Upselling. It?s a key task in retail to generate extra revenue, and raise the average basket spend. But how much upselling does your staff do?
Upselling is a sales technique used to get a customer to spend more by buying an upgraded or premium version of what?s being purchased.
It?s easy to confuse upselling with cross-selling. Upselling typically involves trading up to a better version of what?s being purchased, while cross-selling involves offering the customer a related product or service.
It?s part of a shopper?s natural journey. Often, customers do your upselling for you. Other times, you will need your employees to encourage it. Sometimes, a customer may approach one of your sales team subconsciously wanting to be sold the benefits of a higher-specification item.
There are a few things you can do to improve your staff?s upselling skills. By doing so, you will improve your bottom line.
Hire correctly
By changing your recruitment technique, you can improve the quality of the upsell. In your interview process, ask if a candidate a) knows what upselling is and b) can demonstrate an example where they?ve upsold. If the candidate can successfully navigate this question, things are looking good!
Train staff to upsell
Instead of telling your staff to offer the ?25 premium 9cm pot instead of the budget one, feed the staff the benefits as to why they should. If your staff members are committed to your business, they will feel proud of turning that ?14.99 sale into a ?30 one.
Start your training with something you know they use or do. Ask your team why they choose a certain brand of bottled water instead of the cheaper alternative. Whether they say ?because it tastes better? or something else, you can tell them that they upsold themselves by describing the benefits of the more expensive purchase.
Incentivise upselling
This may be more difficult to monitor, but by running ?upselling? competitions between your staff on the floor and having a prize (a voucher/half a day off) you may see a rise in the average basket spend.
It may also be a way to get rid of premium stock that hasn?t sold quite as well as you expected. Maybe you bought in a higher priced, higher specification seed compost, but your budget option is outperforming them.
By having a competition on selling more of the higher margined product, your staff would be encouraged to upsell from the budget version. Just remember to make your team aware of the benefits of the higher-priced ticket item.
