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hello hello hello hello hello so again for anyone who is listening to this on another platform we are on clubhouse and uh i am actually recording this here in my car and the reason for that is because um i came to work this evening at a coffee shop and i'm going to be using this replay and they're playing music and so um i didn't realize they were going to be playing music so i'm actually recording this in my car but it is okay hey there daniela how are you thank you for joining me this evening so for those of you who may not know who i am i am mrs atondra jones i am a systems and business process advisor and i help people simplify their company operations so that they can create more time for their spouses their children their family their hobbies i show you how to simplify your company your company operations um in a way that's elegant in a way that's efficient and in a way that still allows your company to be profitable so that's who i am that's what i do and uh today we are talking about the best crms and this is the first part of the series and so for part one we're going to be talking about the best crms for tax offices and accounting firms specifically now i want to let you know how you can get access to this information into all of the replays so if you are listening to this on clubhouse the replay is going to be available on my clubhouse profile at atondrajones at the bottom of my profile you'll be able to see that this replay is also going to be uploaded to our podcast which is called train coach lead with atondra jones so you'll be able to find it there this will also be uploaded to our youtube channel and it's also going to be on our members only blog okay now there are detailed notes um along with a detailed checklist checklist that goes along with what i'm going to be talking about today and that is going to be uploaded on our members only blog so if you text blog to 210-942-0548 we can get you access to our members only blog and you can get all of the notes and the detailed descriptions and all of the checklists that go along with um with this particular um recording so let's let's get into it let's get into it so we actually have to do some pretty deep research um to find crms that are specific for accounting firms and for tax offices now i do want to be clear any crm that you get um can be manipulated and adjusted to meet the needs of an accounting firm right like you can create all kinds of workarounds all of those different things but the problem with that is if you don't have someone on your team who is implementing that someone who's going to be responsible for that then you end up taking your time and doing this yourself and so when you are choosing a crm that wasn't specifically designed for accounting firms and it wasn't or it wasn't specifically designed for a tax office you're going to spend most of your time basically being an implementor and that's not the thing that makes you money so when you choose a crm that is specific to you and your business it's going to be a lot more intuitive and then as you grow and you get more people on your team you can maybe have someone on your team do do the implementation or you can contract another company to actually do that implementation okay now why did i mention this the problem is when you google crms for accounting firms or you google crms for tax offices what you're going to find on the first few pages are the following you're going to get crm companies who have created specific pages on their websites for how you can create workarounds using their software to fit your accounting practice however their solution was not built for your for your practice so what does that mean that means that you go to google you type in see what is the best crm for an accounting firm and i'm not going to mention any specific names but you'll be able to see it when you do it you'll see in on there on their google space it'll say best crm for accounting firm this is if you run an accounting firm this is the crm that you want to use and you click on it and what they've actually done is they've created a separate page on their website specifically for accounting firms but if you click off of that page and go to their main website you'll see that that crm was actually not built for your practice so what ends up happening is because you didn't click on the logo and you didn't go to their main website you purchased that crm and then you're trying to figure out why it's not working for you and the reality is it was never meant to work for you okay so you'll find that the other thing that you'll find is companies who are actually resellers of other crms and so what they'll do is they will white label the crm and then they'll create a website that says you know this is the jones accounting firm crn so you click on the website the website talks all about accounting and so you really think that this is something that was made for your industry and then you read the fine print and it says something like powered by such and such and such company or supported by such and such and such company so what that really means is that's not an accounting firm crm that's not a tax office crm that is a crm that someone else has white labeled and has created a website to make you believe that this crm was built specifically for your business and so um we took we took the time to go through and to pull out four of what we believe to be the best options okay um when you're doing this research on your own you typically have to search a few pages before you can find the crms that that that are specifically designed for these industries okay now let me be clear what i am sharing with you today is not designed to take the place of any financial or any legal advice so it is your responsibility to ensure that the tools you use align with your industry your industry standards and the legal guidelines that you have to abide by okay now when we looked at these crms we looked at how they would support your business in the following areas how do they support you for lead management marketing business development and project management client onboarding client retention what kind of integrations do they have and what their implementation options are so we're going to start with the accounting firms so the first crm that we found that i believe is is is a great option for accounting firms is one called carbon the website and everything is going to be in the blog post so you'll be able to click and go straight to their website and and look at it for yourself so let's go to the categories so for lead management i didn't see anything specific for this with this