Empower your accounting team with customer nurturing for Accounting

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[Music] hi there it's brad here from modernfirmpractices.com and this is episode 17 of the modern firm practices show and today i'm going to be covering nurturing and nurturing not only your existing clients but nurturing potential clients and potential prospects that you're talking with and that you're engaging with and that might have been referred through to you so the reason we're talking about nurturing is because many firms i chat to want to grow they want to increase in size from a revenue perspective from a number of clients perspective and that can be for a range of certain business and personal reasons and to do that we need to have an inflow of new work either increasing the work with existing clients or bringing new clients into the fold and so what i'm talking about here is having certain activities and nurturing activities and marketing activities in place to allow you to facilitate that nurturing of existing clients and of new prospects because most accountants don't have any of that in place a couple of things that i see is there's nothing there's no activities going on at all so that that shouldn't be a surprise you don't have a truckload of new work coming in the door the next is a very shotgun approach which is just very going out and trying to be everything to everyone which is just very difficult and you tend to bring in a very wide mix of clients so it's not getting clear on your ideal client and what their problems are and where they hang out there's also the cold outreach approach so i'm definitely starting to see this during covert with accountants going out on social platforms and just cold messaging or cold emailing prospects who don't know you that you know you have you haven't had permission from them to contact you who knows whether they're interested in in what you've got but uh that's generally going to fall flat on its face um because everyone's getting slammed in approach like that and that's generally not how people buy accounting or business advisory or cfo type services and the other thing i'm seeing is very sort of sporadic and poor quality approaches on social media so where to be once out of a blue moon there'll be a burst of activity for a week or two and then there's nothing and the quality within that week or two was generally quite poor and the type of post that i'm seeing is very much it's almost like everyone's copying everyone uh we're xyz accountants and we've been around for this long and we're really good and we're friendly and we're great at what we do chat to us reach out to us let us know if we can help you so it's a very direct promotional type post it's not entertaining it's not educational it's basically we want you to come in and give us some work so we can send you an invoice that's that's pretty much it now if that isn't your intention that's how it's coming across so either of them is a concern so there's a great book called book yourself solid by michael port and he always talks about having something to invite people to so if you're looking to engage with someone or you are connected with someone or you've started a conversation with someone or you just meet someone new today it's great to be able to have something to invite them to because they're not already in a position to buy from you now is only small percentage of people that will buy now and they'll come to you and it'll either be like the emergency department at a hospital right they've cut their arm off they need help right now and there's going to be some where they're just having a terrible experience with their current accountant and they need to move now they've made up their mind it's done so that's that's the absolute minority let's call that three percent well what about the other 97 percent what about that opportunity well the reason that generally goes to the wayside is because your only option that you've got is to promote your services because there's no real marketing or activities to invite that particular person to to help them to nurture them to engage with them the only thing you've got to offer is your services and it's almost an all or nothing approach right because if you don't if if they're not in a position and they're not interested in buying the service right now but they might be you're going to lose that opportunity so what we're going to look at now is what are some things you can do to nurture those relationships and they're very marketing type activities and they're not only for prospects but they're also for existing clients because you need to know you need to look after existing clients right and so what are some things we can do where we're able to um kill two birds with one stone we're able to look after existing clients and look after potential clients with the aim that we know we're going to retain more of our existing clients there might be an opportunity to work closely with existing clients and increase our average client group fee and we might be able to take some prospects along a journey where they might want to buy right now but they might want to buy in 3 or 6 or 12 months and so you're starting to build up a pipeline so to speak of potential opportunities where the time's not right now but they're not saying no to you what they're really saying is not now and it is a coincidental that the first two letters of not now is actually no so a lot of people you're talking to it's actually no's not really a no it just means not now the problem you have is well what do i do with the not nows because if they say yes great they need help with advisory and accounting and tax i can do that but if it's not now i'm not sure what to do so a couple of ideas and he's bookmark important book yourself solid um you know it definitely does a great job there of sharing a number of different strategies in his famous one is having something to invite people to the next step as opposed to saying well reach out to us when when you're