How accountants can scale sales and boost their trusted status
Most customers search for services and compare products online. So, your digital footprint is more important than ever.
According to a Harvard Business Review study of B2B buyers, 53% of buyers turn to social media when assessing tools and technologies. Currently, 94% of B2B buyers perform online research before making a purchasing decision. If you do not have an online presence and a strong identifiable brand you will miss out on most online inquiries.
In my last article, I showed how professional accounting services firms had room for improvement, now let's deep-dive into Scale Your Sales strategies to accelerate growth. Branding should evoke an emotional response that motivates your ideal customers to sign on as a client. Your brand must reinforce the brand values, engage new customers and make clients want to remain with the firm over their lifetime.
With 72% of firms struggling to win new business and a third of existing clients considering switching to competitors; your engagement and education process is critical.
Even if you are not planning to grow your accounting firm or sole practice, you will want to retain your existing client relationship.
Scale Your Sales is the ultimate relationship system that helps professional accounting services engage, educate and elevate your client relationships into trusted and loyal partnerships.
Scale Your Sales Engagement Strategies
Engagement starts long before the first meeting. It is in the brand messages the resonate with the ideal customers. The brand is the first impression, that set their expectations of what will follow. Do you encourage the customer to schedule their own appointments, is this process easy? What is the on-boarding process in the first, and subsequent years? Are clients invited to an introductory webinar before the meeting? Are they sent a list of questions to ask their accountant? With the confirmation is a photo of their accountant sent? Do you have an engagement process in place? Although a great deal can be automated, it is important that engagement is not overlooked.
Start by asking,
- What would be useful for the client to know?
- What is the best way that they want to receive information?
- How do you know you are exceeding their expectations?
Do you have the benchmarks in place to measure the level of deepening relationship?
Online engagement is no different from offline. It is just a conversation, sharing relevant information. You know what is relevant by asking relevant questions and commenting on other relevant posts to strike-up a two-way conversation. The key is to be active, be helpful, informative and genuine.
Scale Your Sales Educate Strategies
Customers lack knowledge leading to a lower perception of value and higher buyer uncertainty.
Not all your messages will relate to your entire database of clients. Segment your database by the customer stated preferences, characteristics and business sector. Then you are better able to align the relevant messages and offers to the most interested clients.
This is your push strategies, but you must have a pull strategy as well. This allows prospective and existing customers to draw down relevant information as and when they need it. It is important your clients see you are a source of knowledge and insight. The person that can solve their business problems. You must enable your customers to self-select and self-educate from your knowledge platform. If you do not your competitor will.
It is important to educate prospective customers on how best to access accounting services and what best fit looks like. Make it your mission to stop business owners like me, making mistakes that cost them.
Every other industry, technology continues to make inroads into accounting. Yet, technology will not replace relationships. Trusted professional advisers are needed to interrupt the data, to educate clients on the more information created from technology.
The firm itself must be at the leading edge, embracing technology and this includes getting a grip of social media and social selling. Technology plays a significant role in gaining clients and creating brand awareness.
Education creates opportunities that can lead to loyal clients and lifetime partnerships.
Scale Your Sales Elevate Strategies
Satisfied customers deliver an average of 7% higher revenues, what is your retention strategy? Do you know your level of churn and whether you are retaining your customer relationships?
Attracting new customers, retaining existing clients and growing existing revenue. Are all business goals that require defined benchmarks and strategies to drive your accounting firm’s growth results.
It’s about building relationships to help your clients achieve their business goals. This takes professional accounting firms beyond handling the taxes. To elevate the relationship to a trusted partnership.
When the on-boarding team meet with clients, focus on asking questions that help identify the client’s business needs. To help your clients set a direction of travel to greater financial opportunities. A partnership relationship will enable the accounting firm to sit at the client table (either virtually or literally) in key financial business decisions as a trusted independent partner. Without a deep understanding of the information held on your clients, along with a strong trusted relationship. Professional accounting firms must invest in internal systems to easily serve customers’ needs and meet their expectations.
