Have you ever had a client say “I wish I’d known you could have helped me with that”?

Those are words you don’t want to hear Ever.

Those words mean only one thing: even though you’ve done all the hard work of starting and developing a relationship with that client, you are going to lose business.

Why? Because if your clients don’t know about the other services you offer, they are going to go elsewhere when they want them. Or they’ll be susceptible to being ‘snapped up’ by another business that comes along offering that service at just the time they need it.

I’ll admit that it’s happened to me.

Not that long ago I found out that my client had hired someone else to do something I could have helped him with. He had been working with me to implement education-based marketing into his business, and then he asked someone else to advise him on his new website.

Now, I don’t design websites. I leave all that creative work to those who are actually creative!

But I do help clients design the strategy for their website. I help them plan how to turn their website from an online brochure into a client-generating machine. But my client assumed he needed a ‘website developer’ to help him update this website and didn’t realise that I could help him design the strategy for his website, building on the education-based marketing strategy we had already developed together. Then he would be ready to ask a website developer to implement that strategy for him.

So not only did my client go to someone else for a service I could have provided him with but, worse, by getting the website strategy advice from someone else, he was potentially going to get conflicting advice that would get in the way of the work we were doing together. Ugh.

It was my fault entirely. Because it’s my responsibility as a business owner to let my clients know about the services I provide. I can’t expect them to know what I haven’t told them. And in this case I had assumed it was obvious that I could provide this service, when it wasn’t.

So what can you do to avoid this?

The good news is, this problem is easy to fix. You simply need to tell your clients about your other services. Here are 3 tips for getting that message across:

1. Make sure that when you are talking to clients you take the opportunity to tell them about other services which you know are relevant to them. It sounds obvious, but it’s often overlooked. Don’t assume they know what you know.
2. If you don’t know which other services might be relevant to your clients, why not ask them? It might not be appropriate (or comfortable) to ask them directly, but you could send them a short survey or a simple email asking them about other challenges or needs they have. Once you know, you can look for an opportunity to tell them about the services you can see are relevant to them.
3. Use your newsletter or blog to tell your clients about others you have helped with the other services you provide. You don’t need to give out client names if that’s not appropriate – just present the information as an example or case study. You could also include testimonials from clients as a way of demonstrating the services you provide (and the results you have achieved for those clients).

The important thing is to make sure your clients never need to say the dreaded words “If only I’d known you could have helped me with that…..”.