Megaphone the Delivery

Being the delivery side of the services business, I frequently keep hearing that upselling and cross-selling is the skill of art and not for everyone, or maybe it is a sales job, it is not my cup of tea, and many other reasons.

In my opinion, upselling and cross-selling is not as hard as people feel or it sounds. It is just an additional step in our planning. With an experience of more than 10 years on the sides of the professional services and successfully been doing upselling for more than 6 years, I worked on a simple model which can help anyone do upsell and cross-selling in their delivery.

I call it the MEGAPHONE MODEL.

Like usual megaphone takes the inputs and amplifies the voice or provided sounds in the pointed direction, this megaphone model can help you take some basic inputs and amplify your delivery and sales in the pointed direction. Before I jump into details of explaining the model, I made a small diagram to make things pictorial and easy to understand.

Megaphone Model

There are 6 main steps in amplifying the business during the delivery part of the project. And each step plays a major role in understanding, planning, solutioning and road mapping the business for the customer.

1. Hear the Customers: Always hear the customers, no matter what they share (requirements, problems, complains, praises, reasons, thoughts, opinions, view, etc). There is always some information that might be useful to everyone - Like the real business problem, or vision that is not clearly shared, or a challenge that they didn’t foresee yet. Also, this will help us understand who are the key influencers(business and technical) that we should work with, the decision-makers and the logistics problems that can occur down the lane. The more information we have, the more clarity we will have, the more clarity we have, we will be in a better position to guide our customers, and whoever places themselves in a better position to guide customers can eventually become trusted advisors for the customers.
2. Make the Plan: With all the information that we have collected, understood and learned, make a plan that is easily understandable to the customers, especially the key stakeholders. Depending on the situation, I usually make a couple of plans, one for technical teams and one business teams. As there can be situations where we need to convince technical teams first before presenting the plan to the business leaders. Make sure technical plans does not include costings, business logistics, etc. So, understand your audience carefully before presenting the plan. If the technical teams are convinced with our plans, then I can confidently say that we have won at least 50% of the challenge. In my opinion, the most important part of the planning is who comes with the plan first. Whoever comes with the plan first have things better under their control than the others who are listening to planning. If I plan first, then I’m in a better position to run the things the way I want, and when things are in my control, it is easy to manage and drive the things towards success. If someone else comes with the plan first, then I need to follow them and their vision towards successful. Try to be the first one in the room with the plan.
3. Present the Vision: Based on the planning that is done, present the vision of the customer. A vision that could help achieve the problems that they are facing or could face. Try to present the vision in phases so that neither the customer nor we can solve all the problems under the sun in one go. Try not to have more than 3 or 4 phases. If you think phases might not be suitable for your scenario, then try to see if the Maturity Model format will help or Adoption Model format will help them. Access and discuss with your technical teams and pre-sales/sales teams before you construct the vision.
4. Give the Options: Based on the vision and plan, give some options to the customers from which they can choose to decide and go-ahead. Try not to provide them with more than 3 options which could make the decision making cycle longer. And provide pro and cons for each option and finally give your recommendation. I usually place the most recommeded option as the last ones. I usually like to start with not go good option and end with good option. From my observations, most of the times people easily tend to be inclinded/agree with the last option.
5. Show the Path: Based on the recommneded and decided options, show the path to close the opportunity by involving the sales and account team. This can be either upselling the existing vision or cross-selling other items which could help customer achieve the vision and drive towards success. I usually tend not to go into dollar value discussion as I observed those kind of discussions could draw an invisble line of the customer thinking I’m trying sell, which has never been my intention. But, there have been situations where I did the dollar value negotiations and this decision is done based the situation, people(internal and external) and scenario.
6. Loop: We can do this activity again and again based on the phase we are, the maturity step that we are achieving and the adoption model that we are following. After each cycle, there are lessons learned which can be used to imporve in the following cycle. And don’t forget, Step 1 is done through out the cycle and points noted to do any on the spot improvements.

I have observed and has a first hand experience with this model and it always helped me and the customer to achieve some major goals, solve some critical business problems, expand the footprint of orgnization and become a trusted advisor for the customer.

Amplifying and megaphoning the delivery business though upsell and cross-selling is not a rocket science and can be achieved with these 6 steps.