How to Upsell Your Current Agency Clients

Welcome to Inbound Sales Journey. If you want to hone your sales skills and learn from the leaders on inbound selling, you've come to the right place. This episode of Inbound Sales Journey is brought to you by the Agency Sales System, the online course designed specifically to teach you how to build a rock solid agency sales system inside your HubSpot CRM. Learn more at dotinbound.com salescourse. Now here are your hosts, Ryan and Greg.

Welcome back to Inbound Sales Journey, episode number 92. This week, Ryan and I are bringing you guys some new sales wisdom. Am I right, Ryan?

You're right.

All right. We're gonna be talking about referrals, and specifically we are gonna be talking about how to upsell your agency's current clients. Ryan, I know you have a little bit of a process outlined for this that you wanted to dig into and share here on the podcast. You wanna break into it and I'll just. And we'll flow through it from there.

Yeah, sure. So upselling is something that we've been asked a lot about. How do we do it? What's our process for upselling current customers? And I think there's a lot of agencies out there that you land a client, you are getting paid by the client, things are going well and everything is good, and you just kind of keep going in the trajectory that you set out in the beginning and you don't really realize. Maybe you realize, but maybe you're not a little unsure as to how to get more value for them and then obviously for yourselves as well. And a big way you do that obviously is through upsells. But the key to most of the things that we talk about in the podcast here is having a process in place. So I wanted to just kind of outline for you some of the things that we've done that have worked in the past. And then hopefully that will help you as you start to develop your own process at your own agency of how do I upsell these customers? So I'm going to kind of break down the four step approach of what we did, and hopefully that gives you guys some ideas of how to start and begin the upsell process. So the first step in upselling current customers into more services that you guys can provide is just simply identifying which customers are able to be upsold. Okay. So there are different circumstances whether you bring in. And for us it's been a little different. So to paint the picture for you, sometimes we sell a website upfront to a customer first, but really they need more than just A website, they need marketing and basically the different pieces of content created and things to really make that website be of value to them. So it starts with a website, we want to upsell them on that. Maybe we're doing some PPC management for a client and we want to, you know, they really actually need a better website that we're directing people to. So we will talk about ways to do that with them. Maybe they have really bad lead generation, but a nice looking website. So, you know, you get what I'm saying that there's a lot of different things that maybe you guys are offering as services that fit well for the clients. So identifying which customers are able to be upsold. So to help you do this, what I want you to kind of think about and focus on first is how long have our customers been working with us? So legacy clients, the relationship is there. They probably need to be upsold. A lot of our legacy clients, at least for a long time, were not paying us nearly enough. But they also weren't getting some of our newer services and offerings that we were doing. And it was just maintaining this old website that we built for them three years ago, hosting and things like that. So there's a great opportunity there. The relationships there, they've been working with you for a while, so that's good. I would say anyone that you've been working with longer than three to six months, and the reason that I say that is typically after three to six months we've been able to provide some value to that customer. Typically when we provide more value, they're going to have a bigger budget to be able to start to do more services with us. So I would say create a list. Who are our current customers and who are our current customers that we think would be eligible to be able to be upsold and what services are we providing them now and what services would we like to consider providing them in the future that we think? I mean, obviously the big thing here is what's going to be valuable to them. So I'm going to write down that list, identify who that is.

Ryan, one of the ways that you can do that, one of the tools that we've used is inside your CRM. For us, that's a HubSpot. So CRM, you can create just custom contact properties for what services different people have and then you're able to quickly filter through and see who doesn't have this property right now or what people meet this criteria, what people meet that criteria. You can certainly have close date of the initial business and you're able to somewhat automate and build smart lists on all of that and see who might need what.