The customer experience is more important than ever with 72% of businesses saying they switched due to a reactive service. Some customers want a lite touch, however, if this is not their expectation, you are delivering a poor customer experience. Firms must lead in creating the best possible personalised customer experience with a commitment to engaging, educating and elevating customer relationships. If they are to increase the customer base, retain clients and grow their professional accounting firm.
To hit your growth goals and to develop stronger relationships into long-term partnerships.
You need:
- Clearly defined brand and brand values.
- Customer data segmented for your most valued customers.
- Personalisation engagement strategy that elevates your customer relationships.
- An education strategy that builds credibility.
- An engaging onboarding and retention strategy.
Very few people love to sell much more love to build relationships. The more focused you are in serving your customers, the better your chances of scaling your accounting firm. You must in inject more than a bit of personality but fill-in your invisible box with colour and character. Make your professional accounting firm identifiable for the things your client cares about. By completely immersing your firm in partnering with your clients on their journey to business success.
Janice B Gordon is a Sage Business Expert and awarded 25 of the #TOP100 Global Business Influencer 2017 and founder of Scale Your Sales. Janice will be sharing brand building strategies at Accountex. Make sure you book your seat on May 2 in the Sales and Marketing Theatre at 11 am, for 6 Ways to Scale Your Sales Building Brand.
State of Social annual report 2019 – 10 top facts for the accountant
Based on the responses of over 1,800 businesses in the new State of Social Report 2019, paid for social media advertising is shown to be gaining traction with almost a quarter of respondents seeing it as very effective and a third saying it is effective.
Almost, two thirds (65 per cent) are planning to increase their social media advertising budget in 2019.
Accountants, often dismiss social media as something to do when there is room in the budget. However, if these insights are anything to go by, it can represent a cost-effective way of brand building, of finding new opportunities and increasing visibility as part of an overall marketing strategy.
Here are 10 top line facts for accountants taken from the report:
- Social media is a key part of marketing strategies Social media marketing has been around for many years now, and the majority of marketers see it as an important part of their overall strategy. Fifty-eight per cent of marketers say social media is “very important”, with 30 per cent saying it’s “Somewhat important”.
- Facebook and Twitter are the most widely used social media platforms Facebook is the most widely used channel for business use and 93 per cent of those who took part in the study said they were using it. This reflects a slight fall from 2018, when 96 per cent who took part in the same survey said they use Facebook. Twitter follows closely behind with 84 per cent. Instagram is in third position with 80 per cent, and 70 per cent of businesses use LinkedIn. Instagram is gaining traction and has increased its usage in the survey from 70 per cent in 2018 to 80 per cent in 2019. LinkedIn remains constant with 70 per cent across the two years. Interestingly, WhatsApp is now being used by 14.5 per cent of businesses.
- Facebook is the most popular platform to post business content on Facebook remains the most popular channel for businesses to share video content (81 per cent), with YouTube in second (62 per cent), and Instagram third (57 per cent). LinkedIn is fifth (32 per cent), and could be a channel to watch in 2019, with early data showing that videos on LinkedIn are being shared 20+ times more than any other content.
- More and more brands are turning to video content Facebook still leads the way. Video content in gaining in popularity with this year’s findings showing that just 14.5 per cent of businesses don’t publish any video compared with 25 per cent in 2018. More than one-third (36 per cent) publish video content monthly, with about a quarter (24 per cent) publishing video content weekly.
- Image and video lead the way as most important aspect of content Over a third of businesses consider that image/video is the most important aspect when creating and publishing a piece of content and this is followed closely by 34 per cent who consider narrative to be the most important. Call to action came in next with 21 per cent feeling that this is the most important feature.
- Lack of time is holding businesses back from creating more video content A lack of time is the most important reason given for not creating more video content with 66 per cent citing this as their number one. 41 per cent say they have no budget and 23 per cent say they are not sure what to create.
