Increase Upsells and Sign Bigger Contracts with Sales Acceleration

Drew Olsen

Every business aims to increase its revenue by upselling customers and increasing its average contract value (ACV) with each sale. Upselling is the best way to optimize the leads you have already generated and the buying decisions you have already secured. Done correctly, it provides a powerful way to drive revenue, increase net retention rate, and reduce churn.

Sales acceleration processes and strategies support you in achieving your goals for upsells and ACV, and it's a strategy that can be accomplished from a couple of different angles. A sales enablement team or sales leader can consider purchasing a sales acceleration technology or solution. They can also help educate sales reps and the sales team on the different methods and techniques to help close bigger deals. And they can do a combination of both, but sales acceleration is at the root of improving the sales process.

One of the most effective ways to increase upsells and sign bigger contracts is to include alternative financing options in your sales process. Alternative financing solutions support your company in providing flexible financing and serve as a sales acceleration platform. When financing options are included strategically in your company's sales operations, your customers will feel more open to making bigger purchases, your sales team will find it easier to sell bigger deals, and deal alignment will speed up the time to close.

What Is Sales Acceleration?

A sales acceleration process is used to increase buyer engagement, motivation, and the velocity of conversions. Sales acceleration strategies can support upselling and increase the overall ACV with a focus on reaching leads more effectively, forming a better strategy per lead, and differentiating your product from others.

Sales acceleration can be achieved by implementing strategies and leveraging tools. There are many sales acceleration tools and strategies, each providing a unique set of benefits based on the sales acceleration solution.

Sales Acceleration Solutions

You and your sales team members can find a variety of benefits from B2B sales acceleration strategies and tools. The solutions you choose can focus on one or more of the areas below. Take a look at the list and find areas of your business you want to improve.

Lead Prospecting

Identify high-value buyer personas quickly
Lead score and route efficiently
Increase sales pipeline and optimize the sales funnel

Customer Engagement and Relationships

Increase in lead engagement
Track and manage customer interactions
Enhance personalization through the customer journey
Increase conversion rate and sales
Develop an efficient sales process

Accessibility‍

Make your products more accessible and affordable to a wider range of clients
Expand into new market segments and verticals
Incorporate a wider range of use cases

Decision Facilitation‍

Help clients arrive at decisions faster
Incentivize the closing sale
Collect sales intelligence

Upselling Techniques to Use With Existing Customers

Upselling techniques can help you increase each client's order quantity, duration, and variety. The right upselling approach can leave your customers satisfied with their deal while increasing the size of their contract. Upselling your software solutions and subscription services means optimizing the sales funnel to get higher deal values and increase deal velocity.

Consider the following classic upselling techniques adapted to the SaaS model:

Understand Your Customer Lifetime Value

A customer's lifetime value (CLV) is their value to the company over the entire period of time they’ll be a paying customer. A one-time customer has a short customer lifetime value, but a customer who stays with you for years increases their customer lifetime value with each subscription renewal and package upgrade.

CLV emphasizes the importance of cultivating long-term customers rather than focusing on the constant search for more leads and new contracts. New contracts are great, but growth only occurs when those contracts are built on a foundation of long-term customer retention.

Take a closer look at your CLV and determine just how much each customer is worth to you and their increasing value over time. The recurring payments involved in an upsold subscription offer a progressive uptick in CLV. By understanding your CLV and how it develops over time, you have the greatest perspective to increase your company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) through new and existing accounts.

Offer Upgrades That Make Sense

Customers will know their needs. They may already understand the value your product. With this information, they'll be keen to work with companies that guide them in choosing valuable, appealing upgrades without paying for features that don't benefit them.

For example, you may have products designed in tiers by team size. Asking a small team to upgrade to the team package with more seats doesn't make sense. However, offering them customized add-ons that give them some of the bonuses of the larger package will make sense. A small team doesn't need 100+ extra seats, but they can appreciate the mobile app control or advanced dashboard features that may be included in the larger packages. Many of these customers are open to paying a premium for that access.

For software platforms with a wide variety of departmental tools, you might determine a customer’s niche and offer only the upgrades that fit with their business model. A company with a business-critical website will appreciate scalability and SLAs but not find value in niche developer toolsets. It's all about relevance to your customers and the value they will be able to appreciate.

Showcase Cost Savings

Show your customers the financial benefit of choosing to increase their annual spending contract value. In the digital world, this might be offering a 30% discount for a larger annual commitment and increased services. The customer pays slightly more in one order to stimulate their own business growth over time.

