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Wondering how to get more accounting clients?
Looking for some sure-fire ways to get more business clients for your bookkeeping business, accounting firm, tax firm or CPA Firm?
My name is Rob Satrom, and I’m the founder of Feedbackwrench, and we are a Minneapolis Based Web Design & Marketing agency that specializes in Websites for Accountants & Bookkeepers as well as home services & construction companies.
Before I started feedback ranch, I started and grew an outsourced accounting practice from 0 to 150 small businesses and we did it in a completely different manner than your typical bookkeeping, accounting or tax business.
Here’s a roadmap to get B2B Accounting & Bookkeeping Clients
I want to share with you my tips for getting business clients and provide you with a road map of exactly how you can get top-caliber B2B clients.
I'm also going to talk a little bit about how you can charge High retainers instead of the typical commoditized accounting services.
1 - Develop & Embrace a Real Value Proposition
2 - Establish a Sales & Analysis Process
3 - Target Local & Industry Niches
4 - Build a High Ranking & Converting Website & Online Presence
5 - Turn on Core Search Ads with Retargeting
6 - Create 1-3 Video Sales Letters
7 - Create a Niche Lead Magnet & Nurturing Sequence
8 - Create Niche Youtube Videos
9 - Cold Call & Nurture Certain Local Business Owners
1 - Develop & Embrace a Real Value Proposition
When you are highly valuable it's much easier to get sales.
If you are commoditized and seen only as an individual service provider, business owners don't view you as a rock-solid guide to their business or a solution to their litany of problems.
If you develop the right value approach, your business will get much easier.
The first key to closing and attracting lots of bookkeeping clients or tax and accounting clients is to become more valuable than the typical accountant.
We recommend exploring what it means to provide an outsourced Accounting Service to your clients that includes not only bookkeeping services and tax return preparation, but also includes proactive, yearlong tax reduction planning and fractional CFO services.
If you can help a business save taxes, stay productive, improve efficiency and avoid hiring unnecessary staff, you will become incredibly valuable to them.
Create an immensely valuable service stack and get really good at uncovering what's valuable to your prospective clients.
You may have gotten frustrated as you read that because you wanted to know how to get more leads, but getting more leads without the ability to uncover and connect value with a sophisticated business owner is silly.
If you want to get lots of great clients, you're going to want to have an immensely valuable service rather than a commoditized one-off Accounting Service
What should be included with a super valuable Accounting Service stack?
aggressive and year-long tax reduction planning
bookkeeping cleanup
monthly bookkeeping services
helpful and proactive financial reporting
responsive and friendly customer service
leadership to guide new investment for growth
help paying taxes according to a tax plan
strategic meeting before the year ends to make purchases and Investments
guidance around long-term strategic tax planning
help reducing costs within the business
guidance on building long-term and tax-efficient wealth
year-end taxes and financial reporting made easy
You should stack these together into one service, because they are all integrated and somewhat dependent on each other.
Instead of just doing business tax returns and one-off bookkeeping, take the time to build a relationship with your client and discover what's important to them.
If you do this, you will be irresistible to business owners as you will end up being a solid solution to many of their problems.
Business owners want the help I just described, I actually built a million-dollar accounting firm in less than 24 months, selling this exact “outsourced accounting service” back in 2012.
If you want to get lots of great accounting clients, you should create a really great service & value proposition.
After developing the valuable stack of services, you need to get really good at deeply understanding what's valuable to business owners and just how helpful you can be to them.
accountants seldom fathom the Deep value they provide, don't fall into that trap.
2 - Establish a Sales & Analysis Process
The second most important thing when trying to get more bookkeeping customers or business clients for your accounting firm is to develop an organized sales process.
If you want to sell more value, you're going to have to not only prospect and market, but have a process that allows you to uncover what's valuable to a business owner.
I recommend running a three-step sales process
Step 1 - Connect Meetings
Step 2 - Analysis
Step 3 - Proposal
In front of this three-step sales process are marketing and prospecting. We will talk about it in a little bit, but you will need to have enough front-end activity so that you can keep your pipeline full of fresh leads.
One of the biggest failures of most accounting firms is that they don't do enough proactive prospecting and marketing which leads to an inability to find what we call Diamond clients.
A diamond accounting client is simply a business customer that fits the Outsource accounting model, has employees, and we'll be looking to you to provide valuable services.
90% of the leads that will come through your front door, fill out forms on your website, or jump in through your marketing funnel are going to be mediocre or bad leads.
You need to have enough front-end activity that the 10% of leads that are actually super high quality will feed the business you're trying to build with enough sales
Step 1 Connect Meeting
Everything you do should be driven towards a low-commitment consultation or free strategy call.
I call this free strategy call a connect meeting.
