you have two audiences: existing clients and prospects.
by hitendra patil
client accounting services: the definitive success guide
how will you market client accounting services? you will use fundamental steps to generate words and content to express the value of your cas offering.
more: survey: how to market your cas offering | how to decide on your firm’s cas pricing | how to write your cas engagement letter | 12 signs it’s time to outsource | will 2021 be your cash-flow year?
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you will focus on each component of your cas offering to do so, e.g., different content to talk about bill payment services, different for advisory and outsourced cfo services, and so on. you will also use the contrast principle to differentiate between your “usual” services and cas offering. marketing cas to your existing clients will be different than marketing cas to your prospects.
marketing cas to existing clients
to get started with your firm’s cas offering is with, look at your existing clients. like any other cas firm, only some of your current clients will be cas-fit clients. starting cas with a few clients allows you to gain the experience you need to optimize your cas practice with minimal effort and without disrupting your practice. a good ballpark will be to start with five to 10 clients of about 10-15 percent of your existing client base. once you have delivered cas for a reasonable time period to provide the opportunities to your firm to fine-tune your cas processes, outcomes for client and pricing, only then start pitching cas to prospects.
there are some easy ways to identify which clients are the right clients for starting your firm’s cas journey:
- clients whose staff is producing substandard work for which your firm has to spend a significant amount of time fixing errors (are books regularly messed up?)
- clients who have a high attrition rate of accounting staff (do you have to deal with new staff at the client’s office frequently?)
- clients who have 100 or more monthly sales invoices and vendor bills (isn’t this easy to find out from the accounting software?)
- clients who have part-time staff, or no more than one full-time staff, or those who outsource bookkeeping (except in cases where the business owner’s loved ones are the ones doing the bookkeeping)
this will be the first phase of rolling out your cas practice. the work you get from these initial clients should be less demanding and will give you the opportunity to set up and fine-tune your cas processes, build checks and balances into your workflow, examine profitability, and adjust pricing if needed. once you have improved and refined all critical components, you can then expand to other clients and prospects.
once you have identified the more cas-fit clients, seek meetings with them. when you talk to your clients, make sure to emphasize the following:
- they will spend no more than their current cost of accounting – yet they will get professional accounting done for their business.
- they will get near real-time insights from you to help them make better and timely business decisions.
- they will be relieved of the burden of managing and monitoring accounting staff and their work/output.
during such meetings, carefully note down the questions they ask. the answers to such questions will help you create some of your cas marketing content. more often than not, such questions will revolve around:
- can the clients still do what they have been doing by using the accounting software? (process change identification)
- what will be the additional value/insights they will get from your cas offering? (outcomes difference identification)
- what will it cost them? (value judgment)
after you have gained consistent experience providing cas and documenting the content that you can use for cas marketing, it will be time to repurpose the content for marketing and for reaching out to other clients and prospects.
the best way to make them aware of how cas can deliver them better value is to correlate the most common challenges clients face and the questions they ask when faced with those challenges, and show them the cas reports/insights that address those questions. inform them that your new cas offering will be customized for their business, and they will receive new insights and advice to help them propel their business further and upward.
lead generation for cas
to expand and grow your cas practice, you need a steady stream of new prospects. while referrals have been accountants’ #1 source of getting new clients, this method gives no predictability and control to accountants on which types of prospects come in their doors. you need the ability to attract cas-fit clients continuously. hence, your lead generation process needs to be adjusted accordingly. our cas survey revealed that along with the firm’s website, “proactively seek referrals” is the top marketing method for firms to get new cas clients. how do you proactively seek referrals without waiting for them?
marketing legend jay abraham recommended a genius method to generate several referrals quickly. (i strongly recommend his many books, which are a real-life marketing university for several types of businesses. his website, abraham.com, gives out several marketing insights for free.) it involves requesting your existing clients (business owners) to let their customers and vendors know how good you are and why they should consider exploring working with you. how do you make it easier for your clients to actually do it? make them a hero!
get the ceo/owner of your client’s business to send out a letter/email to their customers/vendors/connections. ideally, print and mail a physical letter – your firm should pay for preparing/printing/mailing, etc.
on average, if each of your existing clients has just 25 vendors and 50 customers, imagine your “reach” for getting new referrals. at the most conservative estimate, even with just 10 oercent success rate (only one out of 10 recipients of such letter reaches out to you), you will get several one-on-one discussions with business owners. and i am sure the success rate will be much higher because you are leveraging the existing relationship/trust that your clients enjoy with their vendors/customers/connections, and that helps you bypass the lengthy and costly path to gain the trust of new leads. this method can be the most economical marketing method you will ever deploy.
