December 14, 2010
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Clients need and want more stuff than you can possibly imagine, but you can’t wait for them to tell you what those things are. You have to ask – and when you do, be ready to expect the unexpected! If you’re willing to keep your ears open and make a few adjustments here and there, you will find a lot more opportunities than just selling what you think people ought to buy.
I learned that lesson through my part-time business of selling musical scores, but the insights are applicable in any customer service environment – especially in providing financial planning and investment advice. After all, you provide a service to each of your clients, some of whom may have similar needs but all of whom are unique. Asking your clients what more you could be doing for them is the only way to make sure you’re offering the advice they truly want.
A recent example from my own career: One of my publishing customers had done my shows so often I decided to create for him his own “conductor’s score” so he wouldn’t have to use my rental copies any more. After sending the score to him, I realized that the paper I used wasn’t as heavy as it should have been, so after his latest performance, I sent him a little follow-up e-mail, asking him if the paper was thick enough to not bleed through.
He wrote me back and said, “The paper is fine … but the text is too small.”
Wow. I had been renting copies of this score all over the world for 25 years, but I had never used it myself in a performance or noticed the woefully small and impractical point size of the text.
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