Many accounting firms rely on referrals to get new clients and are skittish about paying for advertising. Too many throw money at sites like Google and Facebook, seeing very little in return because the tools are improperly used.

Our guest this week on Grow Your Firm is Tyler Clark. He’s the founder of ADcountants, which may be the only advertising firm that focuses solely on the accounting, bookkeeping, and tax industries. In addition to agency work, his company also provides coaching and training for firm owners on how to do digital marketing in a way that brings in positive ROI.

He shares some important concepts to know if you want to dip your toes into paid advertising. Be sure to check out his Facebook group in the resources section.

Summary

• Tyler’s past history with both running and advertising for accounting firms
• Why digital marketing can be boiled down to creating more clicks, calls, and clients
• How to understand ad spending results to ensure a good ROI
• Why you have to go national if you niche down
• Why your first choice of paid advertising should be LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator
• Why you must research before you spend money on a platform.

Resources

• ADcountants website: https://www.adcountants.com/
• Tyler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-s-clark
• The Proactive Accountants: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheProactiveAccountants/
• Tyler’s recommended tool for PPC research – SpyFu: https://www.spyfu.com/

Before You Spend, Know The Field

Tyler is one of the few people who have experience on both the agency side and the firm side of digital marketing. He started in his father’s marketing agency that focused on accountants and CPAs. His experience there led him to convince his father and a family friend who was an accountant to start their own firm using the sales principles they were already using.

They were able to add six figures to the firm two years in a row using their principles, but then the family friend died suddenly at the start of their third year. 60 days later, they sold the firm. Since then, Tyler went on to take what he’s learned from these experiences and create his current company ADcountants.
Here are some of the concepts he teaches as part of his coaching services:

The Three C’s

Firm owners who aren’t knowledgeable about sales and marketing are often confused when they try to learn about it. Tyler boils it all down to the three C’s that firms need to focus on. To grow your business with digital marketing, you need to generate as many clicks as you can, as many calls as you can, and as many clients as you can. If you focus on just these three areas and how you move leads through that process, you’re in good shape.

Reasonable Expectations When Spending

Here’s how this translates to spending. PPC advertising is all about the clicks (and sometimes the calls) part of the process. Let’s say you want to attract a $300/month client. Tyler says you should expect to spend $300 for an opportunity to speak with that person.

PPC spending does not guarantee clients; it just gets them on the phone with you. If you close one out of every three leads, you’re spending $900/month to get your $300/month client.

Then you have to look at the yearly value of that client. That client will be worth at least $3600/year from the retainer alone, plus your extra fees for other services, referrals they might bring in, and how much that client would be worth should you choose to sell the firm.

Tyler says that the costs for PPC results scale pretty closely in this space. If you want a $1000/month client, you’ll probably have to spend $1000/month to target that level of client, which brings us to the next point.

Targeting The Right Clients

The more you know the kind of client you want and how to target them, the more successful you will be with digital marketing. The simplest way to escape the “accounting is a commodity” mindset is to be  extremely specific in a sea of generalists.

There are two paths to do this. If you want to limit yourself to a region, you can have a more general clientele and target your advertising to that region. However, if you start to niche down to a more specific client type then you have to expand your advertising to a national level. That gives your ads the traffic necessary to justify the ad spending.

This is a bit of a balancing act, but if you do your market research beforehand it will help you decide how to advertise so you can get the most bang for your buck. If you plan to hire an agency to help with your marketing, do not choose one who follows a cookie-cutter approach.

Start With LinkedIn

Tyler recommends a specific kind of LinkedIn marketing to jumpstart your digital marketing. LinkedIn is the perfect choice for accounting firms because most of their leads will be B2B and LinkedIn is built for B2B connections.

However, he does not recommend paying for post exposure. The amount of spend needed to make that work is too high for most firms. Instead, start by making a high-quality and professional-looking LinkedIn profile. Then, spend the money to use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.

This tool lets you put in information about your ideal client and then it delivers you a list of people on the platform that match that profile. Once you have that, someone on your team needs to engage with the profiles and content to start building relationships with these people. If you can manage to get them to connect with you, they’ll see your profile and see how relevant your business is to theirs.

However, if your main clientele isn’t using the LinkedIn platform you will have to find that out first and then develop a strategy for that platform.
We want to thank Tyler Clark for his time and wisdom. Check out his Facebook group which has a course on how to DIY digital marketing for your firm.

