Do Your Clients Really Know What You Sell?

“Oh, I didn’t realize you sold that.” It’s a phrase that most financial services professionals dread hearing. It’s the moment where you realize a client, sometimes even a great client, didn’t realize you offered a product and bought it somewhere else.

Your business can sell many different products and services and it’s easy to miss opportunities to create awareness of what you have to offer with every single client.

Here are four easy ways to work on ensuring your clients don’t miss what you’re selling:

• Create time at the beginning of every client meeting to go over your customer service promise and provide an overview of what you do for clients. This might seem like overkill to you, but for clients who might only see you a few times a year this is a great way to ensure that they know who you are and how you can help them. We recommend using this article on agendas to help create a process that can be implemented for every meeting.
   
• Track your marketing efforts. What products and services do you pay attention to in your marketing? Do you focus only on a few, and if so is that an intentional strategy? If you want clients to know that you offer multiple products and services, you need to look at how often you promote those products and services. Many of our clients find that they have one or two main product lines that they promote and ignore others. Not because it was their plan, it’s simply because they haven’t been intentional in what they promote. Once you start quantifying what you are promoting it’s easier to see the opportunities and fix any gaps in your marketing. We recommend having a schedule so that your marketing matches your sales goals.
   
• Train your team on Service Through Selling. Cross-selling is often a missed opportunity because team members don’t want to come across as pushy or too salesy. Therefore, they miss those opportunities to offer and sell additional products and services. We change this by first teaching your team to see that offering additional products is a part of your customer service promise. Seeing a need and not mentioning how you can help is denying a client service. Those are strong words on purpose. Your team needs to have the mindset that part of service is helping clients protect needs and maximize opportunities they didn’t even realize they have. When you train your team to see cross-selling in this light it helps to ensure that your clients know exactly what you have to offer.
   
• Use your “space” wisely. Take a look around your lobby and office. What do your clients see when they are waiting or meeting with you? What brochures or informational materials are out? If you’re doing online meetings, consider making your background a virtual background that you can customize to market your variety of offerings. If you’re doing phone meetings, consider emailing clients an agenda with your listing of products and marketing material beforehand since they won’t be in the office. Consider changing your email signature once a month to highlight additional products and services. There are many creative ways to visually get your product offerings in front of clients! Take some time to consider the “space” you share with your prospects and clients, and how you can leverage it to let them know your full line of products and services.