- Half of businesses don’t have a documented social media strategy There is almost a 50/50 split with 50.0 per cent saying that they don’t have a documented social media strategy and 49.1 per cent that say they do.
- Businesses are uncertain how to measure social media’s effectiveness Social media’s effectiveness as a marketing channel has long been debated, and the survey found that, though social media is key to marketing strategy, 19 per cent of marketers are still uncertain how to measure its effectiveness.
- Likes shares and comments are considered most popular form of meaningful engagement Over 66 per cent of respondents consider that receiving likes, shares and comments equals meaningful engagement when measuring the performance of content on social while 59 per cent consider interaction with the brand as their definition of engaging with the content.
- Engagement is the number one way of measuring ROI of social media advertising Engagement is used to measure the ROI of social media advertising by over 60 per cent of the companies that took part in the survey while traffic follows closely behind. 48 per cent cited leads as the key measure with 43 per cent choosing sales. This appears to be a continuation of a trend that was first seen in 2017 with social media becoming more about engagement than driving traffic or making direct sales.
Conclusion This report provides some interesting insights into those platforms that are being used effectively for social media campaigns in the business environment. With privacy emerging as one of the key priorities for 2019, one-to-one messaging is set to increase in popularity.
Accountants that want to deliver more personalised content have the option to use mass social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Messenger or they can use tailored communication platforms such as OneApp that have been designed specifically to connect accountants and clients digitally on their smartphones and tablets.
Why building your accounting brand is more important than ever
Clients of accounting firms or sole practitioner accountants often suffer from buyer uncertainty and remorse and it is easy to see why:
People buy on emotion and justify on logic... how many emotional accountants do you know? 'Emotion' has been a dirty word in professional services.
It is only in the past 5-10 years that they have felt it necessary to inject personality into their communication and put some emotion into their messaging.
We are in a digital social economy where many service-based businesses give away some of their best work, to demonstrate their credibility and to educate the audience of their service proposition. Customers expect more than a transactional service, they expect a personable relationship.
Here are three areas where there is room for improvement in customer communications.
- The starting point is a negative experience such that prospective customers often:
- Feel forced to conform and comply although, by HMRC, your profession is a chink in the chain.
- Uncertain when to access accounting services, so do it late.
- Have unrealistic expectations of the cost of the service, linked to not knowing what you do.
- Lack of understanding of the full services available that could help their businesses grow.
This creates a barrier between customers accessing accounting services.
- Many accountancy firms sell what I call an ‘invisible’ box of services.
No one knows what goes on inside!
The higher the perception of undifferentiated commodity the lower the value. Professional accounting service firms must help customers by differentiating their brand. Giving accounting firm personality and showing customers the specific value to their business.
Besides word of mouth, prospective customers may not know how to make an informed choice between ‘me too’ accountancy firms. To them, many accountancy firms offer similar services, it is hard for customers to distinguish between the good and great. Customers lack the technical skill to assess accountancy qualifications and experience.
To prove this point, when I searched for the difference between chartered and certified accountants one answer was:
“A chartered certified accountant means that the accountant has received his/her qualifications the ACCA. A chartered accountant has received his/her qualifications through another governing body in the world. A certified accountant may also refer to chartered certified accountant UK.”
I remember when I started and managed a growing restaurant and bar business that employed over twenty full and part-time staff. I felt that I was working to pay PAYE, VAT, business rates, corporation tax. As soon as you pay one tax another came thick and fast, and there seemed very little break for the massive personal investment in people and property. I did not always get the right professional advice and it cost me. I was ignorant of the value of professional services, but they did not sell their value to my individual business, they sold the price for the 'invisible box'.
- Customers are unrealistic because they are ill-informed.
Even after the initial service is provided, how can a client assess the quality of the submission? Did the firm find and apply all the relevant deductibles? How would a client know?
