Create More Value in Your Accounting Firm and Love From Your Clients

You are great at what you do, which is why your clients trust you. However, this is likely less true for why your clients may love you. Trust will keep a relationship going, but love will make it flourish.

How do you make your clients fall in love with your firm you might ask? You provide life changing solutions and value, that’s how.

The tricky part is that value is in the eyes of the beholder, and you can’t force someone to see value. This means you have to be better equipped with a wider array of value adding solutions and ways to identify and engage the right people with the right value propositions.

Here are a few examples of building rapport and trust vs finding love and value in a client relationship:

• A Tax Firm Building Trust and Rapport - Filed taxes before extension due date, filed correctly, had three or four calls with client to provide some peace of mind for them and the firm.
• A Tax Firm Finding Love - Firm asks client in the middle of last year after their last timely filing, "Hi Client, What are three things we could have done better this past year?" While telling them honestly what they feel they as a firm could have gone better from the firm’s point of view.
• The client says, "Well, it took way too much time for me to get the stuff together, I was aggravated the way the phone tag and scheduling worked, and I knew you would eventually get it done but I wasn’t sure on the status or final amount due until 3 weeks before the final deadline."
• The firm then (within next 6 months) provides a way for the client to save 20 hours of their time for this tax year, while helping them run their business better, via organizational and bookkeeping suggestions. The firm pre-schedules the 4 calls and puts a task in their CRM or project management system to send status updates to the client in between those calls. The firm files 3 months earlier and actually gives the client (and themselves) back the two valuable hours of call time, or keeps them on the calendar to use as exciting value adding advisory convos vs stressful compliance or due date calls.

• A Bookkeeper Building Trust and Rapport - An accurate set of reports will build some rapport, along with the fact that the bookkeeper is saving them the time and mental angst from having to do their books once or a dozen times a year themselves. 
• A Back Office Expert Adding Value and Generating Referrals - Saving one or 20 hours each year for their client is great, but saving the client and every staff member they have an hour each week, or 52+ hours per year, is money in the client's pocket or a way to get their life back! It can turn into more dollars and clients in the firm's back pocket too, including passive revenue and referrals. 

If this were you in this bookkeeper example... QuickBooks or your spreadsheet may bring you time savings, but what value is that going to bring to your clients day to day life? You need more than tax work papers and after the fact financial reports if you're going to be your clients’ advisor. Your client needs industry and use case specific tools that help them get paid, help them run their business, and align best with how they prefer to work. What if you were able to offer 50 different software solutions to meet their various needs and preferences, while making your life easier too?

• Using Compliance to Build Trust and Rapport  - Answering questions clients ask, or getting clients to satisfy compliance questions you have, will remind them why they pay the bill and allows the firm to get the job done. Even though advice to save money on compliance or taxes is great, it can still be something clients may take for granted as part of what they pay you for.
• Become An Admired Advisor Who Brings Value and Scalability - Your client loves their business much more than they will ever love you. They want to grow and nourish their business. If you go beyond helping them protect it, to actually enabling them to scale it, you will earn their love. There are nearly infinite unique scenarios and opportunities out there waiting for you to provide value and solutions that change your clients' lives. Scaling your firm to help you seize these opportunities can keep things fun, but it can also drive you and/or your clients mad. 

What you do matters to you and your clients, but how you do what you do and what you bring to the table beyond what you do can matter much more to your clients. It is impossible for you as a standalone firm to provide all the solutions and value a small business needs and to do it well.

However, it is 100% possible to never be a dead end or a brick wall either. What you need is to leverage strategic partnerships, technology, best practices, and your clients' invaluable feedback and willingness to trust you. 

Volumes of Value

You should invest some of your time to learn the best ways to leverage partnerships, new value propositions, new service lines, new marketing and pricing strategies, new delivery methods, and client feedback so that you can build on the value and resources you can provide to your clients. 

One way to learn would be to do a series of Google searches and demonstrations, talk with a handful of other firms to see how they’re doing it, and just start trying out new client messaging, new software systems, and other techniques to woo and wow your clients.

A better way to fast track creating more value and love appeal for your firm, while reducing the time you invest, is to book a Console on my website.