Bissett Bullet: How Are We Doing?
Today’s Bissett Bullet: “How often do you ask your current clients for feedback?”
By Martin Bissett
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Five Questions About Facing Challenges
We all have to do it.
By Martin Bissett
Passport to Partnership
When challenges come our way, regardless of what shape or form they arrive in, our world seems to lose a bit of brightness, there’s a little knot in the gut and a sense of peace broken.
MORE: The Real Math Behind the Sales Pipeline | Five Questions for Grading Prospects | Be Clear About Your ROI Proposition | Keep Business Development Going During Busy Season | Health, Wealth, Stealth: Challenges on the Path to Partnership | Don’t Let Recurring Fees Kill Your Practice | Rate Your Personal Purpose | Five Ways to Make Selling Easier | Six Keys to Getting a Proposal Accepted | Tell the World Your Worth
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The question is, if we were watching our own responses to these trials, would we appoint ourselves as the next partner of the firm?
Let’s examine five checkpoints to test your own, or your staffers’, abilities to overcome challenges.
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Bissett Bullet: Keep Your Distance
Today’s Bissett Bullet: “First impressions last. When you meet with a prospective client for the first time, how do you want them to remember you?”
By Martin Bissett
It is important that you demonstrate enthusiasm for that prospect and their business but it is also important to remember that there is a fine line between “upbeat” and “overbearing” and the latter can be construed as “pushy,” which will do you no favors.
In your eagerness to build rapport, be sure to avoid overfamiliarity. Demonstrate that working with you would be a better experience than they currently have, but do so by showing that you care and are excited by the opportunity, without invading their personal space or finishing their sentences for them.
Today’s To-Do:
Be aware of how well intentioned attempts to build rapport and put a prospect at ease could achieve quite the opposite.
See more Bissett Bullets here
The Real Math Behind the Sales Pipeline
Four business development steps that are worth your while.
By Martin Bissett
Business Development On a Budget
I’ve taken many accounting firm partners through this process, and it’s quite common for them to balk a little at the pipeline idea when they see the amount of work involved.
MORE: Five Questions for Grading Prospects | Be Clear About Your ROI Proposition | It’s Time to Prepare the Next Generation | Who Are You More Committed to, Your Firm or Your Clients? | Nine Checkpoints Before Every Prospect Meeting | Three Questions about Conversion | Six Keys to Turning Prospects into Clients | Don’t Overlook Internal Communication | Four Reasons People Struggle with Communication
They see it as just another call on their time when they already have far too much to do, and they ask me why they can’t just write down a list of prospects and go to work on them.
Is that what you’ve been thinking? Well, here’s why that doesn’t work.
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Bissett Bullet: Make Good Use of the Time You Save
Today’s Bissett Bullet: “The cost of cloud-based software or automation tools is no longer prohibitive for smaller firms so if everybody is using them, how do you stand out?”
By Martin Bissett
If technology is readily available and at a cost that makes it viable for firms of any size, then what sets you and your practice apart from your competitors is the way in which you use the time that the technology saves you, to better support your clients.
Today’s To-Do:
Estimate the amount of time you save in a week in comparison to before you upgraded to your current software. How much of that time do you spend reaching out to clients just to check on them or add value?
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Bissett Bullet: What Does It Cost to Undertake?
Today’s Bissett Bullet: “It is important to know the cost price of any given job.”
By Martin Bissett
It is not an exact science. You can calculate that cost with any given hourly recovery rate and however you see fit, but you need to know what it is. This is NOT to inform your pricing, but to inform what your break-even is. When you set your fees, they must never equate to less than cost or you are loss making, and unless there is significant long-term benefit to doing so on a short-term basis, you don’t want that.
Sounds obvious, right? So how come so many accounting firms don’t get acquired because they don’t make any money?
Today’s To-Do:
If you were to be honest with yourself, how many prospective clients really do not want to change their accountant, and how many just did not see the reason to? Now, on that basis with that reality confronted, be stronger in your next meeting with a prospective client.
See more Bissett Bullets here
Five Questions for Grading Prospects
Remember, a list is not a pipeline.
By Martin Bissett
Business Development on a Budget
So you’ve done all the work to get yourself composed and prepared to go out and generate new opportunities, find new business and new clients. Now what? How will you know who to contact for the first step?
Answer: your pipeline.
MORE: Be Clear About Your ROI Proposition | Keep Business Development Going During Busy Season | Walk the Commitment Walk | Two Steps Toward Mastering Selling | Thirteen Ways to Show Commitment | Clients Can’t Grow without You | Seven Mistakes in Winning New Fees | How to Develop Your Communication Abilities | Five Questions for Measuring Partner Potential | Five Ways to Rally Your Firm to Its Culture | When Would-Be Partners Aren’t Candidates | Make Your Expertise a New-Client Magnet | Don’t Think of It as Selling
Many partners think they have a pipeline, but they don’t. What they actually have is just a list of prospects they’ve
- met with,
- would like to meet with or
- have worked with in the past.
Bissett Bullet: Who are Your Centers of Influence?
Today’s Bissett Bullet: “Who is sending new business your way and who isn’t but really ought to be?”
By Martin Bissett