Part Three: Why a Lack of Marketing Skills Holds Back the Growth of Australian Accounting Firms

Tiffany Carter - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Following is an excerpt from an article written by Michael 'MC' Carter for the accounting benchmarking publication ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly® of the Accounting Profession’, 2010 edition. The online report will be available for purchase in the coming weeks on this page of the businessfitness™ website.

This is Third and final Part of this series. Click here to read Part One, and click here to read Part Two.

3 ‘Blind Spots’ Holding Back the Growth of Australian Accounting Firms, and the Obvious Solution Many Firms Fear - continued...


“But do I really have to market and sell in order to grow?”

Yes. Here’s why.

Most firms provide predominantly tax and compliance services to their clients. This is because their clients ask for them. They ask for them because they know they need them. The government makes sure of that.

Firms, by and large, are full of ‘order takers’ not ‘advisors’. Order takers do whatever the client asks. Advisers make clients aware of things they don’t know about, and make proactive suggestions on courses of action for the client.

Order takers add very little value.
Advisers change lives.

The additional services that a firm can provide—such as tax planning, asset protection, wills and estate planning, succession planning and so on—are not mandatory. Other than compulsory superannuation, the government does not require people to plan for their future.

Therefore all these additional services are optional.

If they are optional, they need to be sold. That’s the logical fact of the matter.

It doesn’t matter if you feel a client needs these services, if a clients doesn’t want them. The only way a client moves from you feeling they need these services, to the client wanting them, is through your communication of the value of these services.

That is, through marketing and selling.

If you have a strong stigma attached to these words, replace marketing with ‘education’ and selling with ‘helping’, because in essence, that is all they are.

Why doing more for your clients, results in you becoming more for your clients

Your clients want you to help them build a better future. They just don’t know how to ask. They don’t know about all the wonderful things you can advise them on, to give them a more secure and financially prosperous life.

How can they, until you educate them?

This requires you to take responsibility for communicating these services and their benefits to your clients, and to move from the mediocre career and business path of being a low value ‘order taker’, and move to truly being a life changing advisor for your clients.

“Great theory, but give me some evidence. Does this actually produce results and grow a firm?”

Two days prior to writing this article, a client who is half-way through our Clientshare™ Academy course that teaches marketing and selling skills to accounting firms, emailed through to us a spreadsheet they called, “CLIENTSHARE INCOME TRACKER 2011”.

Clientshare™, by the way, is a word we have coined for a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that firms tend not to measure: Average Number of Services Provided Per Client Group Per Year. In other words, how many different services the firm is providing to each client. This is a far more useful KPI than ‘average fee’.

The spreadsheet told an interesting story.

The first 11 clients they stepped through the Clientshare™ Growth Process resulted in $58,890 in additional fees for the firm in Year 1 and an estimated predictable $400,469 in additional fees in the first 10 years. This is over and above the fees the firm was generating by default, through ‘order taking’.

These are new fees generated through truly advising and educating their clients around strategies such as borrowing to invest through Self-Managed Super Funds.

Earlier in the article I referred to the new top 10 challenge of ‘Client Relationships’ and how this is directly affected by the growth-related challenges.

The following quote encapsulates why I am so passionate about educational marketing and selling for accounting firms, and why it is something where everyone wins; the firm, the adviser and the client.

The client who sent through the spreadsheet said to us, “These 11 clients are paying us more, and our relationship with them is also strengthened because we are no longer ‘just doing their tax’.”

A simple quote with a profound message.

If you would like to find out how you rate as a ‘rainmaker’ (marketer) for your firm, visit out site at practiceparadox.com.au and click on the ‘How Do You Rate?’ link on the right-hand side of the screen. Answer the 20 questions and you are then emailed your score out of 100.

It might mark the start of you progressing onto an exciting new path of growth and development, both personally and for your firm.

Michael Carter

Founder & Director

Practice Paradox Pty Ltd

1300 PARADOX (1300 727 236)

www.practiceparadox.com.au