Capitalizing on Cross-Selling A R T I C L EOpportunities in Financial ServicesIf you’re a financial services executive, you likely understand theeffect that cross-selling can have on increasing share of wallet witha customer

1. Capitalizing on Cross-Selling
A R T I C L E
Opportunities in Financial Services
If you’re a financial services executive, you likely understand the
effect that cross-selling can have on increasing share of wallet with
a customer.Yet, whether your organization focuses on commercial,
private, or retail banking, your sales representatives probably find
it difficult to cross-sell customers from one product to another, let
alone from one line of business to another. This article discusses
what’s at stake and how you might begin to reap the rewards of
untapped cross-selling opportunities.
Financial services organizations offering a range of services under one umbrella have significant
potential to cross-sell to their customer base. But to capitalize on this potential, you need to
look at your products, services, and customers from a broader perspective. In most cases, the
customer need for a certain product can be forecasted based on their history and/or their behavior.
Experienced relationship managers can predict the next product a customer is likely to need and
purchase based on similar customers.
In every day business, cross-selling opportunities are often lost or neglected. Banks rarely have
a way of sharing this information across their disparate systems and applications. To take full
advantage of the upside of cross-selling, they need a way to filter this information from the gigabytes
of transactions and data that exist.
You may be thinking that the benefits of cross-selling are pretty obvious. Improve customer loyalty
and profitability at the same time with smooth handoffs between businesses. But how do you make it
happen?
Here are two approaches to consider:
Cross-Selling Through the Sales Process
Business referrals between different parts of an organization are one way to go. For example, a
commercial banker sees potential for both a private banking deal and a cash management deal,
creates these leads, and assigns them to their respective departments. In order for your sales
representatives to identify and capture sales opportunities for other groups, they need to be able to
see what’s possible. An automated referral system can help to ensure that both the giving and the
receiving parties recognize and act on hot leads.
Cross-Selling with Service Scripts
Cross-selling can also be encouraged in a call centre environment. For example, inbound reps can
be prompted to cross-sell certain kinds of products to certain kinds of customers with service scripts,
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2. such as online banking services to their tele-banking opportunities appear, and then act on them. It may sound
customers or cash management credit lines and insurance straightforward, but we all know it’s not.
services to new commercial loan customers.
Putting a cross-selling strategy in place is a step-by-step
process that starts with developing deeper customer
‘
relationships, leveraging this knowledge for segmentation,
Complexities aside, cross-selling is one very providing a stage for enhanced automatic referral tracking,
smart way to capture a piece of the market while and then delivering on the promise of one-to-one offers for
each client.
improving your customers’ situations at the same
time. Part of your plan will need to include strategies for leveraging
’ In addition to identifying customer situations, you can identify
which products in your arsenal have natural up-sell and cross-
referrals, managing the process, and managing the
compensation. Complexities aside, cross-selling is one very
smart way to capture a piece of the market while improving
your customers’ situations at the same time.
sell potential. With the right product categorization in place,
reps will easily recognize and be alerted to these opportunities With a cross-selling strategy in place, you can refer customers
on the fly. to the products and services they truly need at the moment
they need them, improve client satisfaction, and reap the
Like many great ideas, this is all easier said than done:
rewards of more of their business.
assemble information and present it intuitively, profile and
segment your customer base, watch the cross-sell and up-sell
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