How to sell clients on peripheral services...

More of a question than an answer here...but it came up lately in our office. Here's my posting related to the incident.

The recent situation with me was simply a post-decree divorce matter where we represented a woman regarding some child support modifications and defended her in various contempt of court proceedings. Near the end of these proceedings the woman needs to sell her home and doesn't utilize our firm for the real estate transaction. Why? How can we change this? Should we want to change this?

The obvious answer could be I suppose that she wasn't happy with our representation...knowing the client and this particular instance that wasn't the case here. And at some level I think it's a good thing that this client put us in her "family law expert" box...I want our clients to think that we're family law experts and indeed it's likely our largest practice area. But on the flip side, we do work in real estate extensively too.

How to bridge this gap?

Actually we also have had the opposite result in the last few months too where a former family law client retained us for a real estate transaction. With this individual she had learned of our real estate prowess through our quarterly client newsletter...so some of our marketing is paying off.

The only other direct thing we do in terms of client education about the breadth of our practice is sort of a "close file marketing letter" explaining the breadth of our services.

What more should be done? My staff and I actually just met about two things I think that will address this to some degree. First, we're going to create some subject-matter specific pamphlets whether as PDFs or hard-copy pamphlets for distribution...this might go out with our quarterly newsletter, our monthly billing and/or sent to prospective clients upon an initial cold call. Second, we're going to start finishing client representation with a Survey Monkey survey and somehow breadth of service will be addressed in the survey questions.