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Commission rate

Commission rate

Noun

[ko-mish-in ray-t]

A commission rate is the reward or payment associated with either a percentage of sale or payment. In partnerships, partners can earn commission on either qualified leads or on closed sales. The commission rate is the percentage of the value of that lead or sale that is paid to the partner.

The commission rate you offer should depend on how much the partner is involved in the sale, as well as how much work they’re doing to maintain the client over time. For example, you may choose to give affiliates a commission of 15% for one year, but give resellers 30% for the lifetime of the account, because they're doing much more work to sell and maintain that account over time.

Example: Giro's partner program paid a commission rate of 25% to resellers, who did more work to close a sale, and 15% to affiliates, who did less work to produce leads.

More Partnership terms beginning with
C
Customer relationship management (CRM)

Noun

[kuh·stuh·mr ruh·lay·shuhn·shuhp man-ij-ment]

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a software used to build and manage communication between a company and its customers or prospective customers. It's primarily used by sales, customer success and marketing teams to improve and streamline processes including lead tracking, customer segmentation information and task management.

CRMs are used to increase sales and improve retention by shortening the sales cycle, and monitoring and following up regularly with active customers. A good CRM tool will help attract, delight and engage in order to scale your B2B SaaS business.

Example: B2B SaaS companies use CRM (customer relationship management) software in their business as a centralized place to manage  connections with customers and prospects.

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Cross-selling

Verb

[kraas sel·luhng]

Cross-selling, in sales, is when a customer is persuaded to add an additional, complementary product to their purchase. Cross-selling is important because it boosts overall revenue and can also increase the customer's satisfaction since the related product serves to improve their experience with the product initially being purchased as well.

The key to cross-selling is o understand the customer's needs and anticipate a product that would help improve their experience with that product or service. Cross-selling is not effective and can lead to dissatisfaction is the complementary product is irrelevant, inappropriate or incompatible.

Cross-selling is similar to upselling, which is when a salesperson persuades a customer who is already making a purchase to opt for a more premium option.

An example of cross-selling in B2B SaaS would be a company that sells their CRM to a customer also marketing a document-management technology that would help support the function of that customer's business.

Example: Rick, a sales manager at a SaaS company for invoicing software had a big day. He made a sale of his company's software to a large client who wanted to improve the workflow of their accounting department. Rick also sweetened the deal by cross-selling a partner company's subscription management software.

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