Great Accountants vs. Entrepreneurs
Before you start a CPA firm or accounting firm, you’ll have to gain the technical skills and jump through a couple of hoops which we will touch on in just a little bit, but the first thing I want you to understand is that you’re going to need to be much more than a good accountant.
Entrepreneurs need to get sales and execute.
If you want your own firm, you’ll need to be an entrepreneur, not just an accountant.
Usually, accountants need to work heavily on what it takes to start a business, and it’s usually because sales isn’t their strong suite.
For most accountants, sales is not their strong suite.
Prospecting and sales are hard for everyone, because it’s relationally risky and means you’ll face rejection and possibly looking or feeling stupid.
You’ll fail, you’ll be rejected, you’ll feel dumb – and all that’s uncomfortable.
Accountants that bravely face this discomfort and risk will be able to build something special.
We recommend avoiding the typical accounting firm model, and building an outsourced accountant firm, but that’s for later.
There’s a big difference between being able to prospect, implement marketing, and run meetings that actually lead to closed deals, and simply executing on the task of accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping and other accounting work.
If you want to be a firm owner someday, and have your own accounting business, you’re going to have to not only acknowledge that there’s a big difference between accountants and entrepreneurs, you’ll need to get training, perspective, and practice in the areas that you are weak in
Accountant Weaknesses
Most accountants are high detailed people that often call themselves introverts
Not all accountants are introverts, but they’re often fueled by playing a behind-the-scenes role within an operation, it’s really why they choose the accounting profession.
You signed up to be an accountant, not a sales person, but you’ll need to stretch yourself to build your own accounting firm.
You’re going to need to get sales and execute.
In order to start your own CPA firm, you’re going to have to either find a partner that’s excellent at prospecting and sales, or you’re going to have to get really good at managing the weakness of sales and prospecting
How can you get good at sales to get sales and then do the accounting?
The most difficult thing about sales training is that practice, with quality coaching, is what develops you into a truly good sales person.
Developing salesmanship is a lot like playing basketball, drills and shooting around only get you so far, it’s playing games against actual people that dramatically increase your abilities.
That means there’s a chicken and egg problem when it comes to gaining competency in salesmanship in order to start and grow your own firm.
You need to be good at sales in order to land clients, but you’ll only get good at sales as you get experience and coaching.
That’s why I recommend checking out a sales focused accounting firm training course from an organization like Feedbackwrench. There’s a lot of online courses out there to help people start their own accounting firm, but so many of them talk about the logistics of landing pages, lead magnets, and the functions of the accounting practice, rather than the simple skills of salesmanship.
Feedbackwrench can help you get your website and marketing on point, and their online course will teach you salesmanship, value, meeting cycles and how to land clients.
5 Sales Tips for Upstart CPA Firms
1 – ask excellent questions to get them talking
You’ll want to ask a series of really great, open ended questions that allow your prospect to open up, and you can learn what’s valuable to them and hear their perspective
- Move the ball down the field professionally (don’t waste time with small talk)
- Discover the entrepreneurship journey
- Uncover what the biggest problems in the business are
- Discover the goals
- how many transactions occur in their business, how much do they make and what is their core value proposition that keeps them winning
- Discover their team and who plays the various roles
- Uncover what their previous tax and accounting relationships have looked like
- Ask them what an amazing accountant relationship would look like
The way you get to these is by asking great questions, smattered with short presentations and additional follow up questions.
Genuine curiosity about the business owner, the business, the journey and their struggles are critical.
Genuine curiosity is something you’ll need to cultivate in yourself.
Start with really broad questions as you begin so they can take it wherever they want to.
When they take it in their direction, they are also unveiling what they value and what they’re currently most concerned about.
We let them steer it in order to read it, but we will wrangle it back towards value, and the solutions were hoping to provide.
Good questions accountants should ask
- So tell me about your business, how long have you been doing and what got you into the industry?
- So who’s your core customer and what’s the main value proposition you’re trying to deliver on?
- Tell me what you’ve been doing to bookkeeping tax and accounting up till this point?
- So what have you come to really appreciate about your current accountant?