particular crm however it does have workflow management so what that means is you may be able to create some workflows for managing the leads that you have coming in before they actually become clients um they do have a chat feature so you might want to jump on a chat with one of their representatives to ask those questions now with regard to marketing i didn't really see any anything specific with this crm from marketing but it does integrate with your business gmail and you can also integrate this with zapier which means that you could you could connect it to a landing page or to your email marketing tool now when it comes to business development and project management this crm allows you to create workflow templates you can outline the tasks so if you are a full service accounting firm then each service that you offer of course is going to have it's it's it's its own set of tasks so you'll be able to outline those um in this software and you can automate those workflows now the cool thing about this is it's got a can a kanban board view so that you can see where your clients are in the different stages of your work process so let's say that you've you you provide a book keeping service and maybe there are five steps or five you know specific areas that you cover up for their bookkeeping you'll be able to see exactly where they are in terms of the service that you're offering them so that's really really good to make sure that you're keeping up with things that you're not missing any tasks that your clients need you to complete you're not missing any assignments those kinds of things it allows for team collaboration so if you have multiple bookkeepers in your office they could be working on different parts of the service for your clients so that's a really good thing and it also helps you to create time and budget estimates so working with an accounting firm it your services may not be productized right so it may be necessary for you to give quotes it may be necessary for you to give estimates because you're not really sure um what you're going to charge them until you send them a proposal and you can't send them a proposal to it so after you look at all their stuff so it allows you to create those budget estimates um and so that's good for you as well as your clients now with onboarding they have integrated email so that means that you could create your welcome emails you can create your instructional emails um you could create your confirmation emails all of those kinds of things you can automate the collection of any data that you need to get from your clients to begin working with them um you can set up auto reminders so if you've got different tasks for the for different services you can set up auto reminders to remind you to complete these tasks again so that you don't miss anything um it's got some document storage in there so if they're signing documents if they're uploading receipts if they're uploading bake statements all of those things um you'll be able to store those in there um you can collaborate with your clients in that software and you can also segment segment your clients into different groups or into different contact types so if you've got you know certain number of clients on this service and another set of clients on that service you can segment them ing to how you are servicing them okay now with regard to client retention this software actually maintains a record of every time you communicate with your clients so you can go back and you can look at those conversations and you can see what they were asking for and you can see what they were missing and you can see different areas where you can continue to service them after you've completed the initial service um and again you can set those auto reminders to help you send surveys to remind you to send gifts and other tasks that are a part of your client retention strategy now i do want to say this since we were talking about client retention um you cannot rely on any crm to do the client retention for you you have to create your own client retention strategy and then that strategy gets uploaded into the crm that you're using that's how that works but your crm is not responsible for doing the client retention for you if that makes sense so if you want some assistance with that and and creating something like that um reach out to me and i'll i'll make sure that you guys have the website and all that good stuff but reach out to me and let's book a clarity call so that we can you know outline that for you and and see what that's going to look like specifically for your company now when it comes to implementation of this of um of carbon of the of the carbon software they've got three different options so one of their options is a group onboarding which means you can log on and they're one of their experts will be available on that video call and it'll be you and a few other people who are who are also on boarding and they kind of walk you through um the implementation of this software all together in a group setting okay they have an assistant on onboarding option which is more of like a done with you so it's that's a one-to-one but it's actually done with you okay and then they have a full service implementation option which basically means that they will do the complete build out of that software for your company so those are the free options and as far as integrations like integrating with some of your other software um the list isn't very expansive um but you can also build custom solutions with their api if you have someone on your team who can do that or because they have that custom um done for you service you can actually have that included as a part of your service if you if you've got some things that you need to integrate that aren't natively integrated into their software so that's carbon okay now the second um crm that we found that i think would be really great for those of you who run full service accounting firms it's called fiber crm so it's f i b is in boy r e c r m okay on their website it says that they are the accounting crm for progressive accounting firms who want to improve client experience automate repetitive tasks and empower marketing and manage business development so that's what they say on their website um and if you go through their website you can see they were specifically designed for people who run accounting firms okay okay so lead management you can create workflows um they uh they have an analysis in the software that allows you to see where your leads are coming from so you know where to point your marketing efforts um and then they've got some reporting that's going to be really really beneficial to you and to