THE SMALL FIRM AND SOLO PRACTICE

Five ways to find the sweet spot for your target client.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

Many accountants serve clients with extremely small businesses that gross six figures a year or even less. These clients are prone to being price-sensitive and often struggle with budgets and cash flow. If you’re serving these clients, you’re definitely meeting an important need in the marketplace, but you may also start to question your own prices, or worse, underprice your services.

MORE: Five Ways to Acquire More Clients | Get Your Name in the News | Five Ideas for More Summer Revenue | Four Ways Small Firms Can Beat Large Ones | Why You Need a Link-In-Bio Tool | Five Emotional Skills for Entrepreneurs | Transform Your Marketing with CRM | Five Kinds of Small Thinking
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The good news is that, on average, the higher revenues a company earns, the more likely they are to be a higher-quality client for you. Owners with larger companies, on average, are less price-sensitive and less emotional about running their businesses. The sweet spot for many small CPA firms and bookkeeping companies is to attract clients from $1 million to $3 million all the way up to about $10 million to $20 million in annual revenues. So how do you get to these higher-quality clients? Here are five ideas:
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It’s time to break out the spreadsheets. Hurray!

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

One way to help accountants embrace marketing is to fill training sessions with spreadsheets and numbers, things that most accountants love working on. There’s a lot of insecurity around learning marketing, but when accountants hear they need to do some spreadsheets first, they dive right in.

MORE: Five Ways to Acquire More Clients | Get Your Name in the News | Five Ideas for More Summer Revenue | Four Ways Small Firms Can Beat Large Ones | Why You Need a Link-In-Bio Tool | Five Emotional Skills for Entrepreneurs | Transform Your Marketing with CRM
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Here are six numbers we suggest you track:

1. Closing ratio

As qualified leads come from your marketing efforts into your sales funnel, it’s a good idea to track how many of these leads you’re able to close into business. Your closing ratio is the percentage of successes divided by the total number of qualified leads you make proposals to.
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But don’t bother with #5 if you don’t do #1, #2, #3 and #4 first.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

If getting new clients is a bit of a struggle for your business and you’re not reaching the revenue levels you desire because of too few clients, then the first step is to find out where the process is breaking down.

MORE: Get Your Name in the News | When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know | Eight Things to Give New Clients | Put Your LinkedIn Profile to Work | What’s In a (Domain) Name? Plenty | Four Tips for Tough Times | Nine Thoughts on Self-Marketing for the Introvert | Three Questions for the New Year
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There are five main places:

1. Client Retention

Are you keeping the clients you acquire, or are you experiencing too much churn in your client base? You can measure your retention rate year after year by computing the percent of total annual revenues that is due to repeat clients. If it’s less than 80 percent, then you are either in your first year of business or you have a problem.
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10 triggers for free publicity.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

As a marketing channel, public relations is one of my personal favorites. It includes getting mentioned in news or trade media and publications, having an article you wrote published or reprinted, applying for and winning awards, or otherwise being in the public eye for one reason or another.

MORE: When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know | Five Stages of Any Business | Five Ideas for Summer Focus | Leverage Your Client List Today | Need Leads? Try a Quiz | Now’s the Time to Clean Up Your Email List
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When I started a photography studio several years ago, I sent sample photos of my work along with a letter explaining my business to several news outlets. It was July, and in August, the Sunday magazine supplement to the Dallas Morning News picked up the story and published my samples. They were portraits of cats and dogs, and my phone rang for days. Within a week, I was booked through Christmas, and my business broke even a year ahead of time because of that one piece of publicity.
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Set expectations early.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

How you welcome your new client can set the tone for a relationship that could last for years or in the worst of cases, just days. Start out on the right foot by looking super-organized (because that’s part of why we get hired anyway) and making it super-easy for a client to get on board with you.

MORE: Five Ideas for Summer Focus | Four Ways Small Firms Can Beat Large Ones | Why You Need a Link-In-Bio Tool | Five Emotional Skills for Entrepreneurs | Transform Your Marketing with CRM
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The best vehicle for this is a welcome kit. Here are eight things that should be in your kit at a minimum:
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