Marketing Exercise: Cross Sell Your Products

Purpose

This exercise helps delegates to brainstorm how to cross sell products. It focuses on a random set of products so it is rather creative to see what marketing strategies delegates can come up with. The key point to make in this exercise is that any two products can be related to each other and this can be used as material for marketing and cross selling.

Objective

Cross sell a pair of products while thinking of marketing strategy and advertisement approach.

What You Need

• Small blank cards.

Setup

• Make the cards available to all delegates.
• Explain that in this exercise, delegates will get to learn how to cross sell.
• First they would need to select a number of products. If the delegates are from the same organisation, they should select their own products. If not, they can select any product though you can choose to limit the set to bias the exercise based on your training needs.
• Ask the delegates to pick around 20 products together. For example, if you have 8 delegates, each delegate should pick three cards and write the name of one product on each. You will end up with 24 products in this case.
• Allow one minute for this.
• Collect all the cards and check for duplicates. Ask the delegates to add more products if needed.
• Keep the pile of cards (master pile).
• Now, give one card to each delegate. Ask delegates to pair up with another person at random. If you have an odd number of delegates use a group of three.
• Ask the groups to relate their products with an aim to cross sell them. How would they market the products together? How can one product be used to support the sale of the other? What advertisement strategies would they employ?
• Allow 15 minutes for this part.
• Bring back everyone together.
• Collect half the cards and put them aside.
• Give a fresh card from your master pile to each person who doesn’t currently have a card.
• Now ask the delegates to repeat the exercise. Encourage delegates to talk to a different person than they did in the first round.
• Optionally, you can repeat for another round if you have enough time or products.
• Bring back all together.
• Ask them to share their experiences one by one and explain what was most interesting about what they went through in this exercise?
• Allocate about 15 minutes for this part.
• Follow with a discussion to wrap up a number of grand conclusions or actions.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 2 minutes

Activity: 3 min selecting a unique set of products + (15 min cross selling * n rounds) + 15 minutes sharing experiences = 48 minutes for two rounds

Group Feedback: 5 minutes

Discussion

Did you find a plausible strategy to cross sell all pairs? Was there any pair of products that proved to be very difficult to cross sell? Why? Was there a surprising pair of products that on the outset did not feel possible to cross sell but with further thought you came up with an elegant marketing strategy?