All too often small accountancy firms go to market in a way which involves lots of heartache and a very low return on their marketing investment. (And of course, that's if the firm is proactive in sales and marketing!) So, the million dollar question is, how to win new clients in an effective way for your accountancy firm? This is where the 4 hygiene factors come into play.
It's actually fairly easy to make your sales and marketing systems effective when you are aware of the hygiene factors. Ignore these hygiene factors and your sales and marketing effectiveness will tank, and hit rock bottom. And I really mean rock bottom. Get these factors right, and they wouldn't necessarily bring in new business all by themselves, but they will help you make your marketing and sales incredibly effective.
This blog post is a transcription of part of my webinar with Practice Ignition on scaling your practice. In it, I explore the 4 key hygiene factors that your sales and marketing systems need to take account of. Click here to download the whole webinar recording and audio transcript.
How to win new clients: What should be in your sales and marketing systems?
I split it into two things; if you do everything in your systems and processes, but if you don’t do the hygiene factors, you’re going to leave business on the table.
The 4 Hygiene factors.
How to win new clients is firstly, about knowing who your target client is. I’m not talking about, ‘My target client is a local small business’, that’s not a target client, that’s just a very broad range of clients you could win. I want you to go deep into what are your client personas, what is the detail about that? We’ll be covering that in Accountants' Growth Club.
You don’t have an ideal target client if you’re saying, owner-managed businesses, or local SMEs, it’s got to be a deeper understanding. What is it down a couple of extra levels? The Accountants’ Growth Club is a pretty deep target client for that part of my business, but even now I’m building the client personas of what are the subsets of that very niche market. Ideally you want to go towards where I’m at with the Accountants’ Growth Club, but maybe not that deep.
Make sure you’re helping people to buy. Have you got products and services tailored so that they really meet the needs of those identified client personas, which we will be talking about in the Accountants’ Growth Club.
Do you have what I call a welcome mat? Is there a credible online presence? Remember 84 percent of B2B work initiates with a referral, somebody is going to look you up before they contact you. Is your website and your LinkedIn profiles in order, do they give the impression you want to give?
How are you capturing ongoing client feedback? The last thing you want to be doing is hampering the easiest way for you to win work, i.e. from your existing clients, by not giving a good service. You should have a mechanism for that ongoing client feedback that’s reviewed monthly, and that you have actions implemented as a result of the review.
This isn't strictly speaking a hygiene factor for your sales and marketing. But if you are going to grow your practice so you maximise it's capital value and runs without you, you can't be the only one with sales and marketing responsibilities. All your members of staff have to have responsibility, and maybe they’ve also been skilled up for some aspect of your marketing or sales system, it can’t just be you.
In summary
How to win new clients gets much easier to answer when you have covered off the 4 hygiene factors.
Listen (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