Archive for the ‘Sales and Marketing’ Category

Happy New Year!

One of my mentors for the past 15 years has been Stephen Covey, author of the bestselling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His ideas were instrumental in helping me turn my practice from struggling to highly successful.

One of the seven habits that Stephen identifies is “To Begin with the End in Mind.” What he means by this is that being able to create a clear picture of where you want to go will help you get there much faster and more easily.

It’s rather like embarking on any journey to an unfamiliar destination.

Imagine you were driving to Alaska for the first time. Without a map or clear directions, you’d end up taking many wrong turns or driving in circles for hours and perhaps not even getting there at all.

It may seem a fairly obvious error. But that’s the way many CPAs attempt to run their practices or their careers. They have no clear picture of their desired destination and no map of how they plan to get there.

The end results can be the same – a great deal of wasted time and even failing to get where they want to go.

A Strategic Objective can serve as a clear picture of your desired destination and can be your road map for getting there.

A Strategic Objective is a one-page document that describes your practice at its best and addresses the following big questions:

• This is who we are.
• This is how we operate.
• This is who we serve.
• This is our competitive advantage.

To create your Strategic Objective, you need to sit down and develop a clear vision of where you want to go with your practice. Envision in your mind exactly what it will be like at some stage in the future – perhaps three, five, or ten years down the road.

Creating the first draft will take you a few hours and then you’ll spend a bit of time over the next few days refining it.

Here are some crucial questions that will help you develop your Strategic Objective:

• What is the big picture for your practice? Think of your practice
as a product and specify what the end product will look like in the future.

• Who are your employees? How many? Describe them.

• What will your gross billing be? $200,000; $500,000; $1 million;
or several million dollars?

• What services will you provide?

• What types of clients will you be attracting? Geographic areas?
Industries?

• What is your Unique Service Proposition (USP) ? What makes
you different from the competition? What is your reason for
existence?

• How many days/hours will you work each week (during tax
season , in the off -season)?

• What is the legacy you will leave behind?

As soon as you have a clear Strategic Objective for what you want your practice to look like in the future, you will be much closer to making it a reality.

Warmly,

Salim

You can’t run a CPA practice in today’s world without having an effective website. That is the place where your prospects will go to see ‘the face’ of your firm, who the people behind it are and read about the experiences of others who have dealt with you. Not having an effective website that is not updated regularly is like telling your prospects and clients that you don’t care about your firm.

I have observed that a large percentage of CPA firms purchase a website from a service provider that sells generic website templates that simply don’t work in the real world. You want to advertise you are unique in your field, don’t you? But if your site is nothing but unique and looks cheap to boot – you will turn prospects away. Distance yourself from the crowd and be different from your competitors.

Here are the most common mistakes I see CPAs make with their website:

Too Much Information
Your website should not be like a brochure with technical information written in small letters. How many people really read those? Same goes for you site. It has to be built with the client in mind, as if the client is sitting in front of you and you are telling him/her about your practice. Cluttering your site with a lot of information will only tell them you have an information dump.

How Are You Different?
That is something you should pay attention to. Why will the prospect be better off with your firm instead of others? Your website needs to accentuate your strengths and uniqueness, not copy what your competitors have done.

You Talk Too Much About You
Too much “we” and you lose people because you talk about yourself too much. That is why people go to websites – to see how they can be helped. Talk about how your service can make their lives easier or faster and better.

Your Site Hasn’t Been Updated
You have to show that there are people behind your site, not just electronics. You can do that by updating your site and making it current. Your site needs to reflect the industry’s standards and be up to date on new technology and information.

There is No ‘About You’ Page
This is very important. People who are looking to hire a new CPA firm want to know that there are real people behind it. You have to establish a sense of trust, and you can do it in the ‘About You’ page. Make that page as personal as you can, never generic.

No Endorsements
One of the most important things is people’s endorsements. Anyone can say his/her firm is the best in the world, but can you prove it with clients’ feedbacks? Prospects want to know what other people went through as they consider to hire you.

