Cross-selling additional services: Are Accountants “#%*%ed up” about selling?

Michael Carter - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

I’ve had some very interesting conversations with accounting and financial planning practitioners this week.

Specifically about selling additional services and generating internal referrals between accounting and financial planning.

The discussions were part of my preparation in facilitating a ‘How To Market Your Practice’ discussion panel this week at a conference in Sydney. It's the Count Financial ‘Stars Conference’ for the top 60 firms in the Count Wealth Accountants group.

In the lead up I have interviewed the four panelists who are from four different states of Australia.

The conversations were fascinating and one in particular was quite ‘colourful’.

I always enjoy interviewing high performing practitioners, which I've done since my days as a Co-Founder of Business Fitness where (as one of the hats I wore) I helped analyse the data from the annual benchmarking study 'The Good, the Bad & the Ugly of the Accounting Profession'. The process involved identifying the most profitable or fastest growing firms out of the data, then interviewing them and writing case studies about what it is that these firms do differently from the rest.

And there are always clear differences.

They are usually contrarian in one or more areas.

It's important to note that there is no 'one recipe' for building a successful firm. It's not quite as formulaic or simplistic as some coaches to the profession would have you believe.

And that's great. It means you can mould your firm around you, your values, your preferences, your team.

Which leads to the colourful quote of the week ...

One of the practitioners I interviewed has a very forthright way of saying things. (So forthright, in fact, that I won’t mention him or his firm by name here.)

He’s a Director of a firm that provides accounting and financial planning services, and they do very well at it. Their firm is, in Practice Paradox lingo, what we call a High Clientshare™ Firm.

High Clientshare means that on average they provide a high average number of services to each client.

In other words, they are great at cross-selling their optional services. They are not mere 'order takers'. They are 'advisors' in the true sense of the word.

There are a number of elements to this firm’s success in cross-selling additional services. These include:

• strong leadership and culture around the fact that not only does the firm feel that they owe it to clients to make sure they educate them on a whole range (this practitioner terms it "a natural progression") of different services to help clients build and protect their wealth; and also
• the firm has very clear systems that ensure the cross-selling processes happen on every job.

Note, that's every job. Not some. Not when an accountant feels like it.

As Michael Gerber, author of the E-Myth, says, all great business have strong "This is how we do it here" systems and cultures.

For this firm, cross-selling is not a ‘should do it’ activity. It is embedded into their processes and checklists for each and every job.

This was music to my ears, as this is precisely what we teach firms in our training program, The Clientshare Academy.

Another important aspect of success in cross-selling of additional services that we teach our members is "Don't teach elephants to dance".

This means don't expect all of your existing advisors and accountants to be good or naturally suited to selling.

Selling can be learned, yet it still is a matter of "nature and nurture". It's a combination of both. Some personality styles are better suited to dealing with clients, communicating and influencing. Others are best left to focus on technical work, not client relationship management or selling.

You are far better off directing your efforts at training those who have the natural raw talent to communicate well.

Otherwise you will be training elephants, so to speak.

Don't do it. It wastes your time.

And it annoys the elephants.

This is why we have all our clients complete our What’s Your Profile questionnaire to profile each team member (including admin/support and management, not just advisors) as to whether their strengths lie primarily in Grinding, Minding, Finding or Reminding.

Some people are all-rounders and have an even spread across the four quadrants, but usually people have one or two primary strengths out of the four areas.

This is a model we have evolved from David Maister's 'Grinding, Minding, Finding' model, by overlaying this on the Merrill-Reid Social Styles model which assesses people on two aspects: Assertiveness and Responsiveness.

We have added an all-important fourth category we call 'Reminders'. (More about this another time. Profiling is obviously a whole topic in itself.)

When I asked this practitioner his view on this 'train the right people' aspect, his response was the most black and white I have heard:

"Accountants are #%*%ed up about selling.
We don't let them near it."

As I said, he’s not one to mince his words.

He went on to describe how they have designed their client communication and cross-selling systems around their financial planners, not their accountants.

He explained his view that, "Accountants tend to pre-judge clients' needs and therefore tend not to suggest things to clients. Our process is based on simple demographic data, in terms of who we target and approach within our accounting client database.

"Our planners then drive the meetings. They have much stronger relationships with clients compared with the accountants because they are making suggestions and being proactive in helping clients, whereas accountants tend only to be reactive, around compliance deadlines."

Is the moral of the story to cut your accountants out of the selling process?

No. Not necessarily. I know plenty of accountants who are very good at selling.

Remember, there is no one recipe for a successful firm.

But I would say this ...

In my experience in dealing with hundreds of accounting firms around Australia and New Zealand, the vast majority of accounting firms:

1. Do not have a documented and systemised sales process (in fact, in smaller and medium sized firms, most have not even been exposed to such a process);
2. Have not identified the right team members to have drive that process; and
3. Do not train and mentor these staff members in how to succeed in their cross-selling.

For your firm to succeed in cross-selling, you must do all three. Those firms who understand how to design, systemise, manage and resource a sales system, build for themselves a 'sales machine' that makes cross-selling of additional services virtually a daily occurrence.

But it's about more than growing revenues.

It’s about serving clients well.

It’s about strengthening client loyalty.

It's about playing a more meaningful and more valuable role in your clients' lives. This doesn't just grow your firm's revenues, it improves client relationships and adds much more meaning to what it is your firm does.

As this practitioner commented, "We sometimes lose a client's accounting work to a cheaper provider, because clients perceive compliance as a commodity, and in many ways it is. However, we have never lost a client's work on the financial planning side of things because the relationship and perceived value is so strong."

Ask yourself ...

• What is your firm's sales process? Do you have one?
• Where is that embodied in your processes and checklists? Where can someone see evidence of such a process?
• Have you identified who will drive your sales process?
• Does your management system have metrics for this?
• Are team members held accountable on these metrics?
• When was the last time you got training (for yourself and for your team) in how to sell?

If you answered 'No' or 'Don't know' to any of those questions, odds are you are a low Clientshare Firm with a low average fee (relative to the potential fee) per client, and your clients perceive your services as a commodity.

That puts your firm at risk.

It's only a matter of time before you either lose clients, or lose parts of their work, to other firms who are effective in communicating value.

And that is all selling and marketing is ...

... communicating value.

On the flip-side, once you identify that your firm is relatively low on its Clientshare™ score, that’s an exciting opportunity for growing your firm. In our Clientshare Academy program, most members when they complete the gap analysis using our Clientshare Matrix tool, they typically identify somewhere between 30% to 60% revenue growth potential within their existing clientbase.

It is then a matter of following our systematic marketing and sales process to educate your clients and gradually develop more and more High Clientshare clients within your firm.

 

An easy next step for you ...

To learn how to build a 'Marketing Machine' to transform your practice into a High Clientshare Firm, click here and register for our next Clientshare Academy Briefing.

This is a free webinar where we explain 11 Reasons Most Accounting Firms Struggle With Marketing, and how to break through these barriers. We step you through how our marketing training and implementation program (the Academy) works, what you get, and how you can plug into the system for a low monthly subscription that is, for many, less than what they spend in coffees and eating out each month.

We've designed the Academy so it is affordable for firms of any size so that is within every firm's reach to become a High Clientshare Firm.