Why Upsells Are Crucial When You’re Selling Software

Trying to grow your SaaS business can have many challenges, but if you’re not taking advantage of upselling opportunities, you could be making your business growth even harder than it needs to be. 

Attracting new customers takes time, money, and effort from both your sales and marketing teams. With an average SaaS customer conversion rate of around 3-5%, why wouldn’t you incorporate an upsell strategy into your sales process to help improve your customer lifetime value? 

An upsell strategy can improve your business’s potential for growth and enable you to measure and create opportunities to delight your customers further. If a client has come on board at your lowest pricing offering, upselling gives you a chance to find out how they are getting on with their initial investment with you. This opens up the conversation towards upselling and activating the other benefits of your software. During this process you may even find that you get insights from your existing clients as to what else they would like to see, allowing you to add to your current software stack and introduce new features or even stand-alone complementary software.

Pricing upsells 

The vast majority of SaaS businesses offer a number of pricing tiers within their software package, starting with a free trial or freemium version of your software allow prospects to try before they buy. Next, prospects will typically be provided with a couple of different options depending on their business needs. 

By creating packages that offer varying feature and accessibility combinations, you allow customers to purchase the right software solution based on their current business needs, allowing them to increase their investment with you as their business grows. This could be via software user packages or by fencing off premium features of your software to be used as an upsell opportunity in the future – just make sure your standard package offers enough value to make them want to spend more money with you when the time’s right.

Premium Features

You will have probably spent a long time analysing every detail of your customer journey to take someone from your free version through to a paid. But what about once they become a paying client? Are you acting on usage triggers to prompt your users to upgrade to the next pricing tier when relevant? 

By giving the option to upgrade when the user is looking for a particular functionality that is only available in a premium package, you allow them to self-serve their own upgrade and gain instant access to the tools they need without causing any frustrations.

Whether the upsell opportunity has come from a triggered event or through a proactive sales strategy, it is important that the messaging is based on the benefits for the user and not the features of the products. Remember your buyer persona’s pain points and relate these back to how upgrading will help eliminate these to achieve the highest sales conversion rate. 

For a SaaS business to progressively expand, it is vital that you are retaining clients year on year. By offering different pricing tiers for your software, as your client’s business needs grow, you’ll easily create upsell opportunities for your clients to get more from your software to meet the needs of their business, be it buying more seats or opening up premium areas of your software offer.