There is No Real Address
People want to do business with other people, not with logos. Not having a physical address on you site feels like it is a company that can disappear overnight. Street address, phone number, e mail address and even a Google Map embedded in your site with driving directions, will tell your prospects you are not afraid to look them in the eye.

It’s Hard to Navigate
People’s attention span is pretty short these days. If the navigation on your site is not intuitive and easy to follow, you will lose prospects that are frustrated with the process.

These are the most obvious trust breakers that drive people away from websites without the practitioner realizing what they are doing wrong. Make sure you are not guilty of any of them. More information on how you can create a killer website can be found here: www.CPAmarketingGenius.com

Last month, we talked about time management techniques and I shared with you a couple of my time management techniques. Let me share with you one more:

3) Manage your time in blocks.  In other words, cluster your client appointments. Many CPAs make the mistake of scheduling their appointments whenever the client is available, as opposed to thinking about when it would be BEST to schedule their appointments for efficiency and time off.

What I do for myself is to identify the things that are important that I accomplish and those are blocked on my calendar.

Let me give you a few examples:

• If I have my quarterly meetings with my business clients, those are first blocked off, back to back.

• Any client projects that I am working on get blocked off.

• Staff meetings get blocked off.

• Time assigned to marketing and meeting with prospects gets blocked off.

Try that and you’ll probably find, like me, that there is little time or space left free.  That leads to the conclusion that we have to conserve time that is normally wasted, which is why I believe firmly in this next practice.

Each of my projects and activities has an amount of time assigned to it. So, for example, for my staff meetings I will assign 20 minutes and I want to be done by then…that means we have to be efficient and to the point.

Allocating time towards marketing your accounting services is one of your most important responsibilities. If you follow the regimen I have prescribed in this blog post and the prior one, you will find yourself with several hours you previously didn’t think you had. This is time you can now allot towards marketing your CPA firm.

In my work as a consultant helping other CPAs to market their CPA firms, one objection I hear often is “But Salim, I just barely have enough time to do the work to deliver my services to my clients. I simply can’t spare a lot of time to think about marketing.”

My first answer is that if you want to grow your CPA practice, you don’t have any choice: you simply must make time for your CPA firm marketing.

My second answer is that I know you’re busy. But, as we all know, having time for high-priority tasks is a matter of managing your time. Here are two time management techniques that have worked well for me in my practice:

1) Don’t be a slave to the phone. I don’t answer the phone. I have administrative staff who do that. They screen my calls and either take a message or transfer them to voice mail. I block time on my calendar to return phone calls from 12:30-1:00 pm and 4:30-5:00 pm every day. My clients know that I will respond to their calls during these times. I also encourage them to send me an email for faster response. The benefit of emails is that I can forward them to the appropriate person who can handle that email. Most questions from my clients, my staff can handle. That frees me up a lot. I believe that if you apply this one strategy in your practice, you will easily free up several hours in the week just with proper handling of the phone.

2) Make and use to-do-lists. It is very important to maintain those. A daily to do list, a weekly to do list, a monthly to do list and a yearly to do list. That is crucial for maximum time productivity. I have been using these for several years and all my staff members use them too.

In next weeks post, let continue this conversation.

In my last blog post, I shared with you a four success strategies I picked up from re-reading an excellent book titled “The Sales Bible” by Jeffrey Gittomer. After I sent made that post, I recieved a ton of emails from CPA practitioners across the country thanking me for the information I shared. If I haven’t yet personally responded to you, I want to say here that I did appreciate your email and I do enjoy hearing from you.

Here are a few more strategies I feel you may want to pay special attention to so you become the “tiger” CPA practice in your market place:

5) Spend more time with figuring out solutions than whining about problems
This is a time to prepare and be your best, and you can’t do that if you’re whining. The good news is, most people will be whining. This leaves plenty of room for you to succeed.
QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: What are you whining about? What solutions make you a winner?

6) Study attitude; don’t think you have a good one
Spend 15 minutes a day reading. The best time, in the morning, before you start your day. Read happy, positive thoughts, even if it’s a re-read of a Dr. Seuss book.
QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: What are you reading every morning? Or are you just watching TV?

