Leveraging CRM Data To Drive More Upsells and Cross-Sells

Selling to your existing customer base is one of the most efficient ways to grow your business. These are people who already know and trust your brand, making them inherently more open to added value. Well-timed upsell and cross-sell offers can boost revenue while deepening relationships and strengthening customer loyalty. 

But scaling these strategies isn’t always easy. It takes the right timing, messaging, and full visibility into customer behavior. That’s where your customer relationship management (CRM) system comes in. When used strategically, it can surface untapped revenue opportunities and support data-driven decisions that deliver targeted offers at exactly the right moment.

The catch? CRM data only works if it’s connected. When customer insights live in silos—spread across tools, teams, or outdated systems—you miss the signals that drive meaningful results. That’s why modern organizations turn to unified platforms like Tenon + ServiceNow to bring their data, teams, and strategies together in one place.

Understanding upselling and cross-selling

Upselling and cross-selling are strategic ways to deliver more than what a customer expected at the time of their initial purchase. Rather than simply encouraging customers to spend more, these techniques focus on meeting customer needs by offering better or related products at the right time.

• Upselling involves prompting customers to consider a higher-end version of the product or service they’re already exploring — one with more features or a better profit margin. Example: Why settle for basic internet speed when ultra-premium speeds are just a few dollars more?
  
  
• Cross-selling introduces related products, accessories, or complementary services that enhance the value of the existing customer purchase. Example: Since you’re already planning to purchase internet service, why not add our streaming platform or a phone line?

When applied effectively, both strategies can improve the experience, increase customer lifetime value (CLV), and support sustainable growth, especially as customer acquisition costs continue to rise.

What is the role of CRM in cross-selling and upselling?

CRM systems play a central role in helping sales teams uncover and act on upsell and cross-sell opportunities. They organize customer data and track every interaction, providing a complete picture of customer preferences, behavior, and sentiment.

With this insight, sales and success teams can better anticipate customer needs and deliver relevant offers without the guesswork. It’s not just about storing data; it’s about turning that data into timely, revenue-driving actions.

How can CRM data be used to improve upselling and cross-selling strategies?

Cross-selling and upselling should feel like a natural extension of the customer journey — not a pushy sales tactic. Done right, they enhance the customer experience and increase revenue. However, knowing when and how to deliver the right offer can be tricky without the right data.

CRM systems help connect the dots. By analyzing customer interactions across touchpoints, your team can identify trends, behaviors, and signals that lead to smarter, better-timed offers.

Timing offers based on customer lifecycle stages

Every customer moves through a unique journey with your business, and their needs shift along the way. CRM data brings together key touchpoints and past customer interactions to help pinpoint where someone is in that journey. With that visibility, your team can deliver the right upsell or cross-sell offer at exactly the right moment, when the value is clearest and the timing feels natural.

Automating personalized outreach at scale

Enterprise sales teams often run into scalability challenges, especially when trying to balance marketing automation with true personalization. In fact, 89% of business leaders view personalization as a key driver of success, but executing at scale can be tough. The more tailored your sales journey, the harder it is to maintain speed and reach.

CRM tools can help you strike the right balance. With email marketing automation, you can build sequences that feel personal without requiring manual input. You can also tie CRM triggers — like hitting a spend threshold or going inactive — to relevant product suggestions or timely follow-ups, keeping your outreach relevant without overwhelming your team.

Prioritizing high-value accounts and segments

Some consumers and customer segments consistently drive more revenue than others. Your high-value accounts, especially enterprise customers purchasing multiple products, add-ons, or seat licenses, deserve focused attention. CRM insights can help identify which of these accounts are more likely to spend.

By analyzing purchase history and engagement trends, you can pinpoint when a high-value customer is ready for a cross-sell or an upgrade. This kind of visibility helps your team prioritize outreach where it’s most likely to convert and pay off.

Creating bundled or tiered offer strategies

If you offer a large catalog of products or services, your CRM can uncover valuable patterns in customer buying behavior. 

• Do customers in a certain segment often bundle two offerings that aren’t obviously linked? That’s a signal to build and promote a branded bundle.
  
  
• Do others tend to upgrade to a higher service tier once they hit a specific milestone? Use that insight to trigger automated outreach that nudges similar customers along the same path. 

These are just a couple of examples to get your wheels turning. The real opportunity lies in spotting repeatable behaviors in your CRM data and using them to fuel smarter cross-selling strategies.

Collaborating across sales, marketing, and customer success

In large organizations, multiple teams manage different stages of customer relationships. Marketing teams bring in new prospects, sales teams convert those prospects into customers, and success teams focus on customer retention and expansion. 

But without coordination, the handoff between these teams often breaks down: contacts get dropped, messages get missed or duplicated, and opportunities fall through the cracks.

A unified system like Tenon + ServiceNow helps consolidate your marketing tech stack, ensuring that sales, marketing, and customer success teams can collaborate in real time. With shared data and full visibility into the customer lifecycle, teams stay aligned and responsive, delivering a better overall experience.

