Up-Cross Selling

Let’s assume, you run a burger restaurant. Your customer is hungry. You see it in his eyes. He so badly wants to taste your burger. He orders the Standard-Size menu.

You, as an experienced salesman/woman see the chance of “upselling” your customer the Super-Size menu.

He is already deep in the sales process and he just wants to get his burger, why shouldn’t he upgrade it for only $2 extra and get more for his money?

The Burger is bigger, with more fries, and more Coke. Why the hell should he say no to that?

Let’s take a deeper look at this situation.

In these situations, your spontaneous reaction is usually triggered as a customer. What do I mean by that?

If you take a further look at the question “Would you like to Super Size that?”

What do you see?

It is a Yes/No Question.

This question is on purpose a Yes/No Question.

Why?

At Stanford University in 1999, there was following named experiment done: “Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making”

What they found out in short words:

Impulse behavior is characterized by a consumer's spontaneous positive emotional response to a product, which leads to a sudden urge to select it, but it is often associated with negative consequences for the decision-maker, as opposed to positively valenced affective reactions.

If you want to read the whole Research:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/209563?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

In other words, we people are emotionally tricked by such a question in such a situation. We don’t even want that Super-Size Menu, but we still buy it, because the spontaneous situation was used against you.

Cross-Selling works on the same basis. The only difference here is, that the customer gets a Coke, Fries, or something else extra to the burger.

I think you got the principle of how this situation is used against/for you, depending on which side of the desk you are standing on.

You can use this in online business too. I think we all experienced the situation in the last process of the signup for an online product where we got the offer for super-premium spontaneously for only $5 extra.

Think about it. Maybe you can use it not only in our fictive situation here.