Episode 98: Understanding the 3 phase process of discovery, proposal, and production

As many firms give a lot of their knowledge, they’re giving IP away for free to their clients. In the spirit of addressing the problem and not the symptoms, find out how the core reasons for this happening in firms can turn conversations into an opportunity to better serve clients and generate more revenue.

In this week's episode of The Wize Guys Podcast, Wize Mentors, Timothy Causbrook with Thomas Sphabmixay discuss how the three phases of the process ~ discovery, proposal, and production give every accounting practice the opportunity to scale their marketing, sales, service, revenue growth, and M&A’s.

Find out the advantages and opportunities that you can get from having a practical system to follow!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:31 Why scaling is the toughest part in having a business
• 2:26 How to turn situations to having more business
• 4:16 Tips for creating a service proposal

Transcript

Wize Mentoring: 0:02

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Guys Podcast, a show about accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and the many stories, lessons, and tips from their experience of transitioning from a time-poor practice to a business that runs without them. I hope you enjoy and subscribe!

Tim Causbrook: 0:23

Thomas and some of the other mentors as well, on scaling selling the sizzle, not the sausage. So just to start us off, Thomas, we're looking at scale, which is probably one of the toughest things for accounting firms to master. We're not naturally good at sales. If we were, Ed likes to say, we'd be in a different industry, but that's not to say that sales isn't very important. So we're big on systems in Wize.

Tim Causbrook: 0:46

If you haven't noticed, Thomas, in his time as a Wize Mentor and as a mentee, you've developed a really great kind of system for capturing those sales. So just for some context for everyone, as you are well aware if you're here, many firms give away a lot of their knowledge and IP for free to their clients and, in the spirit of addressing the problem and not the symptoms, we want to look at what are the core reasons for this happening in firms and how can we turn conversations into an opportunity to better serve clients and generate more revenue? So with that in mind, Thomas, when it comes to a practical system to follow to take advantage of these opportunities, you've talked often over the last few years about a three-phase process of discovery, proposal, and production. Can you walk us through exactly how this addresses the problem and what this entails?

Thomas Sphabmixay: 1:28

Yeah, look, and just before I dive into it, when we're looking at any part of a system in a firm, it easily becomes complicated. It seems that there are so many steps and facets that we need to get right, and it's just really important that when we approach anything, we approach it with a simple frame. A lot of times when clients are coming to us with queries, we have a high volume of emails coming towards us. It's really easy just to get overwhelmed and then treat those situations as if I'm just going to respond to an email and then that would be it. Or the client calls me up on the phone. I'm in the middle, the staff might be in the middle of a tax return or something like this, and it's easy enough to just say, hopefully, if I just answer them, they would go away. But so much value is lost there. When clients are calling you up, they're not calling you to have a fun chat. They actually have a problem right then and there, and it's just not good enough to be able to think, all right if I just deal with them, hopefully they go away and they never come back. That's not how we should be running the business. So we want to be able to capture these situations and actually turn them into something a lot more. Turn it into something where it's going to produce more business for the teams. So then that brings us to this three- phase workflow framework. That really helps encapsulate, from the moment that the client sends you an email, having a chat with them, from putting together a proposal and then actually having it go towards production.

Thomas Sphabmixay: 2:51

So with this three- phase workflow system, essentially what we're trying to achieve here is, when clients come to you, they're suffering from something and they need someone to listen to them. They're willing to tell you all their problems and when they tell you the problems, of course, you're going to have solutions to be able to help them with coming from your menu of service. We encourage our client managers, instead of just trying to answer them and that's it, to take a step back to pause and plan, instead of panicking about another email, or another triage item, and work together with the team to set up an appointment with the client. And just take a step back and have a conversation. They're coming to you and they're saying I need an account in Sledo 9 times out of 10. The firm would just put it together and send it out to the client. Okay, they're coming to you and they're saying can you give me a copy of my financial statements and tax returns? So what do we usually do? We go, okay, let me go grab that for you real quick. Okay, that's not a great way to deal with it.

Thomas Sphabmixay: 3:48

When clients come to us like this, we, as advisors whether you're a bookkeeper, your accountant, or your lawyer, it doesn't matter we should take a step back to actually see how can we learn more about their problem. Okay, how can we discover the opportunities that we might be able to actually help them with? And it doesn't matter if it's a new client or an existing client. Every situation that arises like this. We just need to begin with discovery first. Okay, because then from discovery, we're able to actually put together a proposal. Okay, it becomes a lot more straightforward now to think about okay, so what services can I provide to this client to actually help them with? And this proposal starts to come together. We begin to properly scope out how we're going to help them.

Thomas Sphabmixay: 4:34

A lot of the time, when we engage a client and they're paying us like some sort of monthly retainer, they start to ask for this, they start to ask for that and we're losing track of actually what did they originally engage us for?

Thomas Sphabmixay: 4:47

Actually, sometimes the clients don't even know, sometimes they're not even fully aware of what you could possibly offer them. Doing the discovery, then going to the proposal and scoping it out properly lays the groundwork so that when that proposal gets accepted and leads towards production, it's a lot clearer with the team about what they have to do. And, most importantly, it's coming off the back of a discovery meeting and an accepted proposal and we're trying to collect all the information we can before actually beginning that. So how does this actually help you get more business? We in our firms encounter every day. We have hundreds of opportunities to produce more business. It's really easy to think maybe I need another Facebook ad, maybe I need to go create another landing page or make another ebook or something, but there is already so much business within our own firms that if we can train our client managers and the rest of our team just a simple process to follow we might just be able to capture more business from them.

Wize Mentoring: 5:47

Thanks for tuning in. If you liked this episode, please remember to subscribe and leave us a five- star review For more practical, Wize tips on how to build a business that runs without you, head over to wizementoring. com/ podcast to download a free copy of The Accountants 20-H our WorkWeek Playbook. We've included a link in the show notes below. See you in the next episode!