7) Create a REAL (and perceived) difference between you and everyone else
Work on differentiation in new ways. Change EVERYTHING ordinary to memorable. Greetings, literature, proposals, messages and you.
QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: What is memorable about you? What is different about you?

Invest, don’t spend (in money, in time, in business, in anything you do)
Now is the time to guard your assets. It’s real easy to put your head in the sand and think that everything will return to the way it was. The reality is, dig in, but use your assets to build a fortress of positive thought, new information, strategic alliance, etc.
QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: What is your time investment in yourself each day?

So there you go, between this blog and the prior one, you have in your possession eight important success strategies you can work on to create your dream CPA practice.

I was reading a recent issue of a newsletter by Dan Kennedy (one of the worlds most brilliant marketer and business strategist) when a sentence in his newsletter jumped right out off the page and lodged itself indelibly in my mind. It read:

“Tigers Stave Last In The Jungle!”

Here’s why this observation hit me so hard. For an awful lot of CPA practitioners, times are very tough. There are more people out of work now than there have been a long time. Retail sales are down more than most people can ever remember. People are scared. Outside the US, countries are in a financial panic. And in this global economy, what happens in one county affects what happens in all countries. Heck, I don’t need to dwell on our economic situation. Just reads the newspaper. Or watch the news on TV.

Anyway, it seems to me, if you and I want to survive and prosper in this “storm of change” we are all experiencing, we better set about developing a “Tiger Mindset.” In this blog post and the one to follow, I will talk about several strategies that were shared in a fantastic book I recently re-read. The book was titled “The Sales Bible” by Jeffrey Gittomer.

Here are the top 4 strategies I picked up that I feel you may want to pay special attention to ensure you are the “tiger” CPA firm in your industry:

1) Guard your present clients with your life. Others will be eyeing your clients like a hungry tiger ready to hunt fresh prey. Now is the time to invest more time and money in relationship.
QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: What would happen if you lost two of your top 10 clients to your competition? What’s your plan to be CERTAIN that doesn’t happen?

2) It’s the relationship, not the price
When business isn’t expanding, everyone will be trying to steal your clients with a lower fee. Your biggest opportunity is to build relationships with value. Your biggest vulnerability is to ignore your present clients in quest of additional clients.
QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: What new ways have you created to build relationships?

3) It’s now time to do the things you didn’t do (or put off) when you were fat and happy
Start here. Train yourself to be the best. Train your people to be the best. Now is the time to invest in your people with the best possible training both in sales and service, and now is the time to encourage your people to invest in their own time to study.
QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: What is your training budget? What is your training discipline each week?

4) Review your quality, and eliminate anything that isn’t BEST
Elevate everything you do or have anything to do with to BEST. Take a quality inventory, and compare your services with your competitors and your market. If you’re not in first place, you will lose ground to someone who is. Lexus and Mercedes will continue to sell cars. Lower-quality car dealerships will drop like flies.
QUESTION TO ASK YOURSELF: When was your last internal quality review of everything and everyone? What are you BEST at?

So there you go, you have in your possession four important success strategies to work on.

If you have any thoughts and comments, please do not hesitate to shoot me an email or post a comment on this blog. In my next post, I will share with you a few more of these strategies to help you become the “tiger” in your market place.

Maybe you’ve had the experience of being a patient of Dr. Richards, a doctor or dentist who’s quite technically competent, but has no people skills. Every time you go for an appointment, you waste an hour of your day in the waiting room, because they’re always backed up. The receptionist is talking loudly on the phone about personal matters and you have to listen to every word, while your mind is really on your own health concerns. The health care provider, when you finally get into the office, is rude and hurried and doesn’t want to listen to you; you feel like an interruption.

You leave with nothing on paper and when you get home to talk to your spouse, you realize you can’t remember exactly what you were told. Despite all this, the diagnoses always seem to be right, and the treatments work. Maybe you’ve stayed on as the patient of a doctor like this and maybe you haven’t, but you can be sure that most people would change their providers if they had the option.

