four reasons it’s hard to sell

what to focus on instead.

by martin bissett
winning your first client

let’s take a look at the last 16 years of my experience and my research as to where new clients come from in an accounting practice. i don’t think there are going to be too many shocks here.

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what i’ve found is that 82 percent of all new clients in a given year who come into an accounting firm come in from a referral source. this may be a bank or a lawyer or some other source, perhaps an existing client, who has recommended that a particular business meet with your firm and come on board as a client.

in such circumstances, there is little or no selling to be done. a referral is someone who has made their mind up to use you, and so long as you aren’t outrageously expensive or make some other great mistake in your initial meeting with them, it’s fairly assured that they’re coming on board. referrals constitute a huge part of an accountant’s experience of winning any kind of new work in the profession, which means that the skills or the “muscle development” of winning new work aren’t exercised too regularly because 82 percent of the time they’re not required.

eight percent of new business in our study comes from networking. again that’s professional relationships of different kinds: it includes meetings, conferences, activities, golf days and the like. seven percent comes specifically from client-centered seminars, and only 3 percent from what we might determine to be proactive selling.

this means that there is very little exposure historically for practitioners to be able to have developed a selling skillset and that’s one of the main reasons why we find it so difficult to win new work proactively.

but let’s take a look at it in even more detail than that. why is it really so difficult to sell?

well, here’s some brief history of the profession, at least as it is relevant to the uk, where i’m based. from the years 4,000 bc to 1852 ad accountancy began to be established as a concept, a method, a practice and eventually a profession. from 1853 through to 1880 we started to see the first organized bodies appearing and a royal charter (which gives rise to the uk term “chartered accountant”) was granted.

the early organization of our governing body in the uk, the equivalent of the aicpa in the us, set the standards of professional conduct. and that brings us to the advent of women in accountancy.

during the first world war we see fairly slow progress. during the second world war we see non-practicing members gaining influence within the institute. the first members’ handbook is published and so forth. so that takes us right up from 4,000 bc to 1967.

then 10 years on we saw a revolution in 1977 over in the u.s. a lawyer by the name of bates decided that the restrictions on his law practice being able to market themselves to win new work placed on them by the code that lawyers adhered to was a direct infringement of his first amendment rights. he challenged, and he made the point that under the first amendment he should be allowed to market himself and win new work proactively. it was a landmark ruling because he won, thus suddenly changing the outlook for the proactively dictated growth of professions in a way that they had not seen up until this point.

in 1979 another major event occurred when the australian super-marketer paul dunn had an idea to develop marketing within the accountancy profession. the results corporation was formed, which became results accounting systems, which became today’s ran-one network. the work of those groups changed firms’ perceptions of themselves and their ability to win new clients, to grow, to develop, to create infrastructure. the “game changed” immeasurably.

now, i had my start in the accounting profession in that time scale toward the late 1990s, and so i personally saw the change that was taking place in public practice. in 2001 in the uk, there was a significant relaxation in guidelines allowing much greater freedom in professional services marketing. this empowered smaller firms to compete with bigger rivals on a much more even basis.

my reason for outlining all of that history is this: from 4,000 bc to 2014 where we are now, professional selling has never been part of the studied curriculum for a trainee accountant/cpa. so it is not too difficult to understand that proactive selling is something that we perhaps fear and that we struggle to grow the practice in any meaningful way.

marketing, which is now matured in the profession, is able to create those opportunities and many, many marketers and marketing organizations do a fantastic job of creating opportunities. however, turning those opportunities into clients (closing a deal) is where the hurdle exists.

so, in summary, the reason it’s so difficult to sell is actually fourfold.

1 – ultimately the profession has never been trained to sell, and therefore the skill set to do so is not something that would necessarily be innate to a technical professional.

2 – selling, which is sort of an unknown and perhaps a slightly uncomfortable element of practice management, is stigmatized. we tell ourselves, “i can’t do it, i don’t know how to do it, i am scared of being able to do it. i see other people doing it and it seems to not be the right fit.” and all of these things stigmatize selling in our minds.

3 – we see ourselves being sold to and “selling” being presented to us in so many forms, and usually not particularly good forms. therefore we get an impression or a stereotype of what selling must be like and it just doesn’t seem like a fit for a profession like accountancy.

4 – there’s a huge difference between chasing new fees and attracting them.

we need to be concentrating on that second element, which is the law of attraction. stage one of mastering the law of attraction is to be comfortable with self, or “winning your first client.”

posted on may 30, 2023