Cross-selling potential deals with the question, which products a customer could purchase from the company in addition to already purchased products.
Cross-selling is one of the most neglected sales instruments. A central reason for this low cross-selling usage is the product-orientation of sales organizations. Employees, that are mainly responsible for marketing specific product groups, tend to think in a product-oriented way and are often too focused on the sales figures of one product. There are various methods for determining the cross-selling potential. Two simple methods are the customer survey and the employee assessment. Many companies (e.g. in e-commerce) additionally develop comprehensive scoring models based on basic data, consumption-geographic segmentation and product usage profiles in order to assess cross-selling potential.
In the context of cross-selling, composite effects between the products of a supplier are often considered. The idea is that there is a procurement network between different products: If a customer buys product A, there is a probability that this customer also buys products B, C or D. This probability can be estimated using shopping cart or data mining analyses. For example, in the financial services sector, the probabilities of selling supplementary insurance policies depending on previous product use are examined using composite matrices. These matrices contain statements about the probability that users of a particular entry-level product are eventually going to use another additional product.