Run the classic upsell and choose the moment

1. What an upsell is

An upsell is whatever you offer next. When one offer solves a problem, another problem appears, and you sell the solution to the problem the first offer revealed. Every offer opens a door to an upsell, and upsells open doors to more upsells.

It is the second step of the money model, after the attraction offer has produced customers and cash. The aim from there is to make the most profit inside the first thirty days, and the way to do that is to make upsell offers.

Upsells can carry most of the profit. Upsells often make up most of the profit even when they are not what sells in the greatest volume. Rather than making more money from a few customers, get ten times the customers and make much more on the second sale. You might sell ten times more of the front-end offer and still take ten times the profit from the second sale.

The burger case. A burger sells for $2 and costs $1.75 to make, leaving 25 cents. Add fries and a soda — make it a meal — and the profit per sale rises by $1.75, from 25 cents to $2. The stated result is eight times the gross profit per sale. An offer to supersize, make it large, is the next upsell on top of that.

You may be one upsell away from a much bigger business. Find your equivalent of fries and a soda, because if you do not, someone else will.

2. What to sell next

• More of the same — quantity. One burger becomes two.
• A better version — quality. A sirloin or organic burger instead of an unidentified one.
• Something new — complementary and different. Fries and a soda with the burger.

The objective is to raise profit per customer and to move customers into the back end. The structures on this page and the three after it work anywhere and could also serve as front-end offers; they are placed where they have been used most and have worked best — at least for one operator.

3. Choosing the moment

An upsell does not have to come at the checkout. Sometimes it is made immediately, sometimes a few days later, sometimes a few weeks later, and sometimes a month later. Whichever you choose, upsells go wrong in three ways:

Failure	What it looks like
Wrong thing	Something they do not want — either too different or not a solution to the problem they have
Wrong time	Offered before they have met the problem it solves — a second steak offered to someone who has just eaten one
Wrong way	They do not believe you specifically, even if the offer sounds good

Or a combination of the three. The wrong-time failure is the one this page's title is about: a solution offered before the customer has felt the problem is an offer for something they do not want yet. A problem already solved cannot be sold again.

Flag: what the wrong way means. Here, they do not believe you specifically. SOP 162, section 4, reads it as asking in a way they did not like. On the first reading a failed upsell sends you to their trust in you; on the second, to how you made the offer. This page does not settle which reading is right.

The delays above are a range, not named moments. The named moments at which upsells are placed, in the order they occur, are set out in section 6 of SOP 57 — Compute the payback period and shorten it. In the classic upsell below, the moments that appear are the same visit, a nutrition consultation a couple of days later, and a sale on the second day.

4. The classic upsell: sell what the first purchase needs

In one example, an aquarium shop gives a free goldfish to any child who comes in with a parent on a Saturday. The fish costs the shop about a dollar, but it cannot live in the bag it goes home in: it needs a bowl, a small filter and food, which the shop sells together as a $38 starter set. Staff show the starter set while the child picks a fish, then ask the parent, anything else I can get you today? The worked figures in this example are invented.

The structure: the first purchase brings a second need with it, and you sell that need on the spot. Fries with a burger, a bowl and food with a fish, servicing with a car.

The no sale. People have learned over the years to turn salespeople down, so a closing question that invites a no gets one automatically. Frame the else as meaning anything beyond what you just offered, and the customer's no becomes a yes to the bowl, the filter and the food.

The second no sale. The same name was given to rescuing a customer who declined everything. At a gym, somebody who turned down every service was offered, to keep goodwill, a free six-week at-home program on a thumb drive and a nutrition consultation on the house in a couple of days. A lot of people said yes. At that consultation they closed at the same rate as ordinary customers but at a higher average ticket: members who then bought supplements averaged $200, non-members who bought supplements averaged $300. The lesson drawn is that you had been trying to solve their problem in a way they did not want; they wanted the easy answer, and the supplements were it.

5. How the structure is written

Provide something for free that you make money on another way. This works for one-time services, and for recurring ones provided the recurring stream carries enough margin to pay for both. Three phrasings:

1. Thing A is free in exchange for buying thing B.
2. Thing A is free, and I will encourage you to buy thing B.
3. Thing A is free as long as you keep using thing B.

The fish is the second: a free fish, and the starter set strongly encouraged.

The lemonade stand. A free cup of lemonade. Upsell one might be lemonade ice cubes that chill it without watering it down — you could serve it cold, but then you would have no ice-cube upsell. Upsell two is a stainless steel to-go container, with $1 donated to a children's cancer charity for every one sold and 20 percent off refills. Whatever you sell, a natural upsell is available.