- If you could change anything about how your accountant handles things right now, is there anything you wish would happen?
- Most of my clients are really focused on. Reducing taxes and staying really productive, So from your perspective, what’s an excellent accounting solution going to look like?
- So now we spend a ton of time doing year-round, pro-active tax planning, what’s been your tax planning rhythm so far and how confident do you feel that you’re doing everything possible to mitigate your taxes?
- So is your bookkeeping up to a really high standard, or how confident are you that things are being done properly?
- So tell me about how many sales you get a year or per month, what does that process looks like and how do you measure things each month.
If we ask the right questions, your business prospect is going to tell you what’s important to them, what they’ve come to appreciate from an accountant, and you are going to discover whether or not they are in tune to the type of value propositions that you provide.
Short presentations sprinkled in
I’ll often do a really quick presentation in the beginning of a question so that I can peek their curiosity about away that I make my clients lives better.
“My clients usually like when they’re doing everything possible to reduce their taxes, what do you currently get for pro-active, year-round tax planning?”
You’re both floating a value proposition and then seeing if they latch onto it.
“Most business clients want….”
“We do provide our customers with xyz, do you like the idea of something like that?”
2 – Create Video Sales Letters for the Website
If people are going to be on your website, you might as well have a qualified sales conversation with them.
Often times, if you create a video on your website that serves as a summary of what problem-solving, your approach, and what the person needs to do it to do business with you, they’ll end up watching it and be more likely to take a step with you.
You should take anything good that you do in a sales call and place it as a video on your website.
3 – Get Reviews Like Crazy
When you’re first starting out as an accountant or any type of business, you need to show that you’re credible.
The best way to show that your credible is to build up customer testimonials and reviews that show you can execute.
When you first get started, diligently work to make sure that you are finishing services in a way that causes people to absolutely love what they’re getting from you, and then clearly follow up with them and ask for a review.
Besides asking for a review, make sure you text them your link for your Google my business profile and email it to them as well. You should also gently follow up a couple of times to remind them if they forget.
If you can get more reviews than just about everybody else in your region, you’ll find that you start to rain Chi in local search engines and you will naturally gain customers overtime through local SEO.
Besides the additional traffic, placing your Google reviews on your website will also show that you are worthy of trust and cause people to close more often with you.
Get reviews and show those reviews.
4 – Work a meeting cycle
You should run a meeting cycle that allows you to Prospect, run connect meetings, provide deep analysis, and then provide a proposal.
Get your hands on their tax return and spend time analyzing their accounting and bookkeeping before you ever quote a price.
Do you want to start out by having conversations with people about the ways you can make their life better, primarily trying to identify whether or not they’re getting proactive tax planning and helpful services, or if they’ve just been getting the typical CPA or tax treatment at the end of the year.
You’ll want to offer to them that you can take a look at their tax return to identify any opportunities to save on taxes, and you’ll want to peek into the bookkeeping to see if it looks any good, and understand how big of a beast their operations would be for you.
The point is that if you run a sales meeting cycle that allows for a deep analysis, you’ll be able to uncover what’s valuable to them and gain extremely good insight as to whether or not you can help them.
Work hard to get the tax return and find missed tax savings!
5 – Sell the Outsourced Accounting Model
My last piece of advice is that you should stay clear from doing just individual taxes, working with individuals, or doing one off services as much as possible.
You will be able to get more clients at a higher billing if you offer an all in one service that provides the bookkeeping, tax planning, year-end taxes, and advisory services all together for a flat monthly fee.
Small businesses like the idea of having one person looking at their stuff and aggressively being their advocate while also making sure they don’t have to do anything with bookkeeping or tax payments.
If you help them focus on their business, implement the best tax planning strategies, and help them understand their financial reports while making the year-end tax season a breeze, you’ll see that people walk often pay $500-$2500 a month for your services.
Don’t settle for being a tax firm, do more meaningful work and add more value by simply refusing to do the commoditized work and become an outsourced accountant that helps businesses mitigate taxes, avoid hiring staff, and stay compliant with excellent proactive services.
