What to ask your agency about upsells and cross-sells

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on upsells and cross-sells, these questions are worth asking early.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Relevance beats volume every time. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Aggressive upsells at checkout increase abandonment. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about upsells and cross-sells before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Relevance beats volume every time — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.