ready or um you know it's almost just like you know well we're ready when you are or the door's always open it's great to sort of have the next thing to always invite people to because it's not selling it's helping you might see a previous video of mine and it's also a concept i talk about a lot which is stop selling start helping and so this plays exactly into that so the first one would be having case studies of your best your favorite your most successful ideal clients the type of clients that you would love to clone and have more of them come in the door okay so what if we could put together some case studies just a couple you don't need thousands on those particular clients they're going to be great to be able to share not only with existing clients that you'd like to work closer with but also potential prospects that sort of fit that ideal client avatar where you're able to show them real life examples of other businesses where you're you've been helping them the type of services you've been providing and really in a case study you want to see we were here we started working with this person in this firm they did these things for us we're a little bit unsure but we we put our trust in them and thank god we did because here's the outcome and here's where we're at right now and we're we're never leaving this firm ever it's a little bit of a it's called a hero's journey it's a little bit of a hero's journey um but that's that's what people like to see and like to read because they don't know that you can do what you say you can do just yet so this is going to help out with that process um also awards if you've won any awards then you want to be promoting them okay you want to be singing them from the mountaintop so you might have won it doesn't even matter what it is firm of the year an innovative firm of the year the the new firm of the year the cfo of the year any sort of awards are going to add some authority and social proof that perhaps you are at the top of your field or that you've been recognized sorry that that you're at the top of your field for that particular award and people are going to look more favorably upon that having some ongoing educational content okay so what i mean by that is videos what i'm doing right now perfect example i do the modern film practices show once a week and put it out there every wednesday so it is ongoing and it is regular and it is consistent and anyone that's following this and watching this knows that he comes out once a week and frequency starts to build trust okay seth godin covers that in his book this is marketing which is a great marketing book and he talks about how a lot of marketers are very hot and cold they're on their off and they're also too much planning and not enough doing and what he believes is that in frequency of marketing activities and exactly like this doing doing videos that in that frequency you start to build trust a little bit like at 6 00 pm every single night we know that the news is going to be on the tv in australia anyway the news is going to be on the tv and what do we do we all have a lot of trust that that's a different debate to have but we have a lot of trust in the news we know it's going to be on we know it's frequency you don't even have to think about it if the cricket's on on the foot is on they will literally stop the cricket and they will go to the news no questions asked it starts at six o'clock why because they know that they need to have that consistency and frequency to uphold uh their status of the authority of this is where we go as as you know people of australia to get our update and our news on on current affairs and weather and sport and world news and so on so videos is one a podcast is another one okay it's essentially a video without the without the visuals um it's just just for your ears so what about a a some regular uh content you can put out there via podcasts you know there's some great apps out there now one is called anchor dot fm uh and it makes podcasting so easy it's not funny i started a podcast back when i was in practice probably a good five or six years ago and you had to have developers and you had to do all this tricky tech stuff it would put most people off nowadays you can download an app you give it a name it can even create the artwork for you you can literally just press and hold record on your phone and speak into it and then push distribute and it can push it out to all the different podcasting apps and bang your under it is it is the tech side of it now isn't the issue uh because it's simply so easy so um would that be something your additional uh your uh sorry ideal clients and prospects would be interested in an overarching theme here is you want to go where your clients are so if they prefer to watch video and they're on linkedin you want to be shooting videos and putting them on linkedin if you know they more so listen to podcasts let's say you you've got a lot of i don't know clients in the sporting uh niche your ideal clients are in this you know the sporting niche um well there's probably a good chance a lot of them they're at the gym they're out running they're walking on the beach they're traveling to and from different venues and gyms and so on and so forth there might be a higher chance they're going to be listening to podcasts then they've got time to sit there and listen to a video so it's understanding how your clients or prospects consume content another one is putting together just a white paper so it's basically just a write-up um on a you know on a particular topic uh so preferably something that speaks to that niche a particular problem they have or it could be a particular problem a lot of businesses have but you just talk about it specifically for that niche so you would use certain language so if you looked after let's say a lot of allied health practitioners you might use certain words and lingo and so on that they use you also might make it a little bit more casual as well um so you want to you want to sort of speak to what they would like