confident in our upselling and cross-selling models here at Breadcrumbs. 

Let’s look at the models we use to help your team reliably identify (and convert!) upselling and cross-selling opportunities.  

The Best Lead Scoring Model to upsell your clients

Our upselling contact scoring model takes the following data points into account: 

Fit model

• Your NPS score. Your Net Promoter Score tells you how likely customers are to recommend your business to others. This is a direct reflection of customer satisfaction. If customers have given you a high score, they will be a better fit. 
• The number of support tickets logged. The more support tickets a customer has logged, the lower your score. 

Activity model

• Visits to your support center. The higher, the better, and the lower the number of visits, your score will be lower. 
• Number of support tickets escalated. The higher the number of support tickets that have been escalated, the lower your score will be. This is often a direct reflection on the customer experience. 
• How they’re engaging with content like webinars or optional content downloads. Strong engagement will give you a higher score and can include signing up for and attending webinars or conferences, downloading lead magnets, and more.
• How they’re engaging with the product. The higher the engagement, the better your score will be. When was their lost login, and how close are they to reaching their plan’s threshold?

When you want to push customers to upgrade their plan or purchase higher-level products, you want to time your offers well. Looking for contacts actively engaged with your content and plan is a good sign. 

Someone who continually hits towards the top threshold of their plan is a great candidate for an upsell, especially if they’ve also given you a highly-rated NPS score and haven’t submitted many support tickets. They’re happy with the plan; they just need more. 

The Best Lead Scoring Model to cross-sell your clients

Our cross-selling model template (which is fully customizable!) considers the following data points:

Fit model

• Your NPS score. Your Net Promoter Score is a direct reflection of customer satisfaction. If this score is higher, that’s good; if it’s lower, that’s not good.
• The number of support tickets logged. The more support tickets a customer has logged, the lower your score will be.  
• The number of months since a contract’s start date. If clients have been with you for at least six months, that’s a good time to start to cross-sell. That way, you aren’t selling too aggressively too fast, and it gives them time to realize how much value they get from the tool they’ve already signed up for. 

Activity model

• Visits to your support center. Users who are more engaged visit your support center more often in many cases. A higher score here is a good thing.
• Number of support tickets escalated. You want fewer support tickets to be escalated because this can reflect a negative customer experience. 
• Downloads of product briefs. You want a higher score here, as it shows that users actively use your products and want to get more out of them. This is particularly true if they download product briefs for products or services they haven’t purchased yet. 

Breadcrumbs allows you to customize how you want to rank different factors here (such as setting different thresholds for NPS scores and how they impact ranking) so that you can truly customize your scoring system for your business.

For example, let’s imagine that one of your customers has had issues with your product or service that significantly impacted their experience. They’ve given you a low NPS score and have logged and escalated multiple support cases. 

That’s not an indicator that this is a great time for a cross-selling pitch because you need to focus on making them happy with what they’ve already purchased. 

Instead, look for customers who have said they would recommend your business to others, who have engaged with your product briefs and support center, and who are already satisfied with your product or service.

What to do with your scored clients

Once you have created your contact scoring models for upsell or cross-sell, it’s now time to analyze the results and act on the signals that your customers are sending you right now.

When using Breadcrumbs, you’ll immediately know which customers are worth reaching out to and which ones still need some gentle nudges to move to the next customer journey stage.

Let’s see how Breadcrumbs works and how it can assist you in correctly ranking your customers to uncover upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

How Breadcrumbs works 

Breadcrumbs takes a co-dynamic approach to scoring. This means that your score will contain both a letter and a number, with 16 possible different variations, all with time decay factored into the equation (as over time, people become less likely to take an action and thus lowering their score).

The letter represents fit, which determines how aligned the contact is with your buyer persona based on factors like their business size, industry, and needs. This is calculated by creating a usage vs. operational cost score.

Options include A, B, C, and D. A is the best fit, and D is the lowest. 

The number will represent activity and engagement levels, which are based on factors like whether they’ve signed up for a trial, how responsive they are to emails, and how they’re using the tool. 

Your potential scores here include 1, 2, 3, 4, with 1 being the highest level of engagement and 4 being the lowest. 

An A1 customer, for example, is as high intent as you can possibly get. They’re a great fit for your business, and they’re highly engaged. You want to act immediately.

You should never ignore D4 contacts, but the reality is that they may not be a good fit, and they’re not as engaged. You don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket here. 

How to engage with your scored clients

Now that you know the difference between an A1 and a D4 customer, you’re now probably wondering what you should do with a B2 customer. 

The key factor here is that in order to see the most lift, you want to automate these actions as much as possible.

Protip: Breadcrumbs will route back the scoring information to your CRM or marketing automation tool so that you can create automated workflows to respond to your customers’ intent signals as soon as possible.

While you may need a score for each upsell/cross-sell opportunity, you can start by giving your team these insights:

• A1–A2 Immediately assign a rep to go after these customers. They are a great fit and are engaging right now.
• B1–B2 Offer in-product offers to upsell and cross-sell to these engaged customers with a medium fit score.
• A3–A4 These customers are a great fit but are not ready for your sales team. To re-engage them, consider running two automated campaigns about the products they should move to and try to get them to an A1-A2.
• B3–B4 These customers are not engaging right now, but they are medium fit, so you still have an opportunity to get them to a B1-B2. Consider sending quarterly educational campaigns based on what product upsell/cross-sell they are moving towards.
• C1–D4 We recommend just trying to increase these through behavioral impacts and ads. They will auto-upgrade. 

Key Takeaways 

Cross-selling and upselling are strategies you need to know if you want to sell more to your existing customers and get as much value from each client as possible.

This is where Contact Scoring comes into play.

Contact scoring can give you plenty of actionable and invaluable data to reach out to existing customers at the right time for a cross-sell or an upsell. This makes your marketing and sales teams work much more effectively.

In this guide, we shared the Contact scoring models we use to uncover upsell and cross-sell opportunities – but this is just part of the story.

That’s because you can use Contact Scoring at every stage of the customer journey–as it applies not only to upsell and cross-sell but also to acquisition (remember when it was called lead scoring?) and even churn detection. 

It allows you to prioritize your leads and engage with current customers when they are most likely to buy, upsell, or churn. 

Identifying contacts ready to buy and retaining those at risk of churning just got way easier.