Customers have unrealistic expectations not only of the service but also the tax burden. Few people enjoy paying tax. The basic fact is that may customers are ill-informed, and this leads to widespread buyer uncertainty and a lack of trust. Send a personalised confirmation email of the service provided, this is an excellent opportunity to communicate value.
Rather than the above three areas being a barrier, they create opportunities for professional accounting services.
The accounting firm must create an onboarding and service delivery processes to remove barriers to their service and buyer uncertainty. Giving opportunities to deliver and even exceed customer expectations.
What required is education rather than persuasion in sales and marketing. The deepening of the relationship into a partnership is critical to building long-term and lifetime value. It is not a transactional service offered, but a trusted partner relationship. Customers can do their best work knowing they have a trusted professional accounting service in their camp.
Ensuring education is at the core of customer communication shows clients:
- The benefits of seeking an accountancy service early.
- What are the key differentiators between account services?
- Ways to access accounting service providers.
- Ways to communicate their expectations, issues, and desires with their service provider.
- What they should expect from service delivery?
- What they need to look for in early warning signs in their business growth journey.
- What they might be eligible for in deductions.
- A calendar of events or a personalised calendar of their submission deadline.
Your brand values and personality
- What other services benefits are on offer such as a loan, mentoring with example case studies?
Education of prospective customers and current clients will reduce buyer uncertainty and increase trust and loyalty. The better educated your client the higher they value your service.
When a customer perceives the accounting firms or sole practitioner accountant as the experienced professional that has solved a similar business problem for similar businesses. Reduces the risk in the decision to contract your service giving social proof with case studies and testimonials.
When many professional services are indistinguishable it is critical to brand and distinguishes unique element of your firm. Become a specialist practitioner working in one industry or with one type of client.
Building your brand is essential to help customers distinguish your accounting firm others. Survey your top 20% of clients on the attributes they look for in a professional accounting service firm. Find what differentiates your service from other competitors that they considered. When on-boarding customers, ask them what made them choose your firm, record their words and use their perspective to inform your firms brand statement. Researching what is important to your clients and building your brand around this clear communication of difference conveys what is unique about your firm. This will help to attract other similar customers.
Your brand must present brand values, emotionally engage new customers and reinforce why clients must remain with the firm over their lifetime.
Janice B Gordon is a Sage Business Expert, in Sage's TOP 100 Global Business Influencers 2017 ... and founder of Scale Your Sales. Janice will be sharing brand building strategies at Accountex on 2 May in the Sales and Marketing Theatre at 11am.
Accountants' guide: Where to start with marketing (Tide)
You’ve taken the leap, left the safety net of your full time job and started your own business. You know your product or service inside out and everyone you know tells you it’s a great idea.
Then it starts to get sticky.
You need a website, you’ve signed up to ALL social media sites, a friend has done some business cards and told you that you need to be better at marketing if you want to be a success.
That’s when you start to panic.
Marketing.
First Things First
Well, the clue is in the name: MARKETing… it’s about understanding your market.
Do you understand your customers?
Facebook promotions, Instagram posts and ads in your local paper are all tactical outputs of marketing, but they should all flow from the starting point of understanding your customer.
Success Starts With Strategy
The first step to marketing nirvana is to create a marketing strategy. Strategy conjures up images of huge documents, board rooms and dour consultants. You can take this approach, but for most start ups, I’d advise against it.
Instead, to create a marketing strategy, just answer these three questions in as much detail as you have:
- Who is going to buy what you’re selling?
- Why are they going to buy it?
- What are your SMART objectives?
When you’re answering these questions use your own experience, but also talk to people to get their input.
Avoid family and friends, they’re usually the least critical audience you’ll ever have. Instead, get groups of people who fit the profile of your customers and talk to them about the problems they have and how they solve them. Talk to customers (and potential customers) to understand their pain and how you can fix it.
