Cross selling is the selling of additional services to existing clients. The reason that it’s important to a business is that it creates additional revenue for a company, at a cheaper cost to the company than winnng new clients. There are a number of scenarios in which cross selling can occur. So, let’s have a look at each one in turn:

• Scenario one: This is where you are selling an additional service provided by you as an individual to your individual client. This is the simplest scenario, as you start from a one-to-one relationship that already exists. For example, in my own recruitment services industry, I sometimes find customer service candidates for an English language position for a hiring manager who I know also needs German speakers for his team. I  recruit for German speakers too. Therefore, I can sell this hiring manager an additional service that I provide: my German language service.
• Scenario two: This is where you sell an additional service provided by someone else in your company to your individual client. This involves the introduction of another person from your company into your existing business relationship. To use the same example, I know a hiring manager who hires customer service people, but she now wants a sales person as well, I can therefore introduce her to someone else from my company who specialises in sales positions. This introduces another person into the relationship, while keeping the business within my company.
• Scenario three: This is where you attempt to sell a service provided by you as an individual to a new person in the client company. This is a little harder. Continuing with our recruitment example: imagine there are two hiring managers in my client company who hire for customer service positions, I have a relationship with one, but the difficult part is attempting to secure business from the other hiring manager, with whom I have no personal relationship. I should be able to leverage my relationship and success with one manager in order to meet and persuade other manager to work with me. 
• Scenario four: This is the most difficult, where you attempt to sell a service provided by someone else in your company, to a new person in your client company, with whom you have no personal relationship. For example, someone in my client’s company recruits for IT people, while someone else in my company is responsible for IT recruitment services. I have no relationship with the IT hiring manager, so my aim is to find out who this is, sell the idea of working with my company using the existing relationships I have within the compaany and then introduce my IT colleague to them.

So, now it’s your turn. Think about what opportunities there are in your work life for potential cross selling and go out and sell!