How good are you at upselling? You may think that it’s simply suggesting an additional product to a customer who just agreed to buy from you and hoping for the best. Actually, upselling is an art that you can work to improve in order to increase your sales, says Jay Fuchs in a recent HubSpot article. “The process can take on several forms that vary according to how, why, and where the deal is being conducted,” says Fuchs. “When done right, the practice can lead customers to buy up without overthinking their additional purchases.”

Here are a few of the techniques Fuch recommends aspiring upsellers take a shot at.

The Art of Upselling

Tactic 1: Offer Dropping

Do you have a product or service directly related to the one you just sold your customer or something completely different that could fulfill one of your client’s additional needs? Does that product or service happen to be on sale? If so, it’s time to give this first upselling tactic a try.

There are very few people out there who won’t look twice when they see that something is on sale. Most of your clients will take an interest if you casually mention that an additional product or service of yours has been marked down from a more expensive price, especially if this will only be the case for a limited time.

Upselling also means that you convince your prospect to buy a more expensive product. During the sales process, you could offer your client a product that meets their basic needs and is well within the price range they gave you. However, you know that they could benefit more from a more expensive option. To upsell, you could bring up the more expensive product to them and inform them of how much better it will be at fulfilling their broader range of needs. It’s a bit more expensive, but its price has currently been marked down by [name specific amount]. That could be the incentive they need to make a more expensive purchase. Boom. Upselling.

Tactic 2: The Strategic Placing of Reviews

If you’re like most businesses right now, you’ve dedicated more resources to e‑commerce. But just because your clients aren’t directly talking to you when they make their purchase doesn’t mean you can’t practice upselling. If you direct your prospects to a product page so that they can do some more research on the product they’re interested in, one of the first things they’ll probably look at will be its reviews. This is a chance for upselling.

Make sure your reviews are set up so that the first one they see is a five-​star review mentioning how the product fits their needs as expected. Below that, feature a review of an enhanced version of the product they’re looking at that gushes over the upgraded quality of the more expensive product. Look for a review that mentions how the more expensive product doesn’t just meet their expectations, but exceeds them. This comparison will get your prospects thinking that perhaps spending more money would be worth it after all.