to hear and how they how they like to engage and so those white papers can just be a pdf document and you can give it to a designer you can you know you you could just get it made look quite good with all of your branding on it doesn't have to cost a bomb someone can whip it together and if you needed to you could find someone on upwork or fiverr just to quickly whip that together it's not gonna cost a lot and you can share that over and over and over and over again that's the key thing with it it's the next step in the journey you could talk to a client that you might ask a few questions they might share this particular issue and you could then say i actually wrote something up on this exact topic that we've you know shared with all of our clients why don't i send that through to you great what are you doing you'll stop selling you'll start helping and the other one's just a blog so it's just writing something let's say at least 500 to 600 words minimum you might want to do it once a week in fact that was one of the first things i ever started doing a long long long time ago when i started my marketing journey in practice and a bit of a bonus tp was that i bought in a marketer one day a week now i was only getting started and getting up and running uh i can't say i had um a truckload of cash to to throw around on full-time marketing and big massive campaigns but i could find enough for a marketer to come in one day a week and absolutely crack the whip on me on what i needed to do but then they could pull all the things together and when i really had a look at well what's the cost of a wage for one day a week for a year when i compare that to the average size client i was looking to bring on it i didn't have to bring on that many new clients to get quite a good roi on that investment so with another point that i want to cover on the marketer is that i did learn a lot but then i got to a point where it was just this particular person could just look after that department so it was just another another thing off my plate that you can probably resonate as a partner you've got to move things off your plate so it's always good to get at least one thing off your plate plus there was the accountability marketing wasn't just a thing to put to the aside i knew there were certain things that had to be done every week so when i rolled up on friday and i knew she was going to be in the office i had to have these things done which meant if i was sitting on the couch thursday night working on it so be it i couldn't have excuses regular events so educational and entertainment a little bit of a handbrake on entertainment at the moment because of covert but with educational a great example of that would be running a monthly webinar so that's one great thing i've seen in the accounting industry where a lot of candidates have really stepped up is that they are stepping up their game running webinars they are either random sporadically they either only ran a few of them some of them have never run them before and i'm now seeing firms run them at least monthly which is fantastic everyone's getting used to working from home people getting used to sitting in front of a webcam at least on a webinar you don't even have to have the webcams it's just going to be your voice and the slide deck which makes it a little bit a little bit easier um and you'll be a little bit less nervous about doing that but there's obviously a certain level of expectations it's an accountant speaking to a webinar you're not doing a james cameron uh broadway hollywood blockbuster here people don't expect it to be the next star wars right we expect it to be someone sitting at home with a slide deck that's doing their their first or second ever webinar so just be easy on yourself if you're if you're starting to get into that or you're already into it but you're comparing yourself to others um look everyone had to start somewhere myself definitely definitely no different and still working on it all the time so running uh educational webinars what i mean by that educational you are teaching someone something it could be compliance and tax related it could be a new change or some type of cash reg cash relief or tax relief or something from the banks or it could be um you know how to how to build a cash flow war chest it could be you could bring a content expert on so you don't have to run all of these webinars either it's not always how do i do it it can sometimes be well who could i get onto this show who could i bring on this week that would be relevant and helpful to my clients you might see a theme here i was talking about helpful your webinar might just be an open q a so you just literally turn it on you can choose whether you want your video on or not i would say if you're doing a live q a turn your video on because if we met face to face you're looking at me face to face so what's the difference between face to face and on something like zoom with the video on you still look exactly the same and you're the only one concerned without your look no one else no one else cares and so doing a live q a allows you to address problems on maths it also allows other people to hear other people's problems which is insightful and helpful it also allows other people to hear other people's questions that might be a great question that they didn't know to ask or it might be a question that is maybe three steps down the line from when they are so they don't know to ask it now but it's great to sort of see right well when i get to that point i i now know how to navigate that or handle that also promoting yourself um you need to sing your praises a lot higher because if i see a lot of accountants running webinars i am not seeing them being that well promoted you can't just say we're running a webinar and expect a thousand people to roll up it doesn't work like that you need to promote it you need to tell everyone and you need to ask them to tell everyone and then they need to tell everyone you need to send them multiple emails do multiple social media