um and to your lead generation team okay for marketing you can automate your marketing they've got email marketing you can send satisfaction surveys um and then you can also create workflows for your lead management for business development and project management um they they they call it opportunity management but it's basically lead management it's kind of like a little pipeline um they didn't use the word pipeline but based on what i was reading it seems like they allow you to create this sales pipeline um and so you can also determine like which leads you actually won so which leads became clients versus the number of leads that didn't become clients and so you have that reporting available to you um as well as some basic task management which is going to be again that's also that's always really good when you can see the stages that your clients are in um ing to the service that you're providing for them okay now for client onboarding um you can create and send proposals you can send engagement letters um you can you can obtain e-signatures which is going to be really important and there's also a client portal where your clients can see how you all have communicated they can see all of the documents that they've signed and all of those different kinds of things for client retention the software allows you to do upsells and cross sells so if they purchase one particular service and there's another service that's complementary to that um it will prompt them to to purchase that service or to consider purchasing purchasing that service you can create a client care workflow in there and it also allows you to do a revenue analysis and this is really important because you get to see which services are bringing in the most money and again that helps you to streamline your business it helps you to determine what services you're going to offer versus what services you're going to go ahead and show they don't mention anything about integrations on their website but they do offer a discovery call so you definitely want to take a look at that and then again with the with the implementation options they don't give any specific specific details about what their options are however when you click the button to book a discovery call um it talks about how they have a very specific approach to implementation to onboarding to adoption of this software so that might be a question that they would answer for you on a discovery call okay so those are the two um that we looked into that we thought would be really really good options for accounting firms okay now for tax offices so there's a tool called taxidome the website will be available in in the blog post as well and this one is actually pretty interesting because their website says that they their solution serves accountants as well um however when i was just going through the website and just reading the information that that was provided i didn't see any real evidence that what they offered um was robust enough to be able to fully serve a full service accounting firm now i don't run an accounting firm so i don't know everything that you need to be able to do in a crm um so i mean it may be an option worth looking into for you obviously if you're if you're in that business you know a lot more about what you need than i do but just looking through it it didn't seem compared to you know carbon or fiber crm it just it just didn't seem like it would be able to do the job for a full service accounting firm however if you own a tax office and that's just what you do you just do the taxes during the tax season um that this could probably be a great option for you okay so with lead management um they provide you with a website or you can create a website with your own branding now i'm not sure if the website actually comes with landing pages so you you'd want to check on that so that you can actually capture your leads but it does allow you to create custom fields so that you can capture the information that you want so maybe maybe they do have landing pages but they didn't actually utilize that language so i don't want to say that they do when they don't um for your marketing you can send targeted and personalized emails um for project management and business development you can create automated workflows again you know take the services that you offer and break them down into steps and then you can create a workflow you can create workflows around those steps um this one also has the kanban board to view the stages that your different clients are in um and so if it's got the kanban board view it also means that you can create some kind of a pipeline so you could create a lead generation pipeline you can also create a client service pipeline and so that way you can clearly see where people are in either your sales process or in your service process okay you can create dependencies within the workflow which means that it won't allow other tasks to be completed unless certain tasks are completed and so that can help you make sure that you're not missing any steps you can create recurring tasks you can customize workflow templates so if there is a specific set of steps that you go through for a particular service and that doesn't change you can create that as a template and just continue to use that repeatedly and then it also has those automated reminders for your client onboarding and your client support there is a secure client portal um and and there's a dashboard where you can actually see all of your clients in in one place you can send personalized bulk emails to your clients um so if you have new services coming up or if you're coming towards the end of the tax season and some of your clients may need to file extensions you can segment segment those people and send out those bulk emails you can take your contacts and actually link them to certain accounts and you can also collect signatures in here now as far as client retention they didn't really specifically speak on anything um you know that that that i would see with service client retention but again because you can create those pipelines you can just create your client retention strategy and then upload that as a workflow so that you know what you're going to be doing in the off season to keep in touch with your clients um integrations it integrates with several different tax software programs like drake and tax slayer and tax act and there's also a zapier integration as well now for implementation options i didn't really see anything there um they don't really discuss how you would you would implement the software that's probably something that you would find out when you actually signed up for it okay and the last one here um