Cross-selling allows account managers to use existing account resources to generate new sales. With no additional expenses, cross-selling sources additional qualified sales opportunities, driving revenue and scaling a business’s practices.

However, cross-selling can be challenging. The opportunities it presents come with certain risks that account managers should know how to navigate. Interactive assessments provide many tools that simplify and solve these challenges.

See how the 9Lenses platform helps cross-selling and so much more.

Challenge 1:The Risks of New Solutions

Clients represent successful investments to the account team that acquires them. If a client pays the agency for a service (web design, for example), there are risks involved in trying to sell them an additional service, such as copywriting the content on the site’s pages. Cross-selling is only financially viable when an Account Manager can do this successfully.

New solutions can turn the client off. Traditional cross-selling limits the opportunities an agency can source due to several risks, such as the seller seeming unqualified or the new service failing to match the client’s goals.

The Solution

The solution to the risk of uncertainty should involve an equal amount of transparency. Interactive assessments directly reduce the risks of sourcing new solutions by engaging buyers with personalized insights.

By focusing the sales conversation on the client’s needs, interactive assessments reduce the risks of cross-selling, giving the account manager valuable intelligence that identifies their customers’ challenges so they can address them with the new meeting.

Challenge 2: The Expertise Gap

Account Managers cannot always confidently discuss topics outside of their expertise. This presents a major obstacle to cross-selling as it can cause clients to lose confidence in the effectiveness of the new solution. A lack of expertise can easily prevent account managers from sourcing new opportunities.

Therefore, in conventional cross-selling, managers require professionals from other practices to qualify the opportunities to their clients. Introducing an unknown expert can promote opportunities but prevent them as well. Clients may lose faith in the company’s expertise, or they may be turned off by a new opportunity that does not appear to address their pain points.

The Solution

With interactive assessments, Account Managers can acquire far more tools to convert existing customers into new leads without the use of uncertain third-party expertise, which cannot always address a client’s needs as well as the account managers can.

Using information gathered by assessments, account teams can instantly add value to their propositions, even if the topics are beyond their expertise. They can coach their managers on how to navigate the initial conversation surrounding the service they want to cross-sell, focusing on the client’s challenges using information sourced from their personalized assessment results.

This allows companies to maintain an appearance of solidarity while customizing their pitch to the customer’s needs. They can gather necessary information about the client’s requirements without relying on uncertain third-party MDs who do not fully understand the company’s mission or the client’s goals. Interactive assessments keep the sales opportunity internal, which keeps it informed.

Related: Growing revenue from your customer base

Challenge 3:How to Qualify Opportunities

When account teams cannot qualify their initial opportunities, they rely on practice MDs to run the first meeting with the client. This covers up their lack of expertise but can also cause your Account Managers to lose control over the client’s confidence. This makes cross-selling increasingly costly and limits scalability.

Your account team’s opportunities should not be limited by their expertise. Their reliance on outside sources of qualification makes them vulnerable.

The Solution

Freely available interactive assessments allow accounts to confidently qualify new opportunities without additional sales expenses. Now, their practice MDs can focus on the best opportunities for cross-sales. When they do engage with clients, they will understand their needs and pain points based on the results of the assessments. Additionally, your account team will not be lost when the client’s needs venture outside their expertise.

Features of Interactive Assessments

Interactive assessments provide account managers with ways to identify and convert serious leads. Once converted, they aid in cross-selling by continuing to use personalized insights to gain intelligence on a client’s challenges. This allows Account Managers to maintain their lead and match new services to the client’s goals without additional sales expenses.

The right interactive assessment platform allows managers to:

• Automate consumer insights on a secure Cloud assessment platform
• Configure your company’s IP, make calculations, and visualize goals
• Retrieve automated long-term analytics, including benchmarks for workers and clients
• Connect insights between assessments and systems
• Design and configure personalized assessments for your goals

These assessments address the major challenges involved in cross-selling. They give account managers the tools they need to configure their strategies for existing client accounts without additional marketing expenditures.

The Takeaway

Interactive assessments allow account teams to take advantage of opportunities for cross-selling. They reduce the risks normally associated with cross-selling while increasing scaling and profitability even when the opportunities are beyond an account manager’s expertise. Interactive assessments can increase your revenue returns per MD as well since these personnel can be saved for more qualified opportunities.

Convincing existing clients of the value of another service can be challenging. Interactive assessments meet these challenges to help account managers grow existing customer accounts without needless additional costs and wasted resources.