Have you ever seen job boards like UpWork and Freelancer.com and wished you could attract talent that way for your accounting firm? Our guest for this week’s Growing Your Firm podcast decided to make his own talent attracting machine. Jeff Maddux created AccountantList, a job board site that connects people in the accounting world with employers who need their services.

We wanted to ask him what makes a good job posting for an accounting position. He shared his thoughts about attracting the best talent in the field to your firm.

Summary

• Jeff’s job history
• Why he started AccountantList
• What accounting firms need to add to a job listing to attract top talent
• The most important benefit and piece of information you can offer
• Why you need to manage expectations as soon as a candidate applies

Resources

• AccountantList
• Jeff’s Twitter: @JeffMadduxCPA
• Jeff’s email: info@accountantlist.com
• Past interview with Jason Blumer

What Do Accountants Want In a Job Posting?

Some accountants are not looking to stick with a single firm. They want flexibility and remote work. AccountantList was created to enable this sort of employment arrangement and to help firms find accountants faster.

At some point, all growing firms need to regularly start attracting talent to stay fresh in the minds of job seekers and have enough talent in their pockets to cope with growth.

The first connection with your candidates is often through a job posting.
Most job postings just have boring basics. If you’re sticking with the basics, you won’t attract the best because there’s nothing about your firm that stands out. So, what do you need to add to make your job posting and your firm stand apart from others.

Start With A Mission

In the tech market, the market is so hot for talent that job postings have changed a lot to keep up. Jeff suggests looking to those kinds of postings for inspiration. The first thing he looks for is a mission statement. An example from the interview reads: “We are a small team of tech-savvy problem-solvers who love what we do.”

A job description should be designed to sell the job to the candidates. The mission statement can give them a taste of what they can expect if they “buy” your job offer and get employed. It explains what you’re doing that’s different from other firms. This is the “why” behind the “what we do”. It can reveal something about your company culture. Most important, it’s your main selling point.

Explain Your Company

A high-quality candidate can afford to be picky. They’re not going to throw their resume to every job posting related to accounting in the title. Candidates want to know who they are working for, and that’s why you need an “About Us” section in your posting.

The About Us section expands on the mission statement. Talk about what your firm is doing, why you do it, what makes you different or better. Talk about the culture and even talk about the benefits. Another thing to add is a bit about the team they’d be working with and some of the tools you use. Listing your toolchain is a big plus because it will pull in people already familiar with those tools.

Don’t assume that the reader will go to your website or go to Glassdoor to learn more about you. Lay it all out there.

Explain Your Impact

Modern job seekers want to know that their work makes a difference to the company and to the wider world. If you can talk about how whoever fills the role can do that through your company, that’s a huge selling point.

Let’s take a simple bookkeeper. If your firm works with small businesses, you could explain that a good bookkeeper can keep a business from going bust from basic accounting errors. That’s far more motivating than saying something like, “your role in this firm will be to balance books and reconcile accounts.”

The Most Important Benefit

According to Jeff, the most important benefit that top talent is looking for in 2019 is workplace flexibility. This could be working remotely, having more vacation, or even sabbatical options.

Another possibility from the tech firms is to offer the ability to work a number of days from home after they’ve worked at the office for a few years. This can be a way to take steps toward a more flexible workplace.

With today’s technology and accounting tools, this isn’t as scary as it once was. But it does require a certain amount of discipline and good workflows so that management can keep track of what’s going on without needing to talk to the remote worker directly.

The Salary Question

Another recommendation is to be very clear about your salary ranges. Don’t just say that it is competitive, or worse, don’t list it at all. Top talent doesn’t want to waste time going through your interview process to find out that the money isn’t enough for them.

If you want top talent, you have to pay for it. It’s that simple. Jeff believes that job postings that list a salary range attract more quality applications. It also saves on interviewing time because you don’t have to do the dance to bring someone almost to hire and then disappointing them at the end.

The company that runs Buffer, a social media posting tool, makes it very explicit. They have a table and a formula that explains how they pay people. If you have X years of experience at Y level, you will get paid Z amount. You don’t have to be that explicit, but you should experiment with that level of transparency.

We want to thank Jeff for his time to talk with us about job postings and how to make them better and about AccountantList. If you have a job post that you’d like to get his feedback on, he has offered to do this. Send your listing to Jeff’s email address for his feedback.

If you’re a new firm owner, you might start by handing everything from prospecting to customer service to the actual accounting. As a firm grows, these roles have to be given to other people if you want to focus on future products and growth. Hiring another accountant is easy, but what about hiring a business development specialist?