which i personally think is in if if you're a tax office and you're looking for a crm um i personally think this one is is the absolute best option um so it was developed by um from what i can see one of the guys that developed it is actually a funnel hacker um and he's in the click funnels to comma club i saw his photo with russell brunson and he's got the award and all of these different kinds of things um and it looks to be a really robust crm for tax office owners who are really looking to supercharge their marketing efforts and still create this cohesive and customized client experience so with lead management you're able to capture leads because you can actually create funnels in this software you can create sales pipelines they have a drag and drop visual pipeline which is very similar to the active campaign deals pipeline feature if you've ever seen that you they have pipeline management so you can drag and drop you can automate tasks in your sales flow so you can use these triggers that will automatically move your clients or your leads from one stage in your sales flow or from one stage in your service flow to the next and you can also automate the communication as well you have a campaign dashboard that allows you to see all of your tasks it allows you to see what clients are in what stages and it also allows you to check in on how your ads are doing if you're running google ads and facebook there's a lot of other things that are available on the dashboard as well but those are the three that stood out to me for marketing it allows you to create email nurture campaigns that are native to the software so you won't need to integrate it with an outside email marketing service because this is actually native to the software um there is sms text so sms marketing that is native to the software as well um you've got action-based triggers that are based on the stage that they are in your pipeline so when they move from one stage to another it can trigger an automation so maybe that automation is an email or maybe that automation is a text message or some type of communication based on where they are in your pipeline and you can essentially automate your entire sales campaign through that software now for business development and project management um there is an easy to read dashboard i talked about this a little earlier but it basically gives you a snapshot of what is going on in your entire business and you can see that in one place you can also sell products and services directly from the funnels page that you create there is an automated calendar that it that integrates with your google calendar again this is native to the software so your clients can book their appointments and you don't need a separate appointment scheduler for them to be able to do that and you can automatically move your clients through your service workflow with those action-based triggers now for client onboarding again you've got those automated workflows so you can automate the sending out of the confirmation the sending out of any agreements any instructions follow-up emails there's a mobile app that your clients have access to they have both text and phone communication so there's two-way text messaging so you can send and receive messages from one location all of your text email and facebook messenger communication history is available for you to view in one place and for the phone option you can actually monitor and record phone calls with your clients and this is really important for record keeping as well as for training for anyone that you're bringing on um for the up and coming tax season now with the phone call feature there are fees associated with that so when you sign up for the service the system is going to automatically charge you ten dollars to load the call credits onto your account and if you fall below ten dollars in call credits it will auto reload so those details are available on the website i would definitely encourage you if you're going to take a look at this option to make sure that you look at those or they do have an email address on their website and you can just email someone and i'm pretty sure someone from support or sales would get back to you with those specific questions now another cool feature that they have here is they have a chat widget um which means that your clients can ask you or your team questions in that chat and then your team can answer those questions and again all of those conversations are going to be recorded on their accounts with regard to client retention you can create and automate your client retention workflows using the pipeline builder that's native to the software and it integrates with zapier and and you can also do some web hook um integrations as well as far as implementation from what i could see on the website you basically would sign up on the website and you would set everything up using their drag and drop builders so you could do that yourself or maybe you could contract somebody else to do it um that is a service that we offer so something that you're looking to do you can reach out to us for us to do that or you can contract someone else but it it's it seems to be a pretty simple drag and drop um builder that will allow you to create your workflows and your pipelines and your funnels and and all of those things in that software so that's what we have i hope this was helpful one of the things that i'm going to do right now which um i try to pin one of the links the link that's in my instagram bio earlier and it just it didn't work so i'm gonna pin a link to our website which is .wgrnow.com forward slash clarity and i'm going to pin that up here to um to the top of this and here's what here's what i want you to do if you've got a tax office or if you've got an accounting firm what i want you to do is i want you to text blog to 210-942-0548 so that you can get the detailed notes and you can get the checklist that goes along with this and i want you to do some research on these tools and if you're finding that you need some support with your tool selection or maybe you have selected a tool and you need some you need some support with the strategy or the implementation what i want you to do is i want you to go to our website and book a clarity call with me so that we can outline that for you and really give you really show you what this would look like specifically for your business again that's what we do we help you make your operations super super super simple and and they're still elegant everything is still efficient and your business is still profitable so again that's at .wgrnow.com forward slash clarity i hope this was helpful and i will talk to you all tomorrow bye