if you noticed, this method is based upon two fundamental human behavior drivers – social proof and reciprocation. if you talk about your value, it is advertising. if someone else talks about your value, it is a testimonial; it is social proof of your value. if you have done some exceptional work for your clients, they will want to return the favor, i.e., reciprocate, even if they may not even know they want to do so. jay abraham calls it “the relational capital,” which is the most powerful of different types of capital you can have (financial capital, human capital, knowledge capital, experience capital, etc.).
the same principles of social proof and reciprocation can drive another method of lead generation for you: getting google reviews (and other online testimonials) from your clients. if you haven’t already done so, get your free business listing on google. then ask your happy clients to post google reviews. it is not necessary to have only 5-star reviews. some recent studies showed that an average of 3.5 to 4.5 is more believable than a perfect 5-star average. when your prospects search for the key phrases that relate to the services you offer, if you have more reviews, your listing will show up on top of the search results. and because google’s algorithms treat every business listing as a local business, you are competing for localized search result rankings, and your listing can more easily reach the top few results shown. i know of many firms that regularly get new clients who find those firms via google search. for many such firms, it is their largest source of getting new clients!
more lead generation methods
accounting firms have been using several lead generation methods. many of the traditional methods have been modernized, but their fundamentals remain more or less the same. and more new-age lead generation methods have emerged and evolved with technological advances. given below is a list of some such methods, not in any particular order.
- advertisements
- direct mail – postcards/letters
- online/social media paid advertisements
- email marketing
- telemarketing
- website
- search engine optimization
- blogs
- webinars
- podcasts
- social media posts
- social media connections
- thought leadership
- networking
- special events/promotions
- brochures
- newsletters
- partnerships with non-competing businesses that sell to your prospects
- exhibitions/trade shows
- becoming a specialist/expert in certain niches/services
- specializations and certifications
- online groups like facebook groups/linkedin groups
- posting guest content on other publications/groups
- referrals/referral programs
- sales/lead generation agents
- using lead magnets (e.g., giving away valuable free e-books in return for email/phone number)
- build leads list to nurture periodically
- posting content videos online
- testimonials / reviews
the real challenge in selecting and deploying some of these methods for your practice is the relative roi on your time and cost. without a measurement system in place to track the performance of each of the methods you deploy, you can get disillusioned very fast. some of the key metrics to track are cost per lead, cost per qualified lead, cost per new customer acquisition, ratio of marketing cost to first year’s revenue from each new client, etc.
even if your firm is relatively smaller, you can still develop basic systems, even in ms-excel, to track how your lead generation methods are performing. the key is to have some kind of a measurement system in place.
marketing cas to prospects
qualified leads who are somewhat interested in what you sell are your prospects. once you have prospects who are at different levels of interest in knowing about and buying your services, the next task for you is to keep nurturing such a list of prospects. fortunately, cas marketing is comparatively easier as it is a focused subject, and cas has many advantages/benefits that you can leverage in your marketing.
sharing your cas clients’ experiences is one of the best ways to get prospects more interested in your cas offering. as an example, share something like:
“some of our clients have a similar business volume to yours, and are in similar industries as yours – and we’re able to deliver them insights (provide a couple of examples) that help them either solve x kinds of problems or leverage y kinds of opportunities. what would be the impact on your business if you can overcome similar challenges, or what is the value you can uncover for your business with similar insights?”
whatever content you deliver to cas prospects, keep it in the realms of cas scope of work that you define in your engagement letters, i.e., don’t make it an outright sales pitch or too abstract. your cas content based on your cas clients’ experiences will resonate with businesses that can benefit from cas.
to remind, tell the “what,” show the outcome but don’t tell the “how.” your marketing content should make the prospect reach out to you to ask, “how do you do that?”
don’t expect immediate results from this nurturing. but do not be monotonous. break the sequence into a couple of emails that share content, followed by an invitation to attend your webinar or request to book a consultation call with you. share the review your cas clients gave you. make and share a case study on the most common business challenges your prospects can have and how you solved those for some of your cas clients.
use the contrast principle of advertising. it is not enough to show them only the “after” picture, i.e., the benefits of cas. contrast that with their current outcomes without cas. contrast what is the difference when they have your cas benefits versus when they don’t have those.