‘Oh, I never knew you did that’ is a phrase that businesses hear quite often, and is often an indication that some key services aren’t as shouted about as others. Stuart Mason, founder of Here’s How To, talks about how businesses should revaluate what they offer and shout about it all.
If I had a pound for every time I have heard a print business owner say, “a customer told me they never knew we did that”, I would have retired years ago, and so would you.
It is one of those comments that every company in the graphics industry has heard at some point, yet very few stop to think about what it actually means because the natural reaction is to assume the customer simply was not paying attention.
After all, the product is on the website, it has been mentioned on social media, it appears in the company brochure, and it has probably featured in countless conversations over the years, so surely the customer should have known.
The uncomfortable truth is they don’t, and that’s on you, not them.
The customers’ interests
Customers do not look at your business the way you do because they are not interested in your business.
They are interested in solving today’s problem, and once that problem has been solved, they go back to running their own business without giving another thought to the hundreds of products and services you are capable of supplying.
If they buy business cards every month, then you become the business card company. If they order brochures every quarter, then you become the
brochure company.
If they regularly purchase site boards or safety signage, then you become the sign company. Everything else quietly disappears into the background because it has no relevance to what they need today.
That does not mean they have forgotten your website or ignored your marketing. It simply means your other products are sitting in exactly the same place as that bus at the end of the road. They are visible, but they are not important. Until they are…
The problem is that when the need finally appears, the customer often has no immediate association between that new requirement and your business.
The restaurant owner who has bought menus from you for the last five years suddenly decides to refurbish the premises and orders the external signage from someone else because they never connected your company with signs.
The construction business that has trusted you with site boards spends thousands on branded workwear without ever asking for a quotation because they genuinely did not realise you supplied clothing. The retailer who orders point of sale material every month goes elsewhere for vehicle graphics because, in their mind, you are still the print company they have always used.
None of those sales was lost because of price, quality or because your competitors were necessarily better. They were lost because another supplier occupied the customer’s mind when a different problem appeared.
That is an expensive mistake because it costs far more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell an existing product to an existing customer.
You have already invested time building trust, proving your quality, demonstrating reliability and creating a relationship, yet you quietly allow additional revenue to disappear simply because you assumed your customers understood everything you were capable of producing.
In fact, I would argue that the broader your product range becomes, the less likely your customers are to understand it.
The average graphics business today is capable of producing an astonishing range of products including print, signage, exhibition displays, branded clothing, promotional merchandise, vehicle graphics, and countless other specialist items.
From the owner’s perspective, all of these products sit comfortably under one roof, but from the customer’s perspective they often exist as completely separate industries.
The disconnect between customer and provider I regularly ask business owners a simple question during workshops: “How many of your customers know everything you sell?”
The answer is usually accompanied by a confident smile and a comment about the website, the catalogue or the social media pages. My next question is always the same: “How do you know?”
Listing products on a website is not the same as educating customers. Websites are reference libraries, not teaching tools, because visitors only consume the information that helps solve the problem they arrived with. Somebody searching for business cards rarely decides to spend the next twenty minutes reading about architectural signage, branded gazebos or embroidered workwear because those products simply do not matter
to them today.
It’s why education has to become part of your everyday communication rather than something you hope customers discover for themselves. Every quotation should quietly introduce another product category. Every invoice should remind customers what else you supply. Every email newsletter should solve problems while showcasing different capabilities.
Every social media post should reinforce another area of expertise. Most importantly of all, every conversation should include genuine curiosity about what is happening inside the customer’s business because opportunities rarely arrive wearing a badge that says “please sell me more”.
Ask whether they are recruiting, moving premises, opening another branch, attending exhibitions or replacing company vehicles because every answer
creates another opportunity to demonstrate the full breadth of your business.
Customers cannot ask you to quote for products they have never associated with your company, which means the responsibility for creating that awareness sits firmly with you.
Knowing your value
This is not about becoming pushy or trying to sell everything to everyone. It is about making sure your customers understand the genuine value you can bring before they instinctively start searching elsewhere.
There is a significant difference between aggressive selling and consistent education, and the businesses that understand that distinction are usually the ones enjoying higher average order values and stronger customer retention.
The next time a customer smiles and says, “Oh, I never knew you did that,” resist the temptation to laugh it off because that single sentence tells you something far more important than you might realise.
It tells you that your customer trusted you, liked working with you and was perfectly happy to spend money with your business, yet they still bought
elsewhere because your marketing failed to occupy the right space in their mind at the right moment. That should concern every graphics business owner because the lost sale you have just discovered is almost certainly not the only one.
It is simply the only one your customer happened to mention. Plus, if your competitor is better at highlighting all their products, you now run the risk of losing that client because they have found a ‘one-stop shop’. The bus is always there, quietly waiting at the end of the road until it becomes important.
Your products are no different because they only become visible when the customer’s circumstances change, which means your job is to keep reminding people that the bus exists long before they actually need to catch it.
If you fail to do that consistently, somebody else will be waiting at the bus stop when your customer finally arrives, and they will happily collect the cash that should have been yours.
What are you going to do this week to highlight your product range? Chances are your competitors are reading this too.
