client service

Overcoming Your Clients’ Worst Fears

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How to help them take initiative and allow you to be proactive.

By Hitendra Patil
Pransform Inc.

Neuroscience studies have shown that fear is a far bigger driver than we would ever care to admit. According to Kevin Hogan, author of The Science of Influence: How to Get Anyone to Say “Yes” in 8 Minutes or Less!, “most people react to the fear of loss and the threat of pain in a much more profound way than they do for gain. They overemphasize the importance of pain by about 2.5:1 in decision making.”

Your customers and prospects fear that their actions or inactions will cause bad things to happen, or bad things can suddenly happen to them. It’s therefore important to ask yourself what sort of problems your potential clients are facing during current times. If you can identify their true fears and show them how you can remove the possibility of loss, you are one step ahead of your competitors. READ MORE →

The Top 20 Reasons Clients Love Their CPA Firms

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By Marc Rosenberg
How CPA Firms Work

The CPA’s training is geared to identifying problems that clients are experiencing and giving recommendations for improving the company.   This leads to producing what is known as the “Oh wow” feeling from a client.  Efforts to super-please clients are what it takes to satisfy clients’ needs, retain them year after year and get them to make unsolicited referrals of other companies.

Here are 20 things that CPAs do that their clients rave about: READ MORE →

Accountants and Six Fundamental Human Needs

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By Hitendra Patil
Pransform

Celebrity Author Anthony “Tony” Robbins identified six fundamental human needs that everyone has in common, and states that all behavior is simply an attempt to meet those six needs.

These Six Human Needs are Certainty, Uncertainty/Variety, Significance, Connection/Love, Growth and Contribution.

As an accounting services provider, if you can identify the ways to meet these six needs of your clients (and your staff), if you can recurrently and consistently do things that lead to clients  (and your staff) actually experiencing the satisfaction of these needs, you are more likely to improve your firm’s performance. The question to ask is, “WHAT should I do to ensure that my services/products fulfill these needs of my clients?”

For now, let us focus on your clients. Here are some suggestions on what to do to fulfill six fundamental needs of your clients. READ MORE →

The Five Essential Skills Accountants Need Today

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Above and beyond accounting, you need business know-how.

By Sandi Smith Leyva, CPA
Accountant’s Accelerator

We’ve worked super-hard on gaining our accounting, tax, and auditing skills.  Those skills alone will keep us working as employees for someone else, but what if we want to go out on our own or grow our business beyond what we have now?

More for soloists and small firms: The Seven Essential Components of a Simple Marketing Plan for Accountants  | Take Six Big Steps to Go Beyond Compliance Services     |     When Your Business Needs to Be Rebooted  |   Two Steps to Easy Cross-sells   |   The Hot New Tech Product for Automated Data Entry   |   Five Value-Add Service Areas to Take You Beyond Bookkeeping   |   Six Money-Making Strategies to Take You Beyond QuickBooks   |   Proactive Ways to Get More Referrals   |   The Three Biggest Money Leaks in Your Practice   |   New Client Opportunities with Mobile Apps   |   Six Questions to Launch Your Summer Strategy Sessions   |   What Most Accountants Miss in the Five Simple Steps to Get More Clients   |   Accountants, Do You Know Your Opportunity Number? | Five Ideas to Reduce Client Price-Sensitivity | Rise to the Top with a Fresh Elevator Speech | Four Ways to Practice Entrepreneurial Perseverance | 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Seeking New Clients  | The Top 12 Business Card Blunders Accountants Make | Seven Tips to Keep the Clients You Have | How to Attract Clients Like a Magnet | Eleven Easy Ways to Deliver More Value to Clients

Here are five skills to consider adding to your toolbox so you can get ahead faster. How do you rate in each of these areas?

READ MORE →

Take Six Big Steps to Go Beyond Compliance Services

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Beat the billable hour by doing more than just taxes or QuickBooks.

By Sandi Smith, CPA
Accountant’s Accelerator

As compliance services become more commoditized and automated, accountants are faced with how this affects their practice and their bottom line. They can:

  1. Serve a higher level client that requires greater complexity, making themselves fairly immune to these changes
  2. Serve a larger number of clients to offset a drop in revenue per client averages
  3. Add new services to their practice to boost revenue per client

Those are pretty much the options available to keep profits from shrinking. But today I want to focus on the third point above, adding new services, and provide you with some ideas on how you may be able to serve your tax compliance clients in new ways.

More for soloists and small firms:  When Your Business Needs to Be Rebooted  |   Two Steps to Easy Cross-sells   |   The Hot New Tech Product for Automated Data Entry   |   Five Value-Add Service Areas to Take You Beyond Bookkeeping   |   Six Money-Making Strategies to Take You Beyond QuickBooks   |   Proactive Ways to Get More Referrals   |   The Three Biggest Money Leaks in Your Practice   |   New Client Opportunities with Mobile Apps   |   Six Questions to Launch Your Summer Strategy Sessions   |   What Most Accountants Miss in the Five Simple Steps to Get More Clients   |   Accountants, Do You Know Your Opportunity Number? | Five Ideas to Reduce Client Price-Sensitivity | Rise to the Top with a Fresh Elevator Speech | Four Ways to Practice Entrepreneurial Perseverance | 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Seeking New Clients  | The Top 12 Business Card Blunders Accountants Make | Seven Tips to Keep the Clients You Have | How to Attract Clients Like a Magnet | Eleven Easy Ways to Deliver More Value to Clients

Even if you don’t do taxes, you will find some ideas for new related services you can think about offering to your clients. (Remember, it’s easier to sell to existing clients than to acquire new ones.) READ MORE →