Strategic Marketing: 5 Essential Steps for CPA Firms
What it takes to be competitive
Our friend and colleague Bruce W. Marcus takes note of a study performed by Suzanne Lowe and Sally Glick, and reported in Accounting Today.
Surprise! Surprise! Few firms had any formal performance measurement system for marketing leaders. No surprise, really, when you consider the state of management systems at CPA firms in general.
So how do measure a marketer? It begins by measuring the firm’s focus on five critical processes.
Five Strategic Marketing Goals for Professional Service Firms
1: Defining and identifying the most strategically important prospects / clients (i.e., segmenting the market, targeting the “right†clients, and prioritizing which clients or industries to pursue or to avoid).
2. Acquiring the most strategically important prospects / clients (i.e., establishing a firm’s attractiveness, credibility and thought leadership with the “right†clients and successfully winning new engagements with those targeted prospects / clients).
3. Retaining the most strategically important clients (i.e., fostering increasingly significant client / firm relationships, and successfully keeping current engagements with targeted clients).
4. Increasing the firm’s revenue with its most strategically important current clients (i.e., known as cross-selling in some sectors, this means increasing each current client’s use of the firm’s entire service portfolio and the firm’s penetration into that client’s available “share of walletâ€).
5. Increasing the perceived value of the firm to all audiences, including non-targeted prospects and clients, influencers, suppliers, and current and potential employees (i.e., growing the firm’s overall brand value and thought leadership equity; building broad awareness of the firm and its favorable reputation in its marketplace; and increasing its perceived eminence generally).
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