CPA Trendlines

Today's Features

Five Ways to Make Partners Fall in Love with Marketing

It’s an age-old problem, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

By August J. Aquila
Price It Right: How to Value Accounting Services

If only there were a silver bullet to solve this problem! But unfortunately, there isn’t one.

MORE: Analyze Your Firm to Keep It Current | What Makes a Great Website? | Four Strategies for Building Your Practice | Market Technology Services through Workshops and Training | The Secrets of Great Business Developers | Dodge the Four Curses of a Production Orientation | Client Acquisition Never Stops | ‘Sales’ Is Not a Four-Letter Word | Maybe What You Need Is a Marketing Audit | Three Types of Marketing Message, and Which Is Best
Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

Getting partners to market and to love doing it has been the Achilles’ heel of the accounting and consulting professional for as long as I can remember. What does it take to make progress in this area? Here are some ideas to help you move forward:
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Cornerstone

Jobs Outlook: Strong and Steady Growth in Hiring and Earnings for U.S. Accountants

Cornerstone Study Forecasts Smooth Advances in Both Employment and Salaries for Accountants Through 2031

Cornerstone Studies by CPA Trendlines Research provide decision-makers with a strong, data-based set of sharp insights, useful reference points, and actionable intelligence.

MORE CPA Trendlines Cornerstone Reports here

PRO Member Exclusive

How to Solve the Big Disconnect in Talent Management

Can you articulate your firm’s employee value proposition?

By Marc Rosenberg in collaboration with Jeremy Wortman, Ph.D., owner of HRD Initiatives
CPA Firm Staff: Managing Your #1 Asset

“Executives spend more time on managing people and making people decisions than on anything else – and they should. No other decisions are so long-lasting in their consequences or so difficult to unmake. And yet, by and large, executives make poor promotion and staffing decisions. At most, one-third of such decisions turn out right, one-third are minimally effective and a third are outright failures. In no other area of management would we put up with such miserable performance.” – Peter Drucker

MORE: What Relevance Means for Staffing in Accounting | How Accounting Staffing Has Changed
Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

What Is Talent Management?

Talent management is an umbrella term for how firms acquire talent, engage people in their firms, develop their skills and retain them. Among many things, it addresses
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PODCAST

Steve Yoss: Connect, Transform, and Analyze Data Like a Pro with Power Query Basic | Quick Tech Talk

Integrate information systems, but don’t ignore your gut.

Quick Tech Talk
With Steve Yoss
CPE Today

How do you ensure data integrity when you’re working with multiple disparate systems that you want to ultimately pull together and have talked to each other?

You’ll always want to make sure that you have a system of record: one system inside your organization that’s kind of the master control over everything else inside your company. It could be QuickBooks, your ERP platform, a custom database, or something else. But ideally, all other systems inside your company take their cues from that one master system.

MARKETING & SALES

Bissett Bullet: Why Bother?

Today’s Bissett Bullet: “Why, in general, does marketing in the accounting profession fail so often and if it yields such dismal results, why bother?”

By Martin Bissett

I’ve said it before and you’ll read it again many times as you stick with me. The secret sauce, the thing that most accounting professionals don’t use effectively enough are their stories. Nothing more, nothing less.

We’ve established that marketing creates need and when you tell your clients’ stories – not in terms of what you did, not even in terms of how much time and money you saved, but in terms of what your clients were able to use that time and money for – you attract other people who want the same.

How many stories do you have hidden in your portfolio, even just over the last five years? How many mortgages have you saved? How many personal guarantees have you gotten back from the bank? Let’s be really blunt, how many marriages have you saved as a result of your work?

Today’s To-Do:

Find five of your best client stories and ask for permission to use them. Some clients will be happy for them to be shared and others will want them anonymized – that’s fine. Think about how you can leverage these in your marketing.