Sales boosting strategies for accounting and tax

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Hi, I'm Lee Frederiksen. Today I wanna talk to you about sales and marketing strategy for accounting firms, and this is gonna be the first of two presentations. We are going to cover two of the basic ones this time and two of them tomorrow. Today, we're gonna talk about the seller-doer strategy and the traditional seller strategy. So let's start first with seller-doer. This is a very familiar strategy to a lot of firms. It's one where the person who's making the sale is also the person who is doing the work. Very common and particularly in smaller firms or smaller practices, where the same person does both roles. Now there are some real advantages of this one because potential clients know who they're working with, and that's very important to a lot of clients. It also develops a lot of familiarity and trust during the sales process so you understand the client, and they're not having to go back over things that they've covered during the sales process. So, a couple of really big advantages. Now there is a big disadvantage too, and that is, it's the same person doing the work, so you get real busy doing work and your business development falls off. Then you get real busy doing business development, and then all of a sudden you can't do all the work. So you get this cycle going up and down, and up and down with that one, that's the problem. One way to get around that is the traditional seller model. Now you see a lot of this in, particularly information technology and so forth, that's where there's a pretty complicated sales process, and where the sales person is responsible for generating, the lead and closing the opportunity. They own that whole process, and the person who's doing the work only comes in when the sales close. That's when they get into that. The seller maintains the persons closing the sale, the sales person, maintains an ongoing relationship. So you have an advantage of you have dedicated roles and there are different roles, they've two different people doing it but there...and that doesn't interfere so much with the person doing the work, so you don't have that up and down cycle, so that's definitely the advantages. However, there's a minimal opportunity for the doer to get to know the client or to get to know the situation during the sales process so that sometimes creates a clunky transition. It also creates a problem of you've got two different people you have to pay for some of the overlap. So those are two of the four models, next time we'll look at two remaining models to see which are most appropriate for accounting firms.