Cross-sell

What is a cross-sell?

A cross-sell is selling an existing customer a different product or service. Investopedia describes it as encouraging existing customers to buy related or complementary offerings. In commercial services, the classic cross-sell is a second trade or service line: a fire sprinkler customer who also buys alarm monitoring, or a backflow testing customer who also buys plumbing repair.

Why it matters to a revenue leader

Many PE-backed services platforms are assembled by acquiring companies with different service lines, and the investment case often assumes those customers will buy across the platform. That only happens if sellers and technicians know the other offerings and have a reason to raise them. Investopedia also warns that pushy cross-selling erodes customer trust, and that bad practice has led to scandals in some industries. The revenue leader's job is to make sure cross-selling follows a real customer need, and that someone owns raising it with each customer.

A platform formed from a fire sprinkler company and an alarm company has 1,200 customers in the regions where both operate. Only 90 of them buy both services, two years after the merger. That number tells the CRO the integration story has not reached the field yet, and that the sprinkler technicians on site every quarter are the first people to bring into it.