X-Selling and Scaling – two growth avenues that B2B suppliers have to get right.
If you’re in a commercial position in a B2B supplier, you are likely looking at mandating these as strategic approaches, or been tasked with doing more of them in order to close out 2021 and get the jump on 2022.
But it’s all so easy to say we have to focus on X-Selling or Scaling work with clients. It’s much harder to do them and do them well.
Plus, it’s even tougher to do with delivery-focused client teams, as opposed to professional sales teams.
In this article therefore, we’re going to help you with some of the basics of each.
Let’s start with X-Selling.
X-Selling is where you sell different products/services to the same person or division/business. Simple concept, but it needs to be approached in the right way.
If you get X-selling wrong, a lot of people will get very annoyed very quickly, and revenues will go down, not up:
Your clients get annoyed because they feel like they’re being sold to
Your people don’t want to do the job, because they don’t want to sell
Ongoing clients are now less likely to repeat or renew the work they’re doing with you
Clearly then, it’s critical to get it right. That means avoiding the pitfall of starting in the wrong place:
This is still a useful exercise, but not one to base your X-Selling strategy on.
X-Selling is about your people and how they connect with their client counterparts.
They need to connect with them in an authentic way, that unlocks more conversations about what’s important for them and their business.
You need everyone to be doing it. It needs to be in the DNA of your client-facing teams otherwise opportunities will be missed. Some of our own clients who have developed these types of connections with their clients have grown their revenues considerably, by simply changing the conversation from service-focused, to asking what impact they’re having and where else they could help.
If you want to X-Sell in a way that clients appreciate, try getting your people to ask this first, in the relationships that are strong enough to be appropriate to do so.
Scale
Scaling your work around your client’s business, on the other hand, is one of those ways of growing where it’s great (bar internal wrangling over inter-country budgets and the like) when it happens, yet so often we see it as an opportunity missed. And that’s opportunity both for you, but also for your client to benefit from your great work in another part of their organisation.
Why is it so often missed if it’s a key pillar of strategy? Because it’s rarely properly planned for, so it happens sporadically and with a big dose of chance.
As with X-Sell therefore, it needs to start in the right way, and that’s before you’ve begun the first piece of work. The golden question you need to be asking yourself and your teams:
Do you actively plan for your current contacts or stakeholders to refer you to other brands/categories/divisions/geographies within their business?
This one question can reframe mindsets.
Now, it’s not too late to Scale after this point, but this is the ideal. It enables a mindset that getting the core project to deliver real impact is imperative, as not only does it increase the chances of repeating the work with the same contacts, it holds the key to being able to proactively scale it around their organisation.
What happens though, if you haven’t planned to Scale your work with your client before the start of a project?
You need an approach that builds momentum during the middle of the project you’re delivering.
If you can find some preliminary results/early indications/designs etc, to share, you can proactively ask your client contact Golden Question No. 2:
‘We’re finding this from our early work – would anyone else be interested in these types of findings/results/creative?’
Now, we’re not saying it’s this easy (there’s all the considerations around scaling your network, developing contacts, working with gatekeepers etc) but even just this one question can open opportunities.
And just think - if you’re genuinely interested in helping your client to the best of your ability, surely you’d be asking this question anyway?
To find out more about developing a consistent growth approach through these two avenues, as well as retaining clients and winning new logos, get in touch.