Effectively Cross Sell Your Products to Fragmented Markets

Like most big businesses, when chemical producers talk about growth, they’re usually talking about expanding market share by selling to more customers or even finding new markets. Simple math, right? More customers = more money. The thing is that finding new customers, while extremely important, also takes a lot of work.

And, by putting the entire focus on new, new, new, many producers ignore the fact that they already have a really great market — people who are already customers and can probably benefit from other product lines.

The best part?

Companies don’t have to pound pavement to find these customers because they’re already in the proverbial rolodex. This method of cross-selling is insanely valuable to businesses who want to deepen their reach with their existing customer base.

It’s the Next Logical Step for Most Companies

The normal customer journey looks something like this:

Customers find and vet a company who sells what they need. When that company delivers — and delivers well — they’re glad to come back, and better yet, find more ways to work together. Sometimes this means buying more products, while others, it means finding new opportunities.

This is true for most business units, because everyone loves having a trusted partner who prioritizes customer needs and looks out for them.

However, it’s especially true for small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) because they typically don’t have a full-time purchasing team whose sole role it is to vet new vendors. This means it’s WAY more convenient to stick with a company they already trust.

So companies making a real effort to expand sales within an already warm customer base frequently see significant growth and ROI more quickly in their existing market than they do within new markets.

The Trust Factor

Sustained success in cross-selling hinges entirely on building trust. Unfortunately, it’s an area where lots of manufacturers and producers fall short, especially when it comes to the SMBs in their customer base who place nearly as much value on the relationship as they do on value and quality.

SMBs have exceptional needs compared with larger customers with:

• Smaller orders that require more labor to fulfill.
• Lots more technical questions that don’t fit the typical chemical producer business model.
• Complex service needs that cost more on a per-customer basis.

As a result, chemical producers place higher focus on serving customers that are more profitable which can mean longer wait times and high frustration levels for SMBs and other highly fragmented markets.

Curious about the 18 things customers value most when finding and evaluating new vendors? 

Innovating to Build Trust and Cross-Sell Effectively

By now, it’s obvious that current norms in the chemical industry leave plenty of room for improvement — in terms of process and profit. And the answer lies in transforming the way producers bring products to the market to extend their brand promise to ALL customers.

This means some combination of speeding up order times, improving customer service, and lowering minimum order quantities. It’s a tall order for the way lots of chemical producers do business. And that’s where Xenon arc comes in.

Changing the Game With Tech

Our game-changing model that uses emerging technologies to simplify the global supply chain and improve the experience for all customers. The results are transformational and frequently lead to innovations across entire business units for our producer clients.

In addition to increasing operational efficiency and overall profitability for our clients, our model delivers greater brand loyalty among their customers with exceptional needs. And these customers? They account for as much as 30% of the market.

The way producers serve their core market segments — those who order a single product housed at a single warehouse by the truckload — may not change all that much. But then, it doesn’t need to — those customers already enjoy high levels of service. Then again, the insights we deliver have the power to increase efficiency, innovation, and profitability even for these ideal customers.

The bottom line is this: “This is the way we’ve always done it,” does not apply in today’s world. And while it’s always important to find new sandboxes (markets) to play in, chemical producers cannot expect to achieve without finding new product-market fits for their existing customer base.

To learn more about how Xenon arc delivers an improved experience for non-core customers of chemical producers, contact Mica Zuniga at mica.zuniga@xenonarc.com.