*This blog is part of the March 2023 Thought Leader newsletter
It’s busy season for most firms—and many heads are down and deep into the work.
After the tax deadline, firms often ask how they can get their marketing and sales engines running. They’re ready to increase revenue while decreasing their non-ideal clients. Achieving that goal takes time, effort and consistency. Waiting until May to focus on marketing and sales efforts means lost time and success.
Busy season is opportunity season, according to several accounting industry publications, and that’s for good reason. You have multiple touchpoints with your clients this time of year. While you and your team finish their previous year’s bookkeeping and taxes, you can learn what’s happening in their business and what they could do to be even more successful.
We aren’t suggesting you ditch the work you’re doing now and work on bringing in more tomorrow—we don’t want your team to wonder if you’ve lost your mind. However, we suggest you capture the opportunities you find over the next few weeks in your CRM or somewhere else you can find them when your workload is lighter. Then you’ll have more time to reach out to those clients.
If you don’t have a system to capture the information, create a shared document or spreadsheet. Keep it simple by capturing the client’s name, the kind of service you want to offer and what pain point it will alleviate for them and your firm.
Many hands make light work
This timeless proverb is especially true when it comes to looking for opportunities within your current client base. While you and your team are getting down to the business of client work, capture their observations for additional services.
- Everyone in the firm can look for annual-only clients. Add them to your list to move them into one of your monthly bookkeeping packages in Q2.
- Opportunities exist to help individual tax clients who were unpleasantly surprised by their tax liability this year, too. Add them to your list to meet with them later in the year, when you can move them into a package that includes tax planning, which could reduce some surprises next year.
Remind everyone during weekly staff meetings to add these opportunities and others to the list, and you’ll have multiple clients to contact for additional work after busy season. Also, remember to capture that list of non-ideal clients so you and your team can disengage with them to create capacity for ideal clients.
Opportunities with current clients are the easiest and cheapest way to increase your revenue and proactively help them. You don’t have to spend money to pursue them—you only have to recognize and capture the need so you can come back and make it happen. Your relationship and the trust you’ve built with current clients ensures greater success in getting a signed engagement letter for additional work. Best of all, you haven’t lost any time ramping up your marketing efforts and closing the new business.
Rootworks members can access the Process scorecard, which provides an organized way to capture non-ideal clients to consider terminating.