You don’t want your practice to be the CPA version of Dr. Richards. You can be sure, though, that Dr. Richards thinks he’s doing what he needs to do, because he’s giving you good health care. The problem is, he’s not thinking about the patient’s experience from the patient’s point of view.

Have you thought about your clients’ experience from the client’s point of view?

Here’s a quick exercise to help you get started. Choose any one of your clients (or if you’re new in practice and don’t have a client yet, imagine what you expect the experience of your first client will be like). Think about the various contacts that client has had with you since becoming your client.

• How did the client learn about your service?
• When and where have they met with you?
• What modes of communication do you use to contact them, and how often?
• How many of the clients’ encounters with you are likely to have felt positive?
• How many probably felt negative? Why?

Now make a list of qualities you imagine your clients are likely to desire in their experience with your firm. Again, if you have employees, you might want to ask them to do the same exercise and see if their lists are similar to yours.

Going through this exercise will help you ensure your clients’ experiences at your CPA office are NOT like those at Dr. Richards office.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Of the biggest complains that small business owners have about their CPAs is that the CPA doesn’t stay in touch. There are dozens of ways to stay in touch like birthday cards, anniversary cards, newsletters, emails, etc. which I get in depth in my Genius CPA Marketing System.

In this blog post, I want to convey a very important idea. It is for you to get used to the idea that it’s your job to keep in touch with your clients, rather than waiting for them to call when they need services or advice.

I’ll ask you to think about this from a client’s point of view. A friend of mine recently hired a local mover to help her with an in-town move. Before the date on which the move was scheduled to occur, the mover phoned twice to make sure everything was still on schedule and to ask whether there was anything additional that she might need help with. After the move was completed, the mover sent my friend a hand-written note, thanking her for her business and wishing her well in her new job (which he remembered from his discussion with her). My friend has strongly recommended this mover to everyone since then, and the communication was a large part of what made her feel so positive about him.

What professionals have you worked with who kept in touch with you and made an impression?

What was it about that communication that made it special?

Make some notes for your own future reference, especially of any contact ideas that you think might work with your own clients.

In my accounting practice, we have created a touch plan that consists of 60 – to 70 touches per year, above and beyond the time when we service the client. The results are a high retention rate and a ton of referrals.

Share with the CPA community the number of touches you have in your CPA practice.

Testimonials are one of my favorite low-cost but high-impact client attraction tools. Getting testimonials from clients is an important thing to do and creates a powerful tool for acquiring new clients. They create believability, credibility, and a sense of security for your prospects. They help to break down the natural barriers and distrust that skeptical prospects may have towards you or your practice at the onset. If you watch any infomercial, you will see that they are loaded with testimonials. That’s because they work.

Testimonials are a must have. If you don’t have clients, meaning you are just starting out, then get them from freebie clients who you’ve helped.

The key thing to focus on when asking for a referral is for it to be specific and for it to have provided tangible results. It could be something like: “I had this problem, then I started working with you and now my situation looks like…..”

You can also design a handout asking for tangible results since your time together. Use the worksheet I have provided. It will give you an exact set of questions to ask. This is a really efficient way to do it. You may hand this to your clients towards the end of a project.

You can provide the best accounting and tax services but if are not able to attract qualified clients to your CPA practice, your practice will stagnate.

Here’s what’s important.

The mental shift from “doer of the task” (doing accounting work, preparing tax returns, performing the analysis, etc.) to “promoter of your practice” (marketing your services) is vital if you plan on taking your practice to the next level.

I would say that over 99% of CPA practitioners do not make this mental jump from “I provide accounting services for a living” to “I market my CPA practice for a living.”

The CPA practitioner “doer” sees his or her role of providing their accounting/tax services as their primary role. The “marketing minded” CPA practitioner sees acquiring clients, retaining them and maximizing their total client value as their primary role.

Once I realized this, I started paying more attention to it and I began to see significant changes.

Send me your comments.