Posts Tagged ‘Free CPA marketing advice’

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.

Hello there. Labor day weekend is around the corner and I want to wish you a happy and safe one.

I’m a big believer in the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. What the 80/20 rule says as it pertains to the CPA practice is that 80% of the money is made by only 20% of the CPAs; and of course, 20% of CPA practitioners are making 80% of the money.

This is important to be aware of because it means that if 10 CPA practice owners are asked how business is going, 8 of them will say “Man, it’s a hard business. I can’t make any money in this market; all the clients care about is low fees and it’s impossible to get good staff.” And those eight out of 10 practitioners will form the average person’s opinion how the accounting and tax business is going.

But the reality is that 2 out of the 10 CPA practitioners are making all the money, and they are doing so because they have a reliable CPA practice marketing system. They’re not just relying on word of mouth or attending chamber events to hand out their business cards, cold calling, etc.

They are proactively marketing, and as result of that marketing, they’re working less, but making more, because their clients behave the way clients should behave. Their clients, gained through their marketing, are attracted to them, not repulsed. The clients are not asking them to cut their fees. They are not threatening to take their business to their competitors.

I have observed that CPA practitioners usually emulate the habits and tactics of the unsuccessful practitioner, not of the successful one. They do this because they focus upon the majority…..the 8 out of the 10 practitioners that they see doing things “the way everyone else in this industry does them.” They never take the time to understand how the successful CPA practitioner became successful.

Maybe it’s hard to pick the successful ones out of the crowd. By the way, by successful, I don’t mean working 60-80 hour weeks during tax season and getting burnt out. If you are working that number of hours per week and making $150k or $200k per year, that to me is not successful. Your family will certainly not think of that successful.

I look forward to your comments.