All posts by Ken Berry, CBI

Edi Osborne wrote a great article, Interesting vs. interested – advice from a prospect, on AccountingWEB. This letter from a potential prospect describes the frustration in dealing with CPAs who are interesting people but wonders if they are interested in the prospect and the business. Reading this, I’m reminded of the Theodore Roosevelt quote, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

I wrote about caring in my earlier blog Building Rapport is a Key to Creating Client Loyalty. That posting covered using tax appointments to communicate how much you care. Here are some guidelines to use for meetings with potential business clients.

1. Prior to the meeting, do your homework. Find out what you can about the prospect and the company. There are many sources of intelligence regarding businesses and individuals.

2. Prior to the meeting, get mentally prepared for the meeting. Work on emotional detachment, as well as making others okay. You are here to serve their needs not your own, so be sure to put your agenda aside and focus on how you are going to learn as much as you can about the prospect and their business.

3. As a first step in your meeting, use your approach to bond and establish rapport with the prospect.  This is a chance to begin breaking down barriers and establishing some trust.

4. As a second step in your meeting, qualify the opportunity.  Take some time to discover the prospect’s needs, emotional motivation for doing business, the economics of that motivation and the decision making process.

5. Now that you have gathered a fair bit of information about the prospect, you are prepared to discuss how you can provide solutions that address the needs mentioned.  These may be services you have, consulting, value billing or other solutions you have developed. 

6. Finally, end every meeting with clarity about whether there are next steps or not, what they are and who is responsible for them. 

How much you care about the prospect and their business will be apparent if you are thorough in your preparation, your meeting and your follow-up.  Following these guidelines will turn prospects into clients and you into their trusted advisor.

Comments (0) • Posted March 19th, 2010 at 6:00am

We were recently talking with a CPA who expressed excitement over a couple new accounts. Naturally we were curious to find what the CPA thought was the reason for picking up these two new accounts.

Both new clients found him while they were searching the Internet for someone to solve their complex problems.  Based on their search results, they contacted him to discuss their problems. We looked at his website and it did a good job of expressing his competency and personality.  Obviously, it was successful in engaging these prospects and differentiating him from his competition.

So, how well do you differentiate yourself and your practice from your competition?  Addressing the following questions about your site will get you started on generating leads that will be a good fit for your practice:

1. Who are your ideal clients?  What niches do you serve?  Be sure your site identifies and welcomes these individuals and industries through text and use of imagery.
2. What are your specialties and areas of expertise?  Can you present them in terms of clients needs (benefits) rather than just services (features)?
3. Can you present yourself and your staff through the site?  Think of this as the “online dating” portion of lead generation.  Pictures, stories, backgrounds, articles, a blog—all provide the prospect an opportunity to get to know you early in their decision making process.  Work hard to get your personality engrained in the site.
4. What value adds can you build into your site?  Obviously, you can post one of the syndicated newsletters on the latest tax code changes or something similar, but so can your competitor.  So again, think blog or a specific area of knowledge you can share.  There is a level of transparency where you can provide enough to inform prospects without giving away your advantage to your competitors.

Your web site provides you with a great opportunity to make a strong first impression and you cannot beat the price when it comes to direct marketing.  So, take some time to think about what a prospective client will experience when they go to your site.  Most importantly identify your key differentiators and be sure to present them in terms that will resonate with your prospects and your clients.

Comments (2) • Posted February 23rd, 2010 at 11:51am

Years ago, I was in a brand development meeting and we were discussing whether or not a company could come right out and say “we care.” After more than a decade in business development roles, I struggled with this presentation. My problem is, unless you work in specific care-related industries, this statement is not believable. Unfortunately, segments of corporate America have demonstrated prominently over the years that they do not care.

The flip side of the coin is nothing builds client loyalty better than letting them know you care. Therefore, it is important you continually demonstrate to your clients that you care about them and their needs. This time of year provides a great opportunity to use your tax appointments to communicate how much you care. Here are some simple guidelines to get you started:

1) Make sure you have ample time between your appointments. Although this may seem to be poor utilization of your time, stacking your meetings can be a critical mistake on two levels: it does not account for a meeting running over; and it does not allow you time to prepare for your next meeting.

2) Give yourself ample time to prepare for a meeting. Reframe your thoughts from an earlier meeting, clear your desk, review and prepare for the meeting with the next client.  Nothing says “I don’t care” or at least “I don’t know you” more than flipping through a file to find a piece of personal information about a client during a meeting.

3) Respect your clients’ time by being punctual. We wait in lines and traffic throughout the day, make sure you are an exception to this experience.

4) Have a simple agenda for the meeting. Something that outlines the key phases of the meeting is all that is needed. Perhaps as simple as (1) agenda review (2) catch up (3) review financials and tax return (4) discuss business development - referrals and (5) next steps.