In this connect meeting, you want to build a personal connection with the other person, while uncovering as much information about the problems that they have, the vision in their mind for the future, the problems that they're tackling every day, and the team that they've built around them.
People love to talk about themselves, and you need to ask genuine questions and take great notes.
We don't ask these questions because people love talking about themselves, we do it because we have to uncover what's valuable to them and see if we have a fantastic accounting or bookkeeping solution for their business.
Our job is to be a guide, and unless we get to know this person, we're not going to be able to help them head in the direction that they want to.
80% of this meeting will be spent asking questions about your business owner, and the other 20% will be casting vision for the type of solution you can provide, and exactly how you can make their life better.
This connect meeting should be driving towards an analysis of their tax return and their accounting.
We want to get our hands on their tax return so that we can find out if there are opportunities to reduce their taxes, improve efficiencies, and help their business become more scalable and profitable.
Step 2 - Analysis
Get your hands on the tax return by sending them an invitation to your portal, possibly using something like tax dome, and then also have them add you into their bookkeeping.
If they're uncomfortable adding you to their bookkeeping, that means that trust has not been established.
You want to analyze the tax return to find out if they are doing everything possible to mitigate their taxes, look at the quality of professionalism their current provider is delivering, and find out if there's a mess that you can help clean up.
One of the major things you're going to be looking for is whether or not they are being aggressive enough with their S-corporation election, balancing the rules of a reasonable salary with an aggressive stance to mitigate self-employment taxes.
An S Corp is not right for everybody, but generally speaking, it will provide the ability to mitigate your Medicare taxes and Social Security taxes.
If they are not an S corp, you've found a jackpot in most cases and you will be able to more than likely help them dramatically reduce their self-employment taxes.
Besides looking to whether or not they are maximizing an s-corp, they should also get insight from you about small business retirement plans, Healthcare benefits, Fringe benefits, real estate investments, income shifting, hiring their family members and a number of other tax strategies.
Besides the quantitative opportunities you'll find within the bookkeeping and tax returns, you'll also be in a position to get an idea of how much they're currently paying for similar services.
last, this analysis provides you with the ability to find out how profitable and high protein this business really is, allowing you to build a tremendously valuable service stack.
Step 3 - Proposal
We want to share with your customer how much it's going to cost for them to work with you, but not before we connect some dots around value.
accountants and bookkeepers should not show their absolute pricing for a customer until they have connected around the following:
how much they're overpaying in tax
how much they're paying for their current provider
how much labor and staff resources you will save
everything they will get with you
precisely how you're going to get them started
Covering this before you show pricing helps them feel the weight of all value you’re going to add.
If you work a simple sales cycle like this, getting more high-quality business leads is much easier and it puts you in a position to genuinely solve bigger problems and attract High retainers.
3 - Target Local & Industry Niches
The niches produced The Riches.
We're going to get to a specific website and digital marketing tips for accountants in just a little bit, but it's also important to understand the landscape of building credibility, establishing authority, and ranking in search engines.
I believe that accountants do best when they specialize in small businesses, and then develop specific niches around their generalist business approach.
In other words, accountants succeed most when they will work with any business that's profitable, but also have individual lines in the water fishing for a particular industry and location businesses.
When business owners see you help their industry or specialize in serving their local community, they're much more likely to actually want to work with you.
Credibility and authority are enhanced when you have advertising, content, videos & marketing geared toward individual industry sectors and local communities.
Here are Some High-Value Niches:
Construction, Contractors & Sub Contractors
Plumbers
Electricians
HVAC Contractors
Landscaping Companies
Lawn Care & Fertilizing
Pool Builders, Cleaners & Pool Contractors
Real Estate Agents & Specific Brokerages
Flooring, Carpeting & More
Tile Contractors both Residential & Commercial
Commercial & Residential Painting Contractors
Window Installation & Window Repair Companies
Siding & Roofing Contractors
Remodelers & Renovation Companies
I recommend trying to find industry niches that are ubiquitous and in every Community because entropy itself means they are in need. these are incredibly defensive Industries that are profitable and are often pillars of their local communities.
Local community niches
You want to Target every city and suburb within a 30 Mi region of your Google business profile. This means you're going to need advertising, Landing pages, blog posts and backlinks to your website that include the various cities that you live in.
If you do this properly, your Google Business profile, along with your Landing pages, will end up driving lots of local businesses in search engines over time.
Why niches are so important
Since the famous “your money your life” update from Google, the finance sector is incredibly difficult to actually rank on Google.
Search engines are faced with a Litany of giant Publishers writing about taxes, accounting and finance, and you're never going to really outrank them.
You can't outrank large Publications on Broad keywords, but you can dominate local niche keywords.
Targeting industry and location niches allow you to jump ahead of the gigantic Giga corporations trying to get their website to rank really high.
