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
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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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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
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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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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
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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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