Reducing the cost of sale is one of the most important ways for businesses selling complex products to combat increasing competition, long sales cycles, and margin pressures. A strong upsell and cross-sell strategy cannot be overlooked, but sales teams with complex product portfolios may lack the bandwidth and even the technical or institutional knowledge to understand how to best configure solutions that maximize profitability.
A data-driven sales strategy gives your sales teams an edge in identifying the right opportunities and personalizing them for better success. Uncovering these opportunities, however, requires more strategic use of sales tools and their data, and companies often overlook the power of Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) systems and their data in enabling smarter selling strategies. When this data is used effectively, you can identify opportunities faster and with confidence.
Why Cross-Selling and Upselling Should Be a Major Focus for Industrial Enterprises
Most sales teams are familiar with upselling and cross-selling. Upselling encourages customers to choose a more advanced or higher-value product, while cross-selling involves recommending complementary products or services. While these strategies are well understood, many enterprises are not fully capitalizing on them as growth levers.
But manufacturers of complex products are now seeing major shifts in their industry that are driving the need for streamlined cross-sell and upsell strategies. For example:
- The shift from transactional to value-based and solution-oriented selling allows sales to guide customers towards a more holistic solution. Teams are more often selling advanced features, bundled services and accessories, and even training services to better align with customer business objectives.
- Increasing adoption of servitization and product-as-a-service (PaaS) models makes it easier to introduce add-ons or complementary products, as well as encourage customers to upgrade to higher-tier service packages.
- Digital transformation is driving smarter sales insights and decisions, whether companies are using predictive analytics to suggest relevant products, or they’re investing in better analytics from their sales tools.
The Benefits of Upselling and Cross-selling: What’s the Impact?
When you rely less on increasing your customer acquisition to drive revenue and profitability, you create better relationships with the prospects and customers you already have. This in turn creates additional revenue opportunities down the line. Just a five percent increase in customer retention can potentially lead to 25% more in profits, according to Bain & Company. And when your customers are provided with solutions that continuously deliver more value to their business, they become fiercely loyal, potentially championing your solutions to their peers.
Ultimately, your cross-sell and upsell strategy is about creating efficiency to protect your bottom line.
- Increased revenue: Selling higher-value solutions and complementary products drives more profitable growth.
- Cost efficiency: Expanding sales within your existing customer base reduces acquisition costs and maximizes profit.
- Sales efficiency: Providing relevant, well-timed recommendations shortens sales cycles and improves win rates.
- Customer experience: Making buying easier with personalized offers increases satisfaction and repeat business.
- Pipeline resilience: Strengthening customer relationships through upselling and cross-selling creates more predictable revenue.
Effective Upsell and Cross-sell Strategies (and How CPQ Can Help You Achieve Them)
For sales to be effective in selling upgrades or added products, they need the data to find the right recommendations at the right time. Personalization is key to offering value-based solutions, but doing this at scale requires two things:
- Strong historical sales, configuration, and pricing data
- Strong technical understanding of the possible product configurations and services
When these elements come together, manufacturers can optimize upselling and cross-selling in a way that maximizes revenue while improving customer experience. CPQ software, integrated with CRM and other tools, plays a crucial role here.
How CPQ Empowers Data-Driven Sales
CPQ empowers sales teams to recommend more value through upgrades, add-ons, and service plans quickly and accurately, without requiring deep technical knowledge. Beyond ensuring accuracy in configurations and quotes, it’s a valuable data source that can refine and optimize your sales strategy. Every transaction, configuration, and price point captured in CPQ creates insights that help identify the right opportunities.
By extracting CPQ transactional data, like historical configurations, sales BOMs, frequently selected options, and won/lost deal trends, companies can analyze real purchase behavior and move beyond assumptions or gut-instinct. Integrating CPQ data with BI tools like Microsoft BI or Tableau make it even easier for sales teams to visualize this data and make recommendations based on what has actually converted.
Applying CPQ for Effective Upsell and Cross-Sell Strategies
When applied strategically, CPQ can help you streamline common upsell and cross-sell strategies that your competitors may—or may not—be achieving in the market already. It’s a differentiator for businesses looking to build more lifetime customer value.
Consider how CPQ enables smarter selling:
- Creating smarter bundles: CPQ offers data on historical configurations, frequently bought-together features, and sales BOMs that helps businesses identify which products and services are most commonly sold together. By analyzing patterns in won deals, sales teams can suggest preconfigured bundles that align with real buyer behavior, rather than guesswork.
- Knowing and personalizing to your customers: CPQ insights on product-market fit, regional purchase trends, and configuration preferences reveal which product variants, upgrades, and features perform best across industries and customer segments. Sales teams can use this information to tailor recommendations based on real adoption patterns rather than relying on broad assumptions. With data on previous configurations and buyer behavior, sales can also tailor conversations with current customers based on their past purchase drivers.
- Offering the right incentives, profitably: CPQ’s automatic margin control and pricing intelligence ensure that when discounts or incentives are applied to drive upsells and cross-sells, they remain strategic and financially viable.
- Selling proactively: A CRM-CPQ integration can notify sales when customers approach an upgrade, renewal, or replacement cycle based on service records and equipment lifespan. Instead of waiting for customer requests, sales can proactively suggest upgrades or additional features to maintain continuity and avoid downtime.
- Expanding product sales with service offerings: Customers often underestimate the value of service plans, warranties, or preventive maintenance until faced with costly downtime. Companies often use failure rate data, service history, and industry benchmarks to position these as strategic investments. But CPQ streamlines the process by integrating services into the product configuration, while leveraging equipment usage data for service forecasts.
- Sustainability & compliance-based upselling: For customers with sustainability goals or regulatory requirements, CPQ-integrated sustainability calculators compare environmental impact, efficiency, and compliance benefits of different configurations. Instead of offering just a “greener” product, sales can provide data-backed insights on energy efficiencies, making upgrades easier to justify.
Despite the many use cases for CPQ in frontline sales, many companies still treat CPQ as a back-end tool rather than a strategic sales asset. Those that do leverage CPQ unlock faster, smarter, and more profitable selling opportunities.
Sell Smarter with Tacton’s CPQ Solution
Data-driven insights and faster quoting make every recommendation relevant, timely, and valuable. Tacton’s CPQ helps manufacturers identify high-impact upsell opportunities, streamline cross-sell recommendations, integrate service selling, and leverage sustainability to strengthen customer relationships.
With a constraint-based configuration engine, sales teams can ensure technically valid solutions while automating service and product recommendations. Real-time data enables smarter decision-making, simplifying the selling and buying experience, increasing retention, and driving profitable growth. Learn how you can leverage CPQ in your sales strategy with Tacton.