Insights from positive and negative signals

Positive signals in your CRM, like increased engagement or product usage, can point to upsell potential. But negative signals are just as important. An open support ticket or recent complaint, for example, might indicate that now’s probably not the right time to send an upsell email or promotional message.

With a unified system, teams have a full picture and can adjust accordingly. This helps prevent overlapping, disjointed, or contradictory messaging and protects the customer experience when it matters most.

Key types of CRM data that help uncover upsell and cross-sell opportunities

Your CRM is more than a record-keeping tool. It’s a rich source of insights that can surface untapped revenue. Here are the most valuable data types for identifying upsell and cross-sell strategies.

Purchase history

A customer’s past purchases often signal what they may need next, whether it’s upgrades, add-ons, or complementary products. Tracking these trends helps surface logical next steps and makes cross-sell strategies feel natural, not pushy.

Over time, analyzing purchase patterns can also reveal which products are frequently bought together. You can use these insights to build bundles or inform tiered offerings.

Customer segmentation and demographics

Not all customer segments have the same priorities. You might serve doctors and mechanics, or lawyers and universities, but not everyone in your audience is buying for the same reasons. Some may shop from opposite ends of your catalog, while others purchase similar products to solve different problems.

CRM and demographic data can help you create meaningful customer segments so you can tailor messaging to each group. Segmenting by industry, company size, location, or persona reveals patterns that fuel more successful upsell tactics and effective cross-selling strategies.

Engagement and behavioral data

CRM data isn’t just about past sales. It also highlights areas of interest and intent. Website visits, email opens, content downloads, and other non-purchase interactions can reveal valuable engagement signals.

Even when there’s no direct sale, this behavioral data helps you understand what customers care about. Use it to tailor your messaging and highlight products or services aligned with their interests and actions.

Product usage data

If your product (physical or digital) provides usage data, you’re sitting on a gold mine. This data shows how customers interact with your offerings. If someone is consistently hitting usage limits or relying on workarounds, it’s the perfect moment to recommend higher tiers, advanced functionality, or premium features that better support their goals.

Customer support interactions

Support tickets and inquiries often point to friction in the customer experience. When someone reaches out with recurring issues or requests, it may signal an unmet need — one that could be resolved with a complementary product, added service, or upgrade aligned to their specific challenge.

Customer satisfaction and feedback

Customer feedback, along with satisfaction metrics like NPS scores and survey responses, offer a clearer picture of how engaged or loyal someone is to your brand. This sentiment often aligns with their readiness for upselling or cross-selling, helping you time your outreach more effectively.

Best practices for using CRM data to increase upsell and cross-sell success

Now that you understand how CRM data can reveal upselling opportunities and guide more effective cross-selling efforts (and which data types are most valuable) it’s time to put that insight into action. These best practices will help you turn CRM data into results.

1. Align teams around shared metrics and goals

Start by fostering collaboration between marketing, sales, and service teams. In many organizations, these groups operate in silos, leading to disjointed efforts and lost information. 

Aligning them around a shared set of KPIs, sourced directly from CRM insights, ensures everyone is working toward the same revenue goals and focused on high-impact upselling opportunities.

2. Maintain clean, centralized, and connected data

The old saying, “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO), still rings true, especially in the age of automation and generative AI. Inaccurate or incomplete data leads to flawed insights, missed opportunities, and wasted effort.

Prioritize high-quality data collection. That means keeping your CRM data clean, centralized, and connected, with real-time updates across systems. When your data is reliable, the recommendations and decisions it powers will be, too.

3. Regularly audit and refine segments and triggers

Marketing automation is only as effective as the logic behind it. Set up recurring reviews of your CRM rules, segments, and triggers to ensure your automations still align with current customer behaviors.

As product offerings evolve and customers change how they interact with your business, your CRM strategy should evolve with them.

4. Use feedback loops to continuously improve offers

Closed-loop reporting is a proven strategy used by leading organizations to refine what they offer over time. In a CRM upselling context, this means using performance data from current offers to shape future ones.

Track which cross-selling and upselling strategies actually convert, then use those insights to optimize your approach. Leveraging closed-loop reporting ensures your offers get sharper and more effective with every cycle.

5. Choose a platform built for modern teams

Your technology should match the way your team works, not slow it down. Look for an enterprise marketing platform designed for integration, collaboration, and real-time visibility. 

A CRM system like Tenon, built on the ServiceNow platform, gives modern marketing, sales, and service teams a shared, scalable workspace to execute high-impact go-to-market workflows.

Reimagine your CRM strategy with Tenon

CRM data holds the key to more successful cross-selling and upselling by helping you deepen customer relationships, increase revenue, and improve efficiency — without the high cost of new customer acquisition. But that only works when your data is connected, current, and easy to act on.

Disconnected systems and siloed teams limit what your CRM can do. A unified, intelligent platform like Tenon + ServiceNow changes that, giving you complete visibility into the customer journey and aligning marketing, sales, and service around shared goals and real-time insights.

See how a connected CRM strategy can drive real growth. Book your demo.