Here’s what you’re looking for: Martin Bissett

Today’s Bissett Bullet: “If the prospective client you’re meeting with needs to ‘recommend’ your proposal to others, they are not the person who can make the decision.”

By Martin Bissett

In a number of cases in growing our firms, especially in larger businesses, we can sometimes be palmed off with recommenders and not actual decision makers and yet we treat them as if they are. Do not waste time with people who cannot authorize a payment to you.

Today’s To-Do:

Make sure in a new business meeting that you are meeting with at least one of the decision makers in the business. Also, make sure that any meeting that you have with a recommender is based purely on getting a meeting with a buyer next time.

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And 10 questions to ask about yourself.

By Martin Bissett
Business Development on a Budget

I’ve been asking you to believe in yourself, to get your potential clients to open up to you, and to demonstrate to them the outcomes that working with you and your firm would create in their personal and professional lives.

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Now here’s a checklist for you to run through before you begin your next business development initiative, and before each new business appointment that you have.

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Today’s Bissett Bullet: “Growing your firm is possible even with limited time and resources, if you simply focus on the three most profitable exercises that build your credibility as an expert in your field.”

By Martin Bissett

Create high-level intellectual property such as a video series or a guest blog about a niche area for a trade association publication that can be repurposed for all manner of marketing collateral for your firm. If it is published in the places that your ideal clients are looking then you will find that you are attracting new opportunities rather than “selling,” and those appointments take far less time and resources to convert.

Today’s To-Do:

Start today. Dedicate a small amount of time every day to focus on three key things that will build credibility in your field. The rest is billable hours.

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Adopt them and they’ll soon be second nature.

By Martin Bissett
Winning Your First Client

You may be thinking right now, “Well, very good, Martin, but we have finite time. We’re very, very busy people and we need to get business in the door, and therefore creation of opportunity becomes the issue.”

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Regardless of whether we’ve got 20 opportunities on our plate today or none, when the next one comes along we can’t afford to be anything other than confident, comfortable, assured relationship builders who have tremendous value to offer. Because people will see that body language, those voice tones and hear those words and it will be attractive. They will want to get to know more – they’ll want to be able to look at options. They’ll want to know what you’ll charge, and they’ll want to know what they’ll get for what you charge.
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Today’s Bissett Bullet: “When should a lead be considered dead? Having invested time into a prospect, how do you know when to call it a day?”

By Martin Bissett

I would suggest that if someone has failed to come back to you on three occasions, over a legitimate period of time – let’s say a month or more – then that particular lead should be considered dead. You are expensive and your time, past a certain point, is far better spent arranging to meet with somebody who is more keen to work with you.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t ever convert them but for now, it’s time to file them under proposals you didn’t win and move on.

Today’s To-Do:

Who have you met with recently and subsequently been chasing? How many times have you made contact with no outcome? If it’s more than three, take the above advice. As a precaution, diarize one further follow-up, three or six months hence. If they have been legitimately waylaid, they will still have an interest in working with you.

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Are you genuinely interested in your prospects?

By Martin Bissett
Winning Your First Client

It’s about time to realize that value is not about time.

When I look back on the research that has been conducted by various groups as to the biggest obstacles accounting firms cite to growing their practice,

• 50 percent said creating opportunities,
• 25 percent said knowing how to close deals
• and the remainder said having self-confidence in presenting and then being able to positively differentiate from their competition.

Let’s not sell, let’s attract.

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Today’s Bissett Bullet: “Very few business owners highly value compliance work. It is often viewed as a necessary evil and as such, the decision to change accountants for this sort of work will, more often than not, be driven by price.”

By Martin Bissett

Quantify, in monetary terms, what they earned during the time you freed up for them by completing that compliance work, however, and compliance suddenly becomes valuable.

What sales have your clients made in the time that you have saved them over the last 12 months? Justify your fee in terms of their return on investment and help them to understand why they need to change to your firm as a matter of urgency.

Today’s To-Do:

Who are you meeting to discuss compliance work? Find a client of a similar size and have the figure that you saved them at the ready.

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Focus on your client’s concerns, not yours.

By Martin Bissett
Winning Your First Client

Let’s start with two simple definitions to avoid any confusion:

1. The purpose of marketing is to create the opportunity.
2. The purpose of business development (sales) is to convert that opportunity into a paying client.

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When we meet with prospective clients – and I say this as someone who has sat in on many hundreds of meetings of this nature – we rarely give potential clients a reason to buy from us that they care about.

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Today’s Bissett Bullet: “In accounting, our impact on businesses, lives and futures is substantial. We need to pull people into that knowledge to attract them.”

By Martin Bissett

If I were to visit your website today, how many stories would I find about how you helped businesses? Really? That many? That’s what I thought. We need to communicate the “why” of what we do far more than the “what” of what we do.

Today’s To-Do:

Take a look at your website today. How many client stories can be found on it? For many firms this is zero. Look to improve that by one, today.

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