I've found entrepreneurs grossly overestimate how aware their customers are about their product range.

Have you ever been bewildered as to why one of your best customers bought something that you sell from someone else? When you ask them why they didn’t buy it from you, you facepalm as they reply, “I had no idea you sold that.”

In a previous life, I sold telecommunications services - Internet access, fixed lines (remember those?), wireless services, VPNs, and so on. We encountered this problem constantly.

“I didn’t know you guys did [insert service we had been selling for years], that’s a shame as we signed a two-year contract for that with another provider just last week. 🤦

We radically reduced the probability of this happening by paying close attention to a key metric - products per customer.If a customer had only one product with us e.g. maybe Internet but not voice services, that was a problem for three reasons:

1. The customer had a fragmented experience. They’d get multiple bills from multiple providers. Technical issues frequently meant finger-pointing between providers.
2. We were capturing a lower share of revenue than we could be
3. It gave a competitor a foot in the door to steal the customer from us

By paying attention to and rewarding our salespeople on the “product per customer” metric, we massively reduced these issues. These were also the easiest sales to make because the customer already knew us, liked us, and trusted us.

If you sell multiple products, you need to segment your customers by product line and consistently make them aware of the products they could be buying from you that they currently don’t.