Business | Knowledge


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


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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.


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


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