SMART objectives are also crucial, they’re not just a line from a bad management handbook. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound and they help sense check the assumptions you’ve made about the target market. They’ll also help you budget and understand what you need to sell to stay in business.
And finally, make it visible. Put the highlights on a wall in your office, see who you’re talking to every day and know what your objectives are – it helps keep the customer at the heart of what you’re doing.
Move Fast And Break Things
Facebook once had a motto of move fast and break things, which is useful, to a point, for your marketing.
Once the new marketing strategy is stuck on the walls, many small businesses are left paralysed. They are overwhelmed by the plethora of channels available and end up doing nothing.
I can’t tell you if your marketing strategy is right or if your marketing strategy is wrong. But I can tell you that if you don’t implement your strategy, then it will never work.
Get started. Look at the analytics. Review what you’ve done. Track where the sales are coming from. Ask your customers how they heard about you. Use this data to improve what you’re doing. Don’t be afraid to kill things if they’re not working.
Tide Banking <> Andi Jarvis, Strategy Director and Founder of Eximo Marketing
The secrets of SEO for accountants
Every time a prospective client searches for accountancy practices near them, they see the following types of results:
- Advertisements: These are placed by businesses using Google Ads. This is known as SEM (search engine marketing) and it is an easy way to promote your website so that it appears whenever someone searches for specific keywords.
- Map of the area: If Google knows where you’re searching from, a map will pinpoint some local accountancy businesses. Try a Google search for “accountant near me” and you’ll see an example.
- Organic results: These are the websites that Google considers to be more relevant. You’ll want your business to show up at the top of this list. Some of the first results might be directories of accountancy practices so it’s important that your practice is also listed in those sites.
In order to appear at the top of the list of organic search results, your SEO needs to be up to scratch. It enhances your probabilities of being among the first organic results and, although it takes time, it is highly effective when done right. Below is a summary of four steps to follow to start optimising your website:
1. Set up a high-quality Google My Business profile
If you haven’t already set up a ‘Google My Business’ profile, do it now. Every small business should have one these days.
2. Fill your website with highly relevant content
One of the most effective ways of optimising your page for search is to look at the keywords people are using in your area and including them in your website. If you start a Google Ads campaign you will gain access to their Keyword Planner. Find more tips on relevant content in my blog.
3. Ensure consistency across directories and social media
Search engines also refer to directory websites such as Yelp and Yellow Pages to confirm details about your business. Be sure to have the exact same business name, address, and phone number in listings on all the important sites of this type.
Finally, look up your business on ‘Moz’ and check that your listings are verified, identify any duplicates you might find and get recommendations.
4. Seek great links, ratings and reviews
Never underestimate the power of great reviews - Google loves reviews because searchers love reviews. Politely ask your clients to share their opinion about your accountancy practice on these pages, and even send them direct links to the review pages to make it even easier for them to leave their feedback. See my blog for ideas on how to encourage clients to give positive web reviews which will boost SEO.
Safety in numbers...accountancy firms lead the way
I work with CEOs, MDs and FDs across many different industries. A client engages my company, to review and transform their sales function and enable growth by implementing a sustainable sales system© that will mitigate risk and maximise profit.
The future and the economy are always top of the agenda and I think this presents a great opportunity for accountancy firms who want to differentiate and grow their business.
News articles are appearing daily about the rapidly changing business world and point to an uncertain future. My experience with business owners and entrepreneurs shows they are looking for structure and substance to enable growth and confidence.
Growth and expansion
Accountancy firms may choose to focus their efforts to work with clients who are looking for growth and expansion because these clients have the most need of business and financial advice.
Business growth and business confidence stimulate work for everyone. Business owners are far more likely to invest in premises, machinery, IP, staff etc if they believe growth is achievable and will give them a competitive advantage in their market.
The challenge for many accountancy firms, is the difficulty in showing a clear differential between themselves and the competition, when they both offer Bookkeeping, HR, Tax and Audit in their stable of products.