In this episode of Grow Your Firm, we talk with Len Petracosta, COO of Peak Performance. He helps develop training programs for salespeople and executives. We have been talking with him for some time and invited him to speak on the podcast about this problem. We went over a lot that can help you grow your firm to the next level, so check out the full show below.

Summary

• Len’s background as a restaurant entrepreneur and President of Sysco
• How to create a system where firm owners can hand off closing new prospects
• Why “Can I make a suggestion?” is a powerful conversation technique
• How to qualify an engaged prospect
• How to train your lead qualification hire
• And more!

Resources

• Len Petracosta’s email: len.petracosta (at) sandler.com
• Len’s LinkedIn
• Peak Performance by Sandler Traning
• Interview with Jackie Meyer
• Interview with Brandon Hall

Stepping Back As The Rainmaker Of Your Firm

It’s a rare accountant who has both the technical knowledge and qualifications and who also enjoys running a business. Accountants don’t go to school to learn sales techniques. They get that training somewhere else.

As a firm grows, it’s fairly simple to hire more accountants to do the technical work, but what about handling new prospects? If you’ve gained a client base, you probably have a brand presence and style you follow when you talk with a new client. Giving that up to someone else can be a scary proposition.

Our talk with Len Petracosta goes into how you can remove that fear and get someone trained to take over talking with new clients so that you can focus on being more of a CEO than a salesperson.

What Is Their Role?

If you’re going to hire someone with the sole responsibility for bringing in new work, you need to focus on that skillset. Many firm owners want to find a copy of themselves, someone who has both the technical expertise and the sales expertise to do what you do.

The approach that Len suggests is to find someone who can tee the ball up for you. Whatever you choose to call their position, like customer liaison or business development officer, their job is to simply ask potential clients questions about their situation, assess whether your firm can help them, and then convince the contact to talk to you for the more technical interview.

By doing this, you’ll find far more qualified people who can take on the role. Of course, it will help if you have a workflow and client management system in place for qualifying candidates before you bring in someone to train them. Many business owners have an unconscious qualification process for new clients and that has to be documented.

An Ideal Interview

In the podcast, Len and David do a roleplay to show how your new hire might qualify a candidate. According to Len, you can qualify someone in about 45 minutes of talking and if the right questions are asked then the client will talk for 2/3rds of that time.

But what qualifies a candidate? In the sales training offered by Peak Performance, they teach people to seek out the pain inside of a potential client. Not just the technical problems they’re facing but the underlying emotions that make them painful. If these root causes can be uncovered, then it’s a matter of whether or not your firm’s services can overcome those pain points.

Focusing on this is a much better approach than spouting off the years of experience and the number of qualifications you have. Every accountant can do that. But there are only a handful of pain points that get people to search for an accountant or switch accountants. These include:

• Lack of communication
• Feeling like they’re paying too much in taxes
• Lack of transparency (e.g. chasing documents down)
• Worries about compliance

The needs will vary depending on your clients and niche, but there’s usually just a handful. That makes it easy to train someone on what to look for.

Training The Hire

It should be simple enough to train someone to just do qualifications in about 60-90 days. That gives them enough time to understand your firm.

However, if your firm is only getting a few calls each year, say 1-2 a month, that may not be enough to get them trained in time. Also, if they are very new to the field, you might have to have them on the calls with you and learn at your knee about how you interview new prospects. Some firm owners don’t want to go through that hassle. How do you overcome these hurdles?

First, understand that most salespersons can be classified as either hunters or farmers. Hunters go out and seek new clients. Farmers like to develop existing clients and upsell them over time. While there are salespersons who can do both, most fall into one of these two buckets.

If you already have a large book of business that’s bringing in a lot of referrals, you’ll probably want a farmer. But if you only get a few calls, look for a hunter and have them look for new business.

Second, if you want your salesperson to be independent one day they will have to pick up some of the technical pieces by osmosis or through training. If you have a qualification workflow in place, that can be used to bootstrap what the salesperson needs to know about and guide training. If you have other accountants on staff, they can assist with training.

Your salesperson should be at a point where they can operate independently within two years. That gives them enough time to see the entire accounting year and get enough experience to feel comfortable qualifying and onboarding new clients.

There’s lots more about this topic that we discuss in the interview. If you haven’t taken a listen to the full show yet, you can find it linked at the top of the page.