5) Be sure you focus on building rapport in all of your client interactions. This may not be a natural process for you, but it is critical in the “catch up” phase that you ask open ended questions to provide your clients an opportunity to tell you about their lives. Asking appropriate follow up questions will affirm that you are listening and care about what they are sharing.

These steps are simple, straightforward and will pay huge dividends over the years. If you are not already using them, I recommend you test one or two by implementing them this season with half of your appointments. After the season, survey your clients about their satisfaction and see how the results vary based on the two types of appointments.

Comments (2) • Posted February 18th, 2010 at 6:04am

We talk daily with accountants who are nearing retirement age and contemplating selling their practice in the next several years.  Almost every one of them asks what practices are selling for these days.  Their intent is to ascertain a value.  Sometimes, the value the seller has in mind is more than the actual price the firm will fetch in the market.

Several years ago we spoke with someone wanting to sell a tax practice in Arizona.  This owner had not increased fees in five years for fear that clients would leave and go to the H&R Block office nearby.  He wanted to receive a premium price for a premium practice, but what he had was a discount tax service.  Potential buyers were willing to purchase the practice at the same type of discount.

The value you receive as price when you sell your practice is going to be determined by the market.  To create a higher price for your practice, you need to create more value within the practice, typically by creating more value around each individual client.  This is done by providing more value to each client.

There are three core values a practice can provide to a client:  high service, high quality and  low price.  The catch is that a practice can only survive and stay in business when it provides two of the three.  A practice cannot afford the cost and overhead of providing high service and high quality while also providing low price.  So to provide low price, either the standard of service or the standard of quality has to be lowered.  Guess which of these a buyer will find of least value?  Low price equals low revenue per client or at best a huge volume of work to generate revenue per client and buyers care about revenue margin and profitability to insure debt service and future income.

Buyers are looking for valuable practices. Spend the quality time and effort building that practice and it should pay off handsomely, both along the way and when it comes time to sell.

What are your thoughts?

Comments (0) • Posted February 5th, 2010 at 12:49pm

In an earlier entry, we mentioned conducting a SWOT Analysis as part of your business development strategic planning. Let’s take a look at how this will be of benefit to your practice.

SWOT Analysis—short for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—is a strategic planning technique that offers insight into your practice and those of your competitors.  This process will help breakdown your practice and identify ways to maximize your strengths while minimizing your weaknesses. By examining the opportunities and threats you can identify new service opportunities to pursue, identify highly competitive new services you may want to avoid and recognize steps you can take to avoid losing clients to your competition. Taking that information, formulating a plan and executing on that plan will help you grow your business by design by matching your services to your current clients and new prospects.

The benefits to your practice include:

• determining practice growth potential,
• evaluating the competitive marketplace,
• concentrating your marketing and business development activities in the most beneficial areas,
• identifying possible threats and ways to minimize them.

An old baseball maxim says that, to be successful, you have to “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” That can also apply to your practice. By analyzing and planning, you will know what areas to “hit” and what areas not to “hit” while you are executing the strategy developed during the process.

Taking time every quarter to measure your performance and adjust accordingly will help you build a much stronger and much more valuable practice. The SWOT Analysis can be an effective tool during that process.

Comments (1) • Posted January 6th, 2010 at 7:23am

We recently surveyed more than 1000 accountants on issues such as economic pressures, client relationship management, business development and marketing activities. Over our next several blogs, we will discuss some of our findings along with related tips to leverage tax season to increase the value of your firm.

More than 40% of the respondents in our survey said that their team was responsible for business development activities and only 25% disagreed with that statement. To leverage tax season and the face time with clients to expand the business, a team effort is essential, yet only 24% of our respondents report that their team is trained in business development. Taking the time to work with your team on a business development strategy will increase profitability, more sales per client, and potential referrals.

So what is a business development strategy? A business development strategy is used to support your main business plan and effectively it sets out a methodology for developing new opportunities, either from existing clients or by actively targeting new client prospects to develop new business.

Here are examples of steps you might take to develop a strategy to increase the value of your firm:

• First step is a thorough firm evaluation. A SWOT analysis to identify and analyze the Strengths and Weaknesses of your firm can be used to formulate actions and strategies.
• Determine your annual revenue goals. Analyze your revenues. Ask yourself questions such as:
  • Where were they earned?
  • How much of your revenue is earned from January to April?
  • How much business from May to December comes from the same client base?
  • What services are you providing for them?
  • How do you expand this to the rest of your client base?
• Take a look at the issues that your clients are facing.
• Develop a mindset in your firm of client relationship management strategy involving your entire organization. Important aspects:
  • Communication: Listening and understanding the client
  • Consider up-sell and cross-sell opportunities for additional services that you may provide to them.
  • Grow your referral network
  • Utilizing social networking and other technologies

We’ll address many of the elements above in more detail in blogs to come.  

Comments (0) • Posted December 7th, 2009 at 8:30am