Business advisory
Rebranding the firm as a business advisory is not the answer. It’s important that any new products or services you add to your offering don’t detract from your bread and butter products or destabilise your client base.
Your firm may already offer growth advisory services as well as traditional accountancy products. The accountancy profession offers a solid foundation for the addition of specific growth advisory services. Your offering may already include advice on financial decisions, auditing accounts and providing trustworthy information about financial records.
You may also report on taxation, audit, undertake forensic accounting, manage corporate finance including business recovery and insolvency, reviewing accounting systems and processes.
Professional services
Whether your firm is interested in growing your audit business, or introducing additional business growth and financial advisory services, accountants are perfectly positioned to differentiate from other professional service offerings.
Accountancy qualifications, training and experience are great assets, giving your services credibility and integrity. Whichever strategy you employ to achieve your firm’s objectives, you must assist with your clients’ business growth and this will include focusing on areas where they are underperforming.
As ways of doing business grow more sophisticated, firms need to embrace technology and find new ways of interacting with businesses to stay relevant and add more value to their existing clients while attracting new ones. It’s important to understand that winning new clients requires a sales skill-set and mindset, with energy focused on prospecting and winning sales using a sustainable and systematic method.
Technology
However, technology is the future, whether we like it or not. Chasing growth and profit will continue to ensure businesses outsource basic compliance activities to number crunching lower paid/lower value facilities and rely more heavily on financial and business advice.
I’m interested to see that cloud-based accountancy software platform Xero has developed technology that is transforming the way accountants are interacting with their clients. We all know that change requires continual education to ensure real value is delivered.
Xero has developed playbooks to educate their ecosystem of users. The accessible playbooks provide advice and guidance, with each playbook focused on a specific area such as cashflow, retail and professional services. *
Accountants are able to specialise in any industry and firms may have a portfolio of varied clients including public practice, commerce and not-for-profit and public sectors. Whichever industry you or your firm is in, the aim is always to maximise profitability for your clients. Maximising profitability means re-focusing their sales effort and ensuring their sales function is driving the growth they want.
A clear focus on a client’s own revenue and profit aspirations will have an immediate impact on the firm’s success/growth plans. Your advice must be able to achieve the growth they’re looking for with a corresponding increase in their sales and revenue. If you can do this, your accountancy practice will grow along with each client you advise. It makes sense - if they grow, so do you.
Change the question to get a different answer
It’s frustrating when you want to help a client improve their business but they just won’t take your advice.
The explanations I hear range from “they don’t want to pay for it” to “they’re just not interested” but, while I accept that some clients aren’t really business people at all but simply workers doing a job, I don’t accept that the majority of a typical client base fall into this category.
We see business as important and so we see the advice that we give clients to improve their businesses as very important. However, clients don’t necessarily see it the same way.
To many, their business is not a priority in itself but more a means to an end.
Other dreams
They work hard at their businesses in order to fulfil other dreams. Typically these will be related to their family and to creating a better world for them but could equally be for a collectable car, a sick relative, a change of lifestyle.
Giving the client things to do within their business has little impact if their goals lie elsewhere. Indeed, they can be seen counter-productive to the client, taking up more time and money that they want to spend instead on other personal things.
To get a more positive response, you need to link your advise to what really matters to them so that they can see where the true benefits end up.
Business goals
For example, rather than asking a client about their business goals, ask instead what matters to them more than anything else in the world. Get them talking about their lives and sharing their personal goals. Then, by understanding those, you can introduce their business into the conversation but within the context of their personal world.
Advice to improve their cash flow becomes more about the money they can spend on the family holiday. The strategies for effective management become more about spending time with the kids.
The most effective strategy we ever used for ‘converting’ clients to a more business advisory mindset was to show them how to manage their resources in order to get a family holiday the following year. When advice equals tangible, meaningful benefits then clients will pay and come back for more.
Get to know their personal world, not just the business one.