Yeah, custom contact profiles have been really good for us there. So once you have your list figured out and who you want, you then want to start building some case studies around the services that you've offered for other customers and that they found successful. So the reason that this is helpful is when you have your different services, you have them outlined, you probably have different customers that are not necessarily doing all of those services, but they're doing some of them. And you should hopefully have had some case studies that you can pull out of where we've got good results because what this allows you to do, then if you have a case study, you have some examples of where you found success for other customers, especially if you're in a niche and you can say for other customers like you. Now I can use that case study. And case studies aren't just for the initial sale with a prospect that you haven't ever worked with before. They can be great for your current customers to explain value of some new services that they should consider. So the approach that you take with them is, hey, look, you know, I was thinking about you guys and these services that we were providing for you. There was this other company, this other client that we have kind of started the same way and then we started doing this for them and then look at the results that we got for them as a result. So you're kind of showing that value of what you've already done for someone else and how someone else made a decision that really paid off in the end to start doing whatever the service is that you're trying to upsell the current customer to. So using case studies for current customers as well as new products and having special case studies for upselling for current customers. Step three. So once I have my case studies figured out, I have my list of people that I know that I want to try and have upsold. I now need to set my meetings to review their current results and get the right people there around the table that I think need to be there in order to talk about some additional services we can offer. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to invite and ask if we could have a set up a recap meeting. So maybe you guys already do this bi weekly, maybe you do it monthly. Like I said, probably three to six months at least that you've been working with them. So maybe it's a quarterly checkup or a, you know, a six month Checkup. You just want to go over the results. Be upfront with them, though, let them know ahead of time with the meeting what the meeting is about. So it shouldn't just be about, hey, here's these new services that you need to purchase from us. But it should be about, hey, we want to go over the results, talk about how things have been going so far, where you guys are at, how happy you guys are. And then we want to talk about some ways that we've been brainstorming for you that we think we could really help make a greater impact than we're making now. So you kind of are setting the expectation with them that, hey, you're going to hear about some other things that we have that we've been thinking about for you. And so that way, when you bring them that case study with you and you have that conversation with them, there's some sort of expectation now you're going to know their company structure better at this point because you've been working with them. So you're going to know who needs to be at that meeting. But do your best to get everyone that needs to be at that meeting that needs to make a decision on, yes, we should do this or no, we shouldn't. There. So they can hear it from you, not from their point of contact that then has to sell your upsell for you. So that's kind of step three there. And then step four is just going for the ask. So for this one here, it's really just about at the end of the meeting, you have the meeting with them just being very clear with your intentions of, look, I know we've gotten these results. This is what you guys have been spending. This is what I'm proposing for you that we consider for moving forward for the next six months. And just be intentional on saying, and really, I mean, you're not just upselling to upsell. You only want to upsell in the case where you think that you can get a better result for the customer. So you want to take the different services that you have that you've outlined for them and really show them a kind of a clear path to success, like you did in the beginning when you first sold them on whatever services you're providing to them now. But be intentional, Go for the ask. Just be bold and say, look, this is what I believe, this is what I think. What do you guys think about this? Do you have any questions? And it's going to be kind of the initiation, the trigger of another little sales process, and it might not Be right away, yes, we definitely want to do that, but have some ideas for them. So it's not just, hey, I'm thinking about, we should do some PPC also. But that's it. And there's no plan and there's no, you know, what does that mean? What am I supposed to take away from that? So go in with kind of a clear picture of what you're realistically wanting to do for them, how much that's going to cost, what the timeframe would be, kind of everything that you would do like it was in the beginning. But that's kind of step four is after that meeting takes place at the end, giving them a next clear path and going for the ask of more business from them. So those are the four steps, Gray, and kind of how we have approached it. And the big thing there too, and we've talked about this in a previous episode, is trying to determine on your team who should be there for that. So who is going for the ask? Is it the salesperson that originally made the sale? Is it the account manager now that's servicing it? If it's the same person, that's pretty obvious, right? It's just going to be that person that's been working with them, but the salesperson. And typically, like in our case, the account manager and the salesperson, whether it's me, Gray, whether it's been you in the past, would be there and being the one presenting this to them, because we've maintained the relationship and kept that up as the relationship's been progressing over the last three to six months. So it makes it a little bit easier. So that is kind of the outline that we've taken that's been successful for us in upselling people from a website to content creation or from content creation to social media management, paid, paid promotion, whatever it's going to be. That's the approach that we take.

Nice, Ry. Well, I know you just mile minute you're just talking away there. I didn't want to interrupt your flow. I was going to say the same thing, the same point about you need to be clear on who's doing this and what that means then we've talked about compensation plans and having incentives for this for whoever that rep is, whether that's someone on the sales side of things or the account manager, project manager, whoever's working with them, account strategist. But the other thing that I was going to say that's important that we didn't really dive into here was just setting the expectation from the very beginning with your clients who are coming on board that, hey, what we're doing today is setting the baseline for what we're going to do down the road and in the future. And so I think setting the baseline of, hey, let's start with this. Like you came to us for a website. Let's start with the website. Let's make sure that we get Google Analytics, Hotjar, Google Search console, all the analytics tools put up there. We're tracking our progress and we're able to see and measure success along the way. And then after we start from there, there's these other services that we offer that may be a good fit or may not. We'll have those conversations along the way. But setting your prospects and customers expectations that there will be, there are other services from the beginning that you can offer. We don't need to focus on everything all at once because that's just not going to work out well. But we're going to be keeping an eye on that and helping to push you guys towards what we ultimately think is best for your business. I think that's really important. And then that kind of sets the tone for those conversations as you, as you move forward down the road.

Yep.

So that's all I have here. Let's go ahead and wrap up right there. Rye. We will be back next week in episode number 93 with yet another good episode on inbound Sales, this whole sales journey that we're on together. So until then, keep pushing forward and we'll talk to you in a week.

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