6. The worked cases

Storage. A free month of storage is said to cost the customer $127. The walk-through: the first thing needed is a lock, and only one kind fits — sold at the front desk for $47. Then boxes, on site, so nobody has to buy them elsewhere and wait. Then hand trucks. Then insurance: damage is covered up to $500, and million-dollar cover is an extra $10 a month, at a stated margin of 90 percent. Often people also need a bigger unit than they thought, because they underestimate what fits and forget they need to reach the back. The customer must buy these things somewhere; the question is whether they buy them from you.

Weight loss. In one weight-loss business, the first upsell was supplements at the nutrition orientation, then nutrition plans. Supplements were chosen as the immediate sale because they carry no further delivery: hand them over and the profit is back, and what was made on them usually covered the cost of acquiring the customer before any service had been delivered.

Physical therapy. Maybe four free treatments as the offer — a strong one. The first upsell is the orthotics, bands, braces, oils and tape that make the four treatments work.

Education. Group coaching, information and a community, free indefinitely as long as the customer keeps using your software.

Free or discounted, it works either way. A weight-loss chain charged $5 a month for services staffed by doctors and nurses, made nothing on the service, and sold something like five grand in supplements on the second day. One owner paid that chain's top salesperson $500 an hour for two hours — $1,000 in total — to learn every step of how she sold, and credits it with making millions. Sometimes the best people to learn from do not sell information at all; people are not used to being asked, and what you learn can be worth far more to you than the fee.

7. The rules

1. If A is free, it is free. Somebody who wants only the free thing gets it. You cannot make buying B a condition; you can only encourage it strongly.
2. Keep A cheap to give. It should cost you little or nothing but still be valuable, like the thumb drive of workouts.
3. Make B the next natural purchase. Locks, boxes, bigger units, insurance; continuity of service, supplements, prepared meals, hormone treatments.
4. Make B feel as required as possible. The more central B is to getting the result, the more likely they buy it. Do not make it required — that turns shady — but encourage it strongly, and only where it genuinely gets them a better result.
5. Make it frictionless. With a seamless process you can get sometimes 80 percent or more of customers to take the upsell.

The benchmark. If you are not closing 80 percent or more, you are doing it wrong. At 30 percent, the upsell is not assumed enough — it is not clear to the customer that it goes with the thing. At a fast-food chain, the bet offered is that 80 percent of customers take fries and a soda.

Flag: 80 percent as a ceiling and as a floor. One line says a frictionless process can sometimes reach 80 percent or more; another says below 80 percent you are doing it wrong. This page does not settle which reading is right.

Further practices for any upsell:

• Lead with the more profitable one. Of two upsells, offer the one with the higher profit first.
• Give access fast. Something the customer can use only later feels worth less than the same thing now, so shorten the wait; best of all, hand it over before they have agreed, because handing back something already held is harder.
• Bundle and name. Group several upsells into one package named for the customer type or the result. One ask then brings several sales, and items can later be taken off the package as a downsell.
• Keep offering in the spending window. Most buyers who have just started something new, such as a wedding, a hobby, a baby or a move, spend heavily over a short stretch. A business that serves those moments should keep making offers through it.

One preference here is for upsells with little operational drag, so they either recover the cost of the customer at once or become the main profit stream — which of the two depends on what the business is for.

8. Where it works

On the front end, on the back end, and as an internal play on existing customers: the same move works on people who already buy from you. It is not a hard sale for somebody who is weak at selling, it carries a lot of goodwill, and it brings in a lot of customers up front.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• Which of the four timings to use. They are a range of delays, and no ranking is given.
• What to give as A in your business. Cheap and valuable is the property named; this page gives no figure for what it should cost you.

10. The checklist

Question	The answer
What an upsell is	Whatever you offer next
What to sell	More of the same, a better version, or something new
When	Immediately, days, weeks or a month later — after the problem appears
The three failures	Wrong thing, wrong time, wrong way
The principle	The first purchase brings a second need; sell that need
The three phrasings	Free in exchange for, free and encouraged, free as long as
The storage case	A free month worth $127 once the upsells land
The closing question	One that invites an automatic no to anything beyond what was just offered
Take-up to aim for	80 percent or more
Take-up that means a problem	30 percent
Further practices	Higher profit first; fast access; named bundles; offers through the spending window

11. What this page does not cover

Upsells are the second of the four prongs in SOP 59 — Assemble a money model from four prongs, and the five moments an upsell can be placed at are carried by SOP 57. The other upsells come after this one: the prescribing form, which removes items before selling the rest, is SOP 67 — Run the menu upsell; showing the expensive version first is SOP 68 — Run the anchor upsell; and crediting what was already paid toward the next purchase is SOP 69 — Run the rollover upsell. What to offer when the answer is no begins with SOP 70 — Work the payment-plan downsell ladder. The attraction offers whose customers this page sells to next include buy-X-get-Y-free (SOP 63) and the decoy (SOP 62). The same three moves as a wider growth discipline are SOP 40 — Choose the next growth move.

Inventory management and supplement sourcing are not covered on this page.