The niches also communicate to your end user that you have a boutique experience ready for them.
If you do a good job of developing a strong value proposition, and speaking the language of your industry niche, you're probably going to have a ton of success online over the Long Haul.
4 - Build a High Ranking & Converting Website & Online Presence
The 4th website in marketing hack for accounting, CPA and bookkeeping firms is to build a website and an online presence that actually sells and converts.
your website should be the best salesperson on your team.
There's no reason why your website should just be an online business card when it can genuinely help move people to take a step with you after building credibility and Trust.
You’re Website & Online Profiles Should Move People Through the Buyers Journey:
The 3-Step Buyer’s Journey:
A - Pique their curiosity that you solve their problem & make their life better
B - Enlighten them that you’re credible, trustworthy & a great value
C - Call them to make a commitment
We've established some foundations that build a high-converting website.
4 Foundations of a High Converting Website:
HOW IT LOOKS - Clean and responsive designs with strong branding and wise user interfaces.
WHAT IT SAYS - Clear & concise messaging that’s focused on the customer, their problems and how you’ll make their life better.
CREDIBILITY - Showcase happy customers, reviews, logos, & case studies. Show them you’re a credible professional!
AUTHORITY - Position yourself as the authority & guide by having content that really shows value.
Another Conversion Key - Video Sales Letters
Another key to having a high converting accountant and bookkeeping website is to have a video sales letter featured that allows you to take your sales call online and meet them exactly where they are.
You shouldn't have to wait till someone calls you to have an excellent sales call, and a video helps you do that.
We found that videos on websites dramatically improve conversion rates, lead to higher-quality business, and cause more people to Simply reach out and tell you they're ready.
Your sales will get better and people will see you as an authority when you invest in video content and place a video sales letter on nearly every page
What Marketing Works Best?
We find that the best digital marketing centers around two main concepts.
Two Main Digital Marketing Strategies:
1 - Search Ads & Inbound Marketing
2 - Niche Based Lead Magnets with Video Sales Letters & Nurturing
Search ads are pretty hard to beat.
When someone searches “Business accountant” or “bookkeeping services”, it’s always really helpful for you to show up and intersect with people looking for a solution.
Your best clients are usually business owners with employees and more going on, which means they probably have a current accountant.
You need to pique the curiosity of a successful business owner that there’s a problem, and that they’re probably overpaying in tax, missing out on tax loopholes, and remaining stuck and stagnant because of their current accountant.
This means you’ll need to intersect with them online, which means ads on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others.
Connect with us to talk about what we find is the best ROI for accountant & bookkeeping lead generation.
The King of Marketing - Google Business & Local SEO
Another thing you're going to want to do is make sure that you have more Google reviews than any other accountant in the 30-mile region near your business.
if you have more reviews than most of the other providers, you will get lots of customers
Local search engine optimization is highly predicated on the quality and volume of reviews that your business has, so you need to get really good at following up with every customer to make sure that they provide you with a good review on your Google business profile.
5 - Turn on Core Search Ads with Retargeting
The next step to getting great clients is to make sure that you have a predictable flow of new small business clients through Google search ads with simple retargeting on Facebook and Instagram.
You can drive a ton of traffic to your website by spending somewhere between 20 and $50 a day on paid search ads through Google.
You will want to make sure that your ads are set up for conversions rather than traffic, and make sure that you have a great campaign that is set up to win.
Google paid search ads to your local community are a fantastic way to get new customers.
You should also make a remarketing audience on Google display, Instagram and Facebook, and possibly LinkedIn.
Most people don't make a decision right away, and so it's a really good idea to spend a little bit of money to extend your marketing on social media in front of the people who've already been to your website.
It's hard to control this too much on Facebook and Instagram anymore, so I usually just recommend setting them up in the most efficient manner and ensuring that people who've been to your website are also seeing the advertising.
It's usually a good idea to retarget people who have been to your homepage, review page, how it works in pricing, or something besides just a Blog that might be ranking.
I’ve found that if you turn on a core search ad with some simple remarketing, it’s a very efficient way to get new business.
6 - Create 1-3 Video Sales Letters
I mentioned it above, but I think you should invest heavily in creating videos that you would host on social media, YouTube and your website.
you should craft together a brand-scripting video sales letter that you would put right on your homepage so that people don't have to read your entire website.
Being able to push play on a video and cover what's going on is incredibly valuable to a marketing effort.
How do you do this for your accounting or bookkeeping business?
We usually recommend writing out the script word for word, precisely how you would say it out loud.
Your script should align with Donald Miller's marketing Made Simple one-liner.
In this one-liner, you'll want to frame up the problem, solution and result that your customer is facing and that you will help them with.
