DELIVERING VALUE TO YOUR BUSINESS

Upselling and cross selling in financial services: How to use CRM to increase your sales opportunities

One of the most common and complex challenges facing financial services organisations is capitalising on sales opportunities presented by existing customers. Upselling and cross selling in financial services is essential, especially when 40-70% of a company’s growth rate is derived from existing clients. However, many businesses are struggling to secure sales because they don’t have the sophisticated customer data and collaboration methods necessary to sell to their existing customers - that’s where a CRM system like Dynamics 365 CRM comes in. 

So what are the key factors to upselling and cross selling in financial services?

1. Knowing your customer through up-to-date information
2. Mapping the right product or service to your customer needs using data insights
3. Using predictive analytics to anticipate opportunities for upselling and cross selling 
4. Enhancing collaboration between financial sales teams, product specialists and relationship managers

 

Step 1: Knowing your customer through up-to-date information

Upselling and cross selling in financial services is about knowing your customer. This is not just about regulatory due diligence and compliance, but truly understanding the unique factors that may concern a specific client or industry sector at any given time. A CRM like Dynamics 365 effectively supports financial sales teams by providing useful customer insights and product/service suggestions at the same time as completing core activities. This seamless experience enables easier cross selling and upselling with the various elements of KYC in one place. 

Knowing your customer is also important post-sale. Understanding what products or services meet customer needs can help sales teams to present beneficial upselling and cross selling opportunities organically. To do this effectively, it is essential to have up to date customer data in real-time from a CRM system like Dynamics 365. For financial sales teams that can’t obtain this information easily, it puts them at a huge disadvantage to their competitors, potentially leading to lost sales opportunities.

Without a complete, up to date view of the customer, financial sales teams will struggle to identify the key challenges and needs of their prospects, meaning they are more likely to mis-sell or lose upselling and cross selling opportunities completely. How financial sales teams store customer data is essential to gaining a complete view of the customer. While many may currently use a CRM, unlike Dynamics 365 CRM, many commonly used legacy products do not have the capabilities (such as data aggregation and AI in particular) to either store data in an efficient way, or offer effective insights into their customers. Obsolete systems can prevent successful sales, and cause significant issues in your sales process as a whole.

Worried your CRM isn’t capable of handling today’s increasingly complex customer? See if your current system is holding you back in our free eBook:

 Download Our Free Ebook

 

Step 2: Mapping the right product or service to your customer needs using data insights

Once you know your customer and understand their priority challenges and needs, to upsell and cross-sell successfully, your sales team needs to be mapping these needs to the right products or services in your portfolio. When it comes to upselling and cross selling in financial sales, recommending the ideal product or service to your customer is crucial to ensure success. 

cross selling in financial services is usually where businesses can gain the most profit, through complimentary, value-added services, such as insurance. However, many of these opportunities are lost due to a lack of awareness about the products or services customers already have, are likely to want, or will never purchase. Therefore, lost upsell or cross-sell opportunities often aren’t the fault of your sales team - but instead due to data quality. 

When your customer data is stored across disparate, legacy systems with no clear, central view, it becomes easy for financial sales teams to miss vital information about the customer, and potentially try to sell a product or service that they will never buy. Dynamics 365 CRM offers a central location for data, significantly reducing the chance of irrelevant upselling and cross selling, while increasing lead conversion rates.

Find out more information on how Microsoft Dynamics AI insights can drive digital transformation in the financial services sector.

 

Step 3: Using predictive analytics to anticipate opportunities for upselling and cross selling

Without understanding your customer’s likelihood to buy, it becomes difficult for financial sales teams to identify the correct time to upsell or cross-sell particular products or services. Where financial sales teams understand this, they can use predictive analytics to correlate customer attributes (such as demographics, past purchase history, and availability of competitive options) and anticipate their behaviour to predict whether they are likely to make a buying decision.

Systems like Dynamics 365 CRM use these propensity to buy models to compare the behaviour of prospective buyers to the pre-purchase behaviour of thousands of previous customers who ended up buying, comparing activities such as what emails they opened and what products they spent the most time looking at. This is extremely beneficial to financial sales teams, who can use the data to determine which customers are likely to buy, which need further nurturing, and which aren’t worth pursuing at all - giving your sales team advanced upselling and cross selling techniques, and helping them to build robust relationships with their customers.

However, this kind of predictive analysis is extremely difficult when your company is using a system that doesn’t possess such capabilities. If you find that this technique could be advantageous to your business, it could be time to invest in an enhanced piece of software, such as the leading-edge Dynamics 365 CRM

 

Step 4: Enhancing collaboration between financial sales teams, product specialists and relationship managers

While knowing your customer in-depth is essential to increasing upselling and cross selling opportunities in financial sales, what is just as vital is ensuring that your team can work together efficiently. For many financial services organisations, collaborating with people across the sales team and the business can be tricky, particularly when an upsell or cross-sell opportunity requires the input of a specific individual. 

Particularly in larger financial services organisations, collaboration with key team members such as relationship managers and product specialists is common, but often it isn’t running as smoothly as needed. This is usually down to delayed communication, where financial sales teams don’t have access to vital individuals’ information - such as which product specialist would be best for a certain opportunity based on their skills and successes.

Using a CRM that is optimised for collaboration allows various teams and stakeholders within the organisation to work together smoothly, meaning teams can articulate propositions and show value to their clients using features that enable easy sharing of ideas. Because of this, sales leadership can capture the skills of their employees to highlight their strengths, and financial salespeople can identify the right individuals they need for each upsell and cross-sell opportunity - with a leading edge system like Dynamics 365 CRM ensuring a higher chance of success.

For financial sales teams, having complete access to up-to-date customer data, and being able to work collaboratively with ease is essential to securing upselling and cross selling opportunities. If you are facing consistent difficulty within these areas, it could be your CRM. For more information on how to determine if your current system is the cause of issues in your sales process, download our free eBook 7 signs that financial brokers and service providers need a better CRM system:

[This blog was updated on the 4th July 2023]

Free download

7 Signs that financial service providers need a better CRM system

Download our free eBook to see how a leading-edge system could radically improve your sales process and increase your bottom line.

Free download