Bissett Bullet: How Are We Doing?
Today’s Bissett Bullet: “How often do you ask your current clients for feedback?”
By Martin Bissett
MARKETING & SALES
Nine Ways to Choose Your PR Person
The rules of the game have changed.
By Bruce Marcus
Professional Services Marketing 3.0
EDITOR’S NOTE: CPA Trendlines was privileged to have a long relationship with Bruce W. Marcus, who was ahead of his time in his thinking and practice in marketing for accounting. We are publishing some of the late expert’s evergreen work, which retains wisdom for the present.
There was a time when all you needed was a roll of nickels and a phone booth, and you were in the PR game. Of course, all clients expected then was that you get their names in the paper. For most of the publicity clients in those days, that was sufficient.
MORE: When Bad News Happens to Good Firms | Why Accountants Should Be Nice to Journalists | Ten Keys to Crafting Ads | Four Things to Know About Social Media | Internal Communications Are Underrated | Four Things Better Than a Company Song | Let’s Lose the Word ‘Image’ | The Risk In Not Understanding Risk | What Your Marketing Program Can and Can’t Do
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“Those days” were the late 1920s and 1930s, before PR became public relations, and before we were beset with such glorious concepts as “image,” and “positioning,” and “niche marketing.” Today, public relations is infinitely more sophisticated than that, as is the public relations client. The public relations program for any modern corporation is to its publicity ancestor as desktop publishing is to hieroglyphics. And of course, the public relations program for the professional firm is different, too.
But to have a sophisticated public relations program requires not just a sophisticated practitioner, but a sophisticated client. A firm, if it knows how, will always find a good public relations practitioner or consultant, but a consultant is only as capable as the firm he or she serves.
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Six Ways to Expand Your Client Services Checklist
It’s key to client retention.
By August J. Aquila
Price It Right: How to Value Accounting Services
Let’s explore ways to provide additional services to existing clients. Here is a short checklist that will help you obtain additional services for your clients.
MORE: Client Acquisition Never Stops | Make Sure You Know What You Will Get from Your Marketing | Three Pillars Support a Successful Accounting Firm | Clients Have Six Reasons for Needing You | Six Ways to Market Your Technology Consulting Practice | Sixteen Marketing Activities to Try | The Four Steps of Your Personal Marketing Process | How Does Your Firm Measure Up? | Six Questions Before Asking for All the Referrals You Deserve
- Other than accounting and tax services, what additional services do you provide to this client? Create a spreadsheet listing the type of service, the fees, the year of service, the engagement leader and the client’s satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5. If your list of additional services is lengthy, you are providing good service to the client. If it is short, continue to the following questions.
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.
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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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When Bad News Happens to Good Firms
Don’t go spinning out of control.
By Bruce Marcus
Professional Services Marketing 3.0
EDITOR’S NOTE: CPA Trendlines was privileged to have a long relationship with Bruce W. Marcus, who was ahead of his time in his thinking and practice in marketing for accounting. We are publishing some of the late expert’s evergreen work, which retains wisdom for the present.
Every election campaign produces, among other things, media myths and bad language. During the elections of the last two decades, the language was infected by a new myth called spin control. The phrase, which broke a speed record in becoming a cliché after the 1988 election, implies that a good media relations practitioner can control the nature and texture of a story in the press – can put the right spin on it to get the journalist to tell it the spinner’s way.
MORE: Why Accountants Should Be Nice to Journalists | When There’s a Leak in Your Firm | Eighteen Things Advertising Can Do for Your Firm | How and Why Client Service Teams Work | Manage Knowledge as a Marketing Tool | Secret Marketing Formula: Get One Client at a Time | Marketing a Fixed Position in a Moving World | How to Build a Marketing Culture | Have You Planned How to Service Your New Revenue? | Why Is Change So Hard for Firms? | Why Value Pricing Works
It’s just not so. For all that the myth implies, when it comes to the media, we propose – but others dispose. Thus it was, and thus it always shall be, so long as we have a free press.
But is the telling always accurate? No. Is it always fair? No. Sometimes, despite all of the public relations professionalism, and despite all the cooperation we may offer the media, the story comes out badly. Disaster, dispensed in the aura of a supposedly objective media, doesn’t merely strike, it reverberates.
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Client Acquisition Never Stops
Six ways to draw people’s interest.
By August J. Aquila
Price It Right: How to Value Accounting Services
A good marketing program never stops marketing the firm. You must always think about acquiring new clients to replace lost ones and to improve the quality of your client base. It’s a fact of life that some clients will move, go out of business, merge or even leave us for another firm.
MORE: Make Sure You Know What You Will Get from Your Marketing | Ten Questions to Refine Your Successful Marketing Plan | Four Questions for Choosing Your Marketing Audit Strategies | Four Steps to a Successful Email Marketing Campaign | Five Reasons to Implement Change Orders | Make Your Practice Better | Eleven Marketing Strategies for Smaller Firms | Five Questions for Developing Your Marketing Plan | You Only Have Four Strategies | The Damage That Traditional Fee Methods Do
Let’s look at some basic client acquisition activities that should be part of your marketing plan. You may be asking yourself, “Which ones work?” They all do. The secret of business development is to constantly be in the marketplace because you never know when a prospect is ready to buy from you or to move from their existing accounting firm.
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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