Disclosing a comparison of the two options together isn't necessarily enough on its own. For the customer to appreciate the true value, they will need to see the 30% discount and understand the value added from the larger commitment and its encouragement of growth.

Sales teams will need to showcase how much more the customer is getting and how much that would cost without taking the upsell. It's also a good sales strategy to communicate the cost benefits associated with the larger commitment in line with expected company growth.

For example, you might build a chart that shows how you've pulled features from the higher-tier subscription list for small add-ons instead of the full price of the higher tier. Or you might show how buying two software solutions a la carte offers less value than buying five solutions at a bundled price.

Monthly Payment Terms on an Annual Contract

Using a platform like Gynger, it's possible to offer annual contracts with customizable repayment terms. You can showcase the different levels of plans and the costs associated while also demonstrating how a larger annual contract can now be attainable with flexible net terms or monthly terms. This is especially useful if your sales organization typically only offers annual subscriptions that may be inaccessible to clients on a monthly budget.

Offer Incentives

One of the original upselling methods is the ‘incentive’. A freebie, discount, or one-time offer are standard methods, to incentivize an upsell. An incentive is when you add something - typically for free or value added - as a result of being up-sold.

Offering incentives to close a high-value deal is a great way to increase sales acceleration and deal velocity. The best incentives are calculated and perfectly positioned to add value to both the customer and sales goals. An example could be a 10%-20% discount on a large multi-year contract commitment that foresees a strong CLV, customer growth, and product adoption.

Additionally, your alternative financing provider may offer options to subsidize the customer's financing fees. The fee percentage can give you an additional lever in negotiation, encouraging your customer to close the deal with more affordable financing.

Software Financing Accelerates Sales Processes

Gynger specializes in helping software businesses upsell by improving the payment options for your customers. Often, upselling is about demonstrating how a larger financial commitment can lead to an increase in value for your customers.

Customers will buy a more extensive package for a lower cost per feature. Customers will also commit to a more significant purchase if they can pay monthly instead of dipping too deeply into their operating budget reducing their cash flow.

The right financing tools combined with sales acceleration strategies can increase deal values by as much as 60%. The right sales acceleration solution will make your products more accessible to customers who are cautious about larger financial commitments and conscious of their cash flow and runway.

Increase Your Sales with Flexible Financing Terms

A subscription of $30,000 annually can be deterring to new customers. But when broken down into $2,500 monthly payments through flexible financing terms, it becomes a lot more manageable. Breaking annual commitments into monthly payments might also mean customers can afford to increase their overall contract value and include add-ons and package upgrades.

By allowing your customers to pay monthly instead of annually, you can highlight the monthly value in both baseline packages and the upselling upgrades. This means business growth, increased sales funnel, sales pipeline, and improved sales performance.

Extend Contracts

With the use of alternative financing platforms like Gynger, companies can unlock longer contracts that multiply in size with each year added. Longer three-year contracts in SaaS are not unheard of for businesses that know they will still need your solution during that time. While many companies would not be able to pay a 3-year contract upfront in full, a financing option to spread out those payments is far more approachable and can be the beginning of a long-term relationship.

Software Financing in Your Upselling Strategy

Software financing is an effective sales acceleration strategy because it assists in upselling but is not an upselling tactic itself. Instead, the best way to use a software financing platform in your sales training program and strategy is during the side-by-side comparison and package selection of the sales cycle.

When smoothly integrated into your sales cycle, potential customers will connect with the option to customize their repayment terms. Cash flow sensitive businesses might turn away from annual subscriptions, so this is your sales team's chance to win the deal with augmented contract terms.

Are You Ready to Increase Sales Acceleration and Upsells?

Sales acceleration is about showing your customers value when choosing product packages and solutions. This means understanding their business models, motivations, and budgets.

Expand your customer base and make every deal feel even more affordable by breaking up large annual investments into an approachable monthly package without giving up your ACV. In fact, you can close larger deals more effectively with financing because each cost increase is distributed visually and practically to your customers as they decide on their preferred payment terms.

If your sales team is ready to increase its rate of upsells and the average contract value, Gynger is ready to help. With integrated white-labeled financing options, you can accelerate sales and differentiate from your competitors.

Ready to increase upsells and sign bigger contracts? Book a demo to learn how Gynger can help accelerate your sales pipeline.