You might want to talk about the fact that typical business owners end up overpaying in taxes, or that they are part-time bookkeepers and administrative staff when they don't really need to.
Your business will be the solution to their problem, and then you want to talk about the overarching result or benefit that the business owner and their operation will see by choosing your solution
You might want to do this for each of your business services and throw them into remarketing campaigns as well as showcasing them on your homepage and landing pages for each service.
7 - Create a Niche Lead Magnet & Nurturing Sequence
Another form of advertising would be to create a super helpful resource for a specific industry sector and offer it as a free download.
This free download is what's known as a lead magnet.
Once people download this lead magnet, you could have a series of emails, videos and other content served up to the email subscriber showing value and positioning you as an authority.
If you share enough helpful content, and position yourself as a valuable solution to their problems, these emails can help nudge people in the direction of taking a step with you.
The problem with lead magnets is, new paragraph lead magnets and nurturing sequences can be fantastic, but you need to cut through the clutter.
Accountants face the problem that there is a vast amount of online activity playing a lot of games with nurture emails and free downloads.
Business owners need a very short-form, to-the-point communication if they're going to do a lead magnet.
The great challenge for bookkeepers and accountants is that the helpful information you might serve up is what they don't care about and want to hire you to tackle.
Most business owners don't want to read anything about accounting and tax, they just want it to go away and make sure that they never overpay in tax.
To a degree, most of the tips are going to provide are going to be so broad that they're unhelpful, or it's going to be about subject matter your business owner doesn't care about that much.
Accountants should talk about business growth, improved productivity, reduced costs, and building tax-efficient wealth.
I just want to caution accountants that get overly excited about lead magnets because it generally leads to a lot of activity with a very low percentage of people actually becoming customers.
The other problem is that since iOS 14.5, iPhone tracking is so terrible that it's really difficult to avoid looping in lots of other bookkeepers or accountants.
The result is that you end up with a CRM full of other accounting professionals and bookkeepers just trying to figure out what you have.
creating great video content and simply written content is usually better and I generally recommend a handful of other advertising before you start doing lead magnets on social media.
8 - Create Niche Youtube Videos
If you really want to start getting a ton of clients, you need to start creating YouTube videos that are directed towards individual sector niches.
Business owners and entrepreneurs are generally DIY people that enjoy the topics of entrepreneurship.
Most business owners spend time on youtube.
if you're able to jump in and provide real insights about things that they care about, and you bite off an industry sector as a niche, you can get a ton of additional business from this.
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and your core customer is definitely the primary user.
in fact, it could be argued that YouTube is probably dramatically more effective at getting in front of business owners, who are typically male, and showing up in their feeds.
Create videos that don’t even have a face!
Just write a script, create some slides, and use Adobe Premiere, I-Movie or some other video editing program to make a tight slideshow.
You can use b-roll videos and other things as well.
Benefits of Youtube for Accounting Firms & Bookkeepers:
A - Business owners use youtuber lots
B - You can target niches
C - It’s the second-biggest search engine
D - It’s easier to rank on Youtube than Google in most cases
E - You can use paid ads to target people
F - You can build connections with people as well
G - You can retarget to them on Google Display & search
9 - Cold Call & Nurture Certain Local Business Owners
The last way to get accounting clients is to Simply call local contractors and business owners.
every time you drive by a construction company pickup, you should write down the business name, and then call them.
Most people are too scared to reach out.
Business owners, more than just about anyone else, value up-front, frank and problem-based sales calls.
Business owners respect good salespeople.
If you simply call them, introduce yourself as somebody that's down the road from them, and ask them if they have a tax reduction specialist accountant, you'll probably be able to send an introductive email and get to know them over time.
People in general don't like to cold call, and accountants like it even less.
If you get good at warm calling or cold calling, chances are you're going to be in a position to absolutely rake it in because your competitors are sitting back on their laurels and not doing anything.
If you get good at front-end activity, you’re going to DOMINATE.
You simply need to be persistent, and call people.
Don’t do it the lazy way and text, just call.
Don’t ask them for a meeting, just ask them if you can send them an email to introduce yourself.
Just jump into Google, and start with one construction niche.
Here’s a simple script:
“Hi, is this Joe’s remodeling? Hi! I saw your stuff on the chamber website (or your truck on the road), and I wanted to just introduce myself. I own an accounting firm down the road from you but I specialize in aggressive tax reduction planning & bookkeeping. I just wanted to know if you already have a really good tax reduction accountant or if I could shoot you an email and maybe offer a second opinion strategy call?”
The call to action is to get their email - then just send them your one-liner video sales letter in a simple email.
Conclusion
If you stick to these nine websites and marketing hacks for your accounting, CPA or bookkeeping business, you'll find that it gets really easy to keep a steady flow of business coming in the front door and you can build a highly profitable firm.
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