because first, you need clients.
by jassen bowman
if your experience is primarily in the tax return preparation arena, then you are most likely used to the service being what is referred to as a “lay down” sale, meaning you really don’t have to sell.
more: how tax resolution works | 4 tax resolution industry flaws | need a new service line? consider tax resolution
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as an optional service that many people just aren’t familiar with as an option, tax resolution actually requires a little bit of sales skills. i think it’s important for you to have a handle on the key benefits that you bring to the table for potential clients.
these also make good starting points for your marketing communications.
- your bbb grade and complaint history.
- we limit the amount of clients we bring on in order to service our clients with the “red carpet” treatment. this way you can have personal attention and not just become another number.
- we help businesses and individuals to resolve back tax liabilities through programs like payment plans, reduced settlements and penalty elimination.
- we can assist in stopping/removing bank account levies, accounts receivable levies and wage garnishments.
- we work on both state and federal tax liabilities, both personal and business… or we specialize only in helping small businesses, like yours, resolve their irs payroll tax liabilities.
- we will resolve your taxes once and for all, so you can sleep at night.
- the longer you wait, the worse off the situation will get. allow [firm] to become your voice of reason.
- you do not have to feel as if there is no end in sight.
- we will help resolve your tax liabilities once and for all, so you can focus on the things that are most important in life.
- call us for your confidential and free consultation.
lead generation
without leads, you have nobody to sell anything to. leads become prospects, who in turn become clients. creating a steady lead flow into your practice, and having a systematic approach for following up with those prospects, is the single most important key to success in running your tax firm.
nothing, and i mean nothing, is more important to the growth of your tax firm than lead generation.
some tax, legal and accounting professionals get offended when i say this, and i’m ok with that. but the harsh reality is that if you can’t find people willing to pay you for your services, then you’re going to starve. client acquisition is a skill that can be learned, and it’s the single most important skill you can learn for living in a modern, market economy. the importance of this skill dwarfs the importance of any other skill set, qualification, license or degree you may have.
i don’t care if you have both an accounting degree and jd from the most prestigious university on the planet. i don’t care if you have 30 years of experience. i don’t care what alphabet soup you can put after your name. none of that matters one single bit if you can’t attract paying clients.
now, to truly know this amazing critter we call lead generation, you need to understand a few of its component parts. the goal here is obviously to extract maximum value from your marketing efforts. so, let’s start with the 80/20 rule.
pareto principle
let’s start with one of the most important ideas in business. most people are familiar with the pareto principle, even if they don’t know it by that name. vilfredo pareto was an italian botanist and economist (among other things) who discovered the 80/20 rule.
pareto discovered that, within his garden, 80 percent of the peas that were produced came from 20 percent of the plants. once he had made this observation, his scientific inquiry led him to discovering a similar phenomenon within many other disciplines. in particular, he went on to study the wealth distribution in his city and found that about 80 percent of the wealth was held by about 20 percent of the people.
in short, the 80/20 rule states that 80 percent of your results come from just 20 percent of your efforts. in broad terms, an analysis of any business process will demonstrate a near similar ratio. for example, if you make a statistical analysis of your revenue sources, you will likely discover that 80 percent of your revenue comes from just 20 percent (or even less) of your clients.
when we look at this from a marketing perspective, it becomes clear that we should focus on the 20 percent of marketing activities that generate those 80 percent of results. the same thing applies when choosing the services that we offer in our practices, the clients that we keep versus those we fire, etc.
if you only have a limited amount of time during the day in order to do marketing, why not pick the things that are going to give you the biggest number of leads? it’s not that you shouldn’t be doing other things at the same time, but you really want to be focused on the things that give you the biggest bang for your buck and your time.
i want to point out that often, particularly with marketing, it will look more like the 90/10 rule, or even the 95/5 rule. while no practice should ever rely on just one or two marketing methods to generate all of its leads, you will often find that one or two lead generation methods may produce almost all of your business. again, never rely on just these one or two methods – always be testing other marketing methods. never rest on your laurels. but the reality is that just a couple of things will generate the majority of your leads.
multiple streams of prospects
in order to create a high-efficiency tax resolution practice that runs with as few people as possible but generates maximum revenue, you’re going to need multiple streams of prospects.
in other words, rather than just having one way to generate all of your leads, which is typical with many tax resolution firms, you’re going to need multiple methods for generating qualified prospects. the more methods you have operating for putting people into your sales funnel, the more money you’re going to make and the faster you’re going to do it.
there are countless methods for generating a few prospects here and there. the key is to use systems in order to have as many of those methods active at any given time as possible. that way, you have an unlimited number of prospects coming in. at that point, the demand for your services will be skyrocketing, and your supply will be limited only by your time and staff. it is at this point that you can raise prices, which creates a beautiful cycle.
when you have only one or two lead generation methods in play at any given time, a lot of people become afraid of losing any one particular prospect. if you’re doing so much prospecting because you’ve got great marketing systems in place that are bringing in a nice steady stream of prospects through multiple channels, day in day out, then you can afford to dictate everything about how your practice operates, how you interact with clients, your fees, etc.
the other beautiful thing about having multiple streams of prospects who are being generated by systems is that you can entirely avoid the “feast and famine” cycles of doing business. you will never be starving for leads – never hungry for the next client. you will have no fear of loss of turning away clients who aren’t a good fit for you, and you won’t hesitate to fire pain in the ass clients who aren’t paying you on time.
three m’s of marketing
let me now introduce you to your new best friends in the world of marketing. these three new friends, when properly assembled, will make decisions much easier when it comes to allocating your marketing resources (time and money).
the three m’s are media, market and message. your message is what you are saying in your marketing. your market is who you are delivering that message to. the media is how you physically deliver that message to your market. see how the three work together?
media: this is the vehicle you use to deliver your message. a lot of times in direct response marketing, we are defining our marketing strategy based on the media we are using. for example, we’ll talk about direct mail or internet pay-per-click (ppc) as the marketing strategy, but this is actually a misnomer. direct mail isn’t a strategy, it’s simply the media.
market: you should have a really good grasp of what your ideal client looks like. you should have a very strong demographic profile of your ideal client. for example, if your ideal customer is between ages x and y, has a median income of z and has an average equity value in their home of x dollars, then you can very precisely define your market and purchase lists of people who match those criteria and who are also active buyers of products and services such as yours. you can also use that demographic information to target your media in order to select publications to advertise in or to buy mailing lists from other subscriber lists that match that demographic criteria.
message: i could spend 200 pages, if not more, covering just the topic of copywriting. it really is an entire skillset in and of itself. but what i will say about your marketing communications is that you must have congruency between your market and your message. what this means is that if you are marketing to affluent individuals in their 50s and 60s, you cannot talk slang to them as if you are marketing to 18- and 19-year-olds. it is a very different demographic, with very different use of language. you must ensure that what you are saying and how you say it matches the way that your target market communicates.
the same holds true with the offer that you are going to make to them. whenever we talk about direct response marketing, the offer that you make is incredibly profound. it is a very important piece of the entire message puzzle. so, the offer that you make has to make sense for the target market that you are going after.