RevTech

A Step-By-Step Guide to Automating Upsell Opps in Salesforce

ArchitectureNRRPLSSales Ops

If you answered “yes” to more than 4 of these questions, an automated upsell process is likely to make revenue impact for your business. Upselling Opps in Salesforce refers to the process of encouraging existing customers to purchase a higher-priced or more advanced version of a product or service. This strategy is designed to increase revenue by offering customers more valuable options that align with their needs or enhance their current experience. Within Salesforce, upselling is facilitated by leveraging customer data, creating specific opportunity records, and automating workflows to ensure timely follow-ups. By tracking customer behavior and utilizing targeted alerts, Salesforce helps sales teams identify and capitalize on upsell opportunities, ensuring both improved customer satisfaction and higher sales value.

Step 1: Tell Salesforce What Upsell Opportunities to Look For

Create a flow that searches key data points for specific triggers (see above) and when it finds one, creates an upsell opportunity record.

This flow triggers based on specific field value changes, which can vary depending on your Salesforce architecture. You may be triggering based on data points from the account, contact, or a custom object tailored to upsell operations.

Step 2: Create Filter Logic to Exclude Opportunities That Should Not Be Created

To avoid cluttering your pipeline with irrelevant upsell opportunities, use filters to exclude certain accounts. Ineffective filtering logic often leads to upsell opportunities being either ignored or closed prematurely.

Examples to consider filtering out:

Upsell opportunity already open.
Opportunity closed won within the last 45 days. Include renewals, upsells and new business.
Opportunity closed lost within the last 45 days. Consider both lost upsells and recently churned customers.
Non-IP customers, such as single user accounts or customers who are costing you money.
Red accounts. No one wants to be upsold when they’re upset.

Additionally, consider whether you’ll need separate logic for partners, legacy customers with outdated plans, and more.

Step 3: Create the Upsell Opportunity Record

This is where the fun begins—creating a new upsell opportunity record. Be sure to map the following key fields: Make sure to categorize the opportunity appropriately and set specific parameters for tracking, ensuring the upsell is aligned with the customer’s evolving needs and usage patterns:

✱ Map key fields like:

Type or Record type = expansion
Source = auto-upsell
Source detail = give insight into the usage shown or logic (e.g. 10 new users)

✱ Attach contact roles:

Query previous opportunities and copy the contact roles
Consider looking at the most engaged contacts on the account by usage, and adding those

✱ Add products:

For upsells → same product with a placeholder amount
For cross-sell (based on usage you believe we should sell a different product) → add that new product

Step 4: Create Alerts for Upsell Opportunities

Finally, follow the step-by-step process to create alerts for upsell opportunities in Salesforce. By automating these alerts, you can ensure that your team is notified of high-potential opportunities, allowing them to act swiftly and effectively. This will help you stay on top of your upsell pipeline and maximize revenue opportunities:

Create an alert to the opportunity owner
- Typically account owner or CSM
- Alert can be via email and/or Slack – but we prefer Slack
- This adds another layer of visibility for the sales/CS team

Create alerts for opportunities that were not created BUT had high usage (your exclusions)
Create alerts if there is no activity on the opportunity
- This is so important so you can follow up for adoption
- Get buy-in from sales leadership on this. They must make expectations clear with the field that follow up on upsell opportunities is required (even if it’s just to close it with a reason!)

Learnings and Gotchas for Automating Upsell Opportunities in Salesforce

Having implemented this a few times, we’ve learned some lessons. Finally, let’s dive into the key learnings and gotchas when automating upsell opportunities in Salesforce. Understanding these insights will help you avoid common pitfalls, streamline the process, and ensure your upsell automation is as effective as possible. By learning from others’ experiences, you can fine-tune your system to maximize both efficiency and revenue.

Lucky for you, you can avoid these pitfalls:

✱ You will not regret spending time up front to think about how you pipe in usage data into Salesforce. Usage in SFDC is a slippery slope AND every team will want to use it. Spend time with product, marketing, sales and CS.

✱ Your reps will not action expansion opportunities if there are too many getting created or at the wrong time. Filter out any account that already has an expansion opportunity and anyone with an upcoming renewal. For those use cases you can instead send a Slack alert.

✱ Copy over contact roles from previous opportunities! This is a nice to have, but we all know how much reps hate adding contact roles.

✱ Meet with your reps to understand how they want to be alerted about these expansion opportunities. We’ve seen these just “sit” in the system with no action. What a waste.

For a deeper dive into building a unified go-to-market approach, explore our RevOps Strategy Guide
Check the Superhuman Use Case, an innovative email client, worked with Go Nimbly to optimize their RevOps process.

Have questions or want to learn more about how to spot gaps and improve your lead to meeting process?Get in touch with us!

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