Posts Tagged ‘CPA Marketing’

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

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.