Adding Value, not just Cost, makes the Cross-Sell

In my latest article for Printwear Magazine, I decided to cover what I’d consider an underutilized technique in sales for decorated apparel and accessories vendors; the cross-sell. We frequently hear about the up-sell, or the “do you want fries with that” approach that tends to add more of the same to a customer order; hats to a shirt order, for instance; but I encourage decorators to look at cross-selling, wherein one sells the customer on an additional product or service that provides a different benefit or experience than can be provided by the original sale item.

Who doesn’t love an embroidered bag? Great for customers, easy for organization.

Embroidered Bags- a natural Addition to Apparel

My case study for this article kept things very simple- I explained how to pitch and fulfill orders of decorated bags to a team-sales sports apparel customer as an example of the most basic form of cross-selling, breaking the process down into four main  points.

1. Select a win-win product: Make decoration and fulfillment easy for the processes in your shop while fitting the needs of the customer at hand. Non-sized items are a great way to keep the organization easy.
2. Curate your selection: Start with a small, hand-picked selection of products that you trust and can decorate without issue. You can always expand your selection later if a customer isn’t happy with the pieces offered, but it’s harder to narrow down if you present customers a constellation of similar options.
3. Prepare your Presentation: Create mock-up images with existing art assets showing a method of decoration that makes sense for your processes. Seeing is believing with most customers, and their confidence rises with a well-created image of your intended product.
4. Make Ordering Easy: Make all the necessary preparations for your customer to order and help them with anything you can that eases the process. Custom order forms, affiliate stores on-line, mock-up handouts and posters, and informational sheets with ordering, payment, and pickup instructions are all great tools to take work out of your customer’s hands; you certainly have to keep in mind how much work a customer’s buying power warrants and scale accordingly, but any effort to ease your customer’s workload is likely to pay off in repeat orders; everyone wants a friction-free process and most people feel too busy to bother with someone who makes buying difficult

Order forms go a long way toward making the process smooth and the orders plentiful.

Make it more than Product

Though adding decorated bags to an apparel order is the simplest form of this technique, a cross-sell could include services wholly unrelated to the initial product itself. For instance, we sell the development and management of uniform and fulfillment programs as well as online company stores to our customers; the experience is a far cry from a standard B2B order, but it is one that provides immense value to the customer and increases a customers product buy-in with our company without getting away from areas where we have skills.

My Added Value – Four Perfect Production Tips

As a sidebar to the main article, I also give these four tips specific to personalized items and team/club sales like the bag order I described:

1. Use Team Tools – Your digitizing or lettering software likely has time-saving tools to create team naming templates. Use them!
2. Get Approved – Send off approvals showing the final form of all names in an order and have that customer approved. Nothing upsets people more easily than a misspelled name.
3. Organize Twice, Ship Once – Prep all documentation and pair and items to be decorated before production and verify correct production after completion by keeping that necessary information with the grouped items to be used for final checks.
4. Think Distribution– Provide your customer with items grouped and with full lists of personalization for each group of products. Remember that the experience of handing out the items after they leave your shop still reflects on their assessment of the order and thus on your branding. Make the process easy, even after it leaves your shop; loyalty and recommendations follow that kind of thoughtful consideration.

See it in Detail

For more detail on the cross-sell and this case study along with a host of images describing my process, check out the full article in Printwear Magazine.