Sales

The 7 Fundamentals of Getting Clients with Social Media

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h…But only if you’ve done everything else first.

By Sandi Smith Leyva The Accountant’s Accelerator 

It’s likely your friends and peers are urging you to get on the social media bandwagon. Hearing about social media is unavoidable these days. We have many clients who feel stressed about the whole topic. The stress or guilt comes in when they don’t really want to do it but their friends keep urging them to.

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MORE ON SMALL-FIRM GROWTH STRATEGIES: 5 Ways to Attract Higher-Quality Clients   |   6 Biz Dev Metrics Accountants Should Measure  |  5 Areas to Improve Client Acquisition Success  |  Are Accountants Newsworthy? You Bet!  |  When Accountants Don’t Know They Don’t Know  |  Seven Hot Lead Generation Methods for Accountants   |  What Stage of Business Are You In?  |  8 Essential Ingredients for Your New Client Welcome Kit  |  4 Ways Small Firms Can Surpass Larger Firms  |   REBUTTAL: The 3 Most Unused Marketing Methods for Accountants

I like to take a contrarian view with social media: I believe it’s not a cost-effective marketing tool for a majority of accountants. Nevertheless, there are some very important exceptions where it can pay off big. Here are some ideas just in case you can’t resist getting started in social media.

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5 Ways to Attract Higher-Quality Clients

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Arrow hits target bulls eyeFinding the sweet-spot for your target client.

By Sandi Smith Leyva
The Accountant’s Accelerator

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, under-price your services. READ MORE →

Overcoming the Roadblocks to Innovation

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6 reasons why innovation is so difficult at accounting firms and 6 practical ways to launch new money-making ideas.

By August J. Aquila
Creating the Effective Partnership 

The mantra over the last few years has been “change or die.”  So, why is it that professional services firms, especially accounting and law firms, have found it so difficult to embrace change, innovate and spend time and resources on research and development in order to build a stronger future?

Here are six reasons why firms fail to innovate: READ MORE →

Seven Busy Season Success Secrets

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Tip #5: Get paid before filing.

By Sandi Smith Leyva
Accountant’s Accelerator

Here are some fast tips to help you make the most out of busy season, which is when you have the highest amount of your clients’ attention all year long. READ MORE →

Two Steps to Easy Upsells

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By Sandi Smith Leyva
Accountant’s Accelerator

Adding revenue does not have to take much time or money. Start by going after the low-hanging fruit.

Open Excel or your favorite spreadsheet tool, and make a worksheet from the sales numbers in your accounting system. List the name of each current, active client you have in the rows of the spreadsheet. Across the top, make columns for each service you offer. For example, if you offer tax, bookkeeping and QuickBooks consulting, you will have three columns.

You can break your revenue out any way you like. The more columns, the better.

Then, drop in your revenue numbers from your accounting system. In QuickBooks, you may be able to run your Sales by Customer Summary to make it faster. You can create the columns by class, if that’s what you use to break out your revenue by service line.

That’s step one, to create your spreadsheet. Step two is the fun part.

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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 →