The Great Client Search

As another tax season disappears in the distance there are always two things I can set my watch to.

The first is what has become an annual ritual for practitioners: Many vow never to trudge through another 1040 frenzy again. On average this strategy or pledge lasts at most, oh, about six months.

The second is that firm owners and partners now switch their focus from worrying about getting through filing season to how they’re going to grow their practice and entice new clients to sign on.

A generation ago, the critical but unenviable job of business development usually fell upon the already overworked shoulders of the firm’s managing partner. But there were usually two inherent problems with that. First, said managing partner more often than not had a book of business of their own to manage. Second, most of them were not highly skilled in sales or marketing – two critical skills needed to usher in organic growth.

The harsher reality is that you can only get so many new clients through Chamber of Commerce or industry related networking events.

So many turned to hiring marketing and business development personnel, many of whom were not CPAs but nevertheless had the requisite skill sets vital toward  achieving new client gains.

But what about the firms with a tight hiring budget? For them, bringing aboard a six-figure salesperson is most likely a pipe dream. The good news is there are other ways to grow the client base and guess what? Many of them are pleasantly affordable.

With so many search engines available, many potential clients shopping for an accounting firm have turned to such browsers as Google for help. Therefore you need to create avenues to help them such as a establishing a Google Plus Page so your firm comes up at or near the top of search engine optimization (SEO).

Social media, once forcibly blocked by many firms during its infancy, has proven to be a terrific tool to keep your firm at or near the top of mind with regular postings on front burner issues.

Once a potential locates your firm, nothing can be more of a disappointment than a plain vanilla web page. You don’t have to spend a fortune on unnecessary bells and whistles but many will perceive a bare minimum website as a bland firm offering bare minimum services.

And last but not least distinguish yourself from the competition. Studies show the more services your offer a client, the retention rate rises almost exponentially. That’s not to say you have to become the CPA firm version of Costco, but you and 50,000 other firms in the country for example, offer tax services and probably auditing as well. Think of the cross-selling opportunities if you also featured wealth management.

Good luck and happy hunting.