posts talk to centers of influence and associations and clubs and referral partners and invite them and ask them to share it with a lot of their contacts that would be ideal clients and invite them along if you're talking to prospects you might want to say to them hey we're actually running this training in a month it should really come along you might have a client who you'd like to work closely with and you might have a webinar coming up on seven ways to grow your business and you want to work closer with them to help it with it great instead of going in and trying to sell them hey we should meet monthly and do a whole lot of reporting and it's going to cost you two grand a month and the client's saying no you could perhaps put a few steps in between where you are now and having that conversation so why don't you come along to this training i'm going to show you some ways where you can put some focus on what drivers you need to influence to grow your business you can already see it's a lot softer and everyone's going to say yes to it okay it doesn't mean they're all going to show up to it but everyone will say yes to being helped not everyone will say yes to being sold to the great thing with helping people is they'll go from where they are now to wanting to buy as opposed to you trying to sell no one likes being sold to but we all love buying you see the subtle difference there now sometimes between where you are now and wanting to buy a few things need to happen and so a lot of these activities that i'm sharing today are going to help with that journey i'm writing a book okay great piece of info everyone you know i don't know about you but when i see that someone's written a book they've got instant authority even if i buy the book and i don't even read it they must be an expert because they've written a book so the great thing with a lot of you and a lot of the accountants that that watch modern film practices is that you are already experts and it's just bottling that up and putting it into a different type of format where you can be helpful so a book is another great option helping with some basic growth planning so instead of selling a service what if you just put aside a little bit of time to help this particular business owner so right let's just jump on a quick 20 minute call i'm going to show you something called the growth equation and we're going to do a little bit of basic growth planning to see the potential in your business and perhaps where you should focus and what would be the best place to focus versus just trying to chase after more leads that's costing you a lot you're struggling with on the back of that you're able to show off a little bit you're able to help and then perhaps could be a good time to either position working a bit closer or if it's not the right time you'll have the next thing to invite them to and start building an email list you've already got your email details of your clients of course you do your client comes on you gather their details but you're not always gathering details of people that are engaging with you and that are the different stages they've just learnt about you some might have been following your stuff for a while if you're running webinars they might have been um they might have been uh participating in those webinars for quite some time you want to start building that list of of your prospects that you can then start communicating with because the engagement and conversion rate on the back end of emails is still massive but i see a lot of you focusing so strongly on social media and getting no results not even some no results but then you've got this email list that's untapped okay and it's not just selling to that email list what is it it's inviting them to things like i'm talking about today so you can see now when you're engaging with someone and perhaps now is in the right time for them to buy you can share a case study with them you can share some of the awards that you've won and what that means you can share educational videos with them you can share an educational podcast you can share an educational white paper you can share educational blogs you can invite them to educational webinars you can have quite helpful open q a to invite them to you can push your promotion a little bit more using email fantastic example there using email to sing your praises a little bit more you could send them a book and say hey everything you need to know is in here the biggest problems i see in your nature industry you could offer to give them a little bit of time and say hey i'll underwrite the time i'm going to absorb it because i want to show you a few things and i want to commit to this relationship before you have to buy anything from me any services or anything further so let's put aside some time to do some basic growth planning and you've got the opportunity to tap into your email list at any time and share whatever message you want helpful message update messages um promotional messages invite messages the list goes on so pick one of them i've read it off a whole lot i'm going to put them below or around this this video if you're listening to this on a podcast i'll have it in the notes it will be around however you're watching or listening to this pick one of them and have it as something regular so if you put together a white paper you can regularly send it out if you decide to do monthly webinars you can always invite people to this one they don't want to buy now invite them to the next one into you can constantly be helping them and take action on it don't do nothing and don't do it sporadically it should be regular and it doesn't need to be difficult it will help nurture your existing clients and it will over time convert more prospects and they won't feel like they're being sold to they'll feel like that this is someone that can truly help me achieve my goals i'm brad turville this is modernfirmpractices.com until next week get out there start helping and nurturing your existing clients and prospects i'll see you then [Music] you