Growing your accountancy practice but leaving your marketing and sales to chance is a recipe for low marketing and sales effectiveness. You are throwing money away AND leaving money on the table. It's just going to be SO much harder to reliably generate the right sort of leads for your accountancy firm without a system.
If you have systems and processes for your marketing and sales (as well as observe the hygiene factors talked about in this blog post ) you can easily scale your practice as you know what works. Growing your accountancy practice is so much easier when you know what works for your marketing and sales. Then when you know what works it makes is SO much easier to forecast the available capacity your firm will require going forward.
This blog post is an extract from a transcription of part of my webinar with Practice Ignition on scaling your practice, and looks at what systems and processes your firm needs for marketing and sales. You can also view the slides and listen to the audio below. Click here to download the recording and transcript for the whole of the webinar.
Growing your accountancy practice: Your systems and processes need to be standardised and easily available
This is key, if you’re going to get the predictable scale, the work coming in week in/week out, you must have your sales and marketing systems, and processes, systemised. They’ve got to be written down and available.
What systems and processes will you need for your marketing and sales?
There will often be lots of sub-sectors of this, but in effect you need a lead generation system. Part of this will include your tactical marketing plan, exactly the activities your firm will do to win work by route to market. Click here to download a template for your tactical marketing plan.
- You will need a lead conversion system, that’s going to contain things like how you’re going to qualify your prospects, i.e. Nigel, so you don’t have to take every single referral that comes along if it’s not a good fit.
- Your sales process, what are you going to do to get your leads to the next step in your sales process.
- Pricing, how will your firm price up for your work so its consistent across the firm, and how will you keep in touch with prospects.
- Onboarding, how will you take your newly-won clients, so they become part and parcel of what you do? And of course, Practice Ignition is a great way of doing that onboarding.
- Account Management. What are you going to do to deliver that great service, day in and day out, to identify where there is more work to be had with the client? PI can help you with that as well.
It’s only when you’ve got both, the hygiene factor sorted, and your sales and processes nailed down, that you’re then in the position to reliably and effectively maybe delegate down, maybe outsource your marketing to others.
If you can’t afford dedicated marketing resource, which I know Patrick couldn’t do, then how much can you outsource? One of my clients spends £120 on social media a month. They did a 3-month trial to see how it was going, and in that 3-months the only thing they changed was the social media, and as a result, they saw their number of local referrals double. The only thing they changed was the social media, they could see what was happening, and were then able to carry on doing it. Maybe it’s delegate down, maybe it’s outsourcing your marketing to others.
In Accountants' Growth Club, we’re going to be sharing exactly how other accountants have put together these systems and processes to get the right type of client. Potentially how have they used the bank manager relationships, and I’m hearing from clients that bank managers will still refer, and the question is are you talking to the right ones if they’re saying they can’t refer. What’s the exact process they used to onboard new clients, and maximise referrals from these clients? We will be going through all of that with real accountancy practices and what they are doing well.
In summary:
Growing your accountancy practice in a predictable way means systemising your sales and marketing processes.
Listen to (or read) the whole recording of the webinar
In the webinar you will discover:
1. Why relying on referrals is not the best way to grow your practice
2. The 4 hygiene factors you need to take note of if your sales and marketing is going to be effective
3. What sales and marketing systems you need in order to steadily and predictably win business
4. How to use the buying journey to win bigger and better clients
Click here to download