The Wize Way

Episode 101: How to educate clients with your firm's accounting services

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 1 • Episode 101

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In this week's episode of The Wize Guys Podcast, Timothy Causbrook, Thomas Sphabmixay, and Kristy Fairbairn provided their insights about educating clients with your accounting practice services.

Find out how to upsell more services to clients, opportunities for marketing your practice to existing clients, and use feedback scores for client engagement. Tune in to today's episode to learn more!

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Wize Mentoring:

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:

You said to create a process of add-on service opportunities at the end of the job. Three recommendations what can the team see the client needing? One fries with that. That's probably the opposite of ad hoc, which is upselling. This brings me, quite nicely, as a segue, to our second question that we want to look at today. This one was directed to me.

Tim Causbrook:

I'd love to hear Kristy's thoughts and Thomas' thoughts and share my experience at Cause Mentor Associates on how we ensure clients are educated on all of the services that we offer and that they provide them with opportunities to gauge us on their services. I think that's what you're getting at there. This is a different kind of problem. It's the opposite of the ad hoc. We might have a client who comes up to us and says I'm really not happy with my bookkeeper. Can you recommend a good bookkeeper to me? That happened two months ago and we said well, we do bookkeeping and they just had no idea. That's more common than you'd believe. I'd love to hear, Thomas or Kristy, have you had that issue in your firm? Have you got any wisdom to share on that? Or I'm putting on the spot a bit?

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, definitely it does happen. Just for those of you who haven't met me before, I own a bookkeeping business. We don't do tax work at this stage, but it definitely does happen. The great thing about being in your clients' books on a regular basis is, though, you can see the growth of their business as they have changed, and you can decide if you should be offering an additional service to them as well to support them. A lot of businesses, when they've got the right team, will go through some expansion and growth, or they might have staffing changes. I have a firm that we're working with that is going through a lot of change and they need more support. To begin with, we've offered that straight away and been proactive. It's just having a look. I think it's a really great opportunity, Clayton, to assess, as you're doing the work on a regular basis, what could you add? What value could you add of being proactive?

Tim Causbrook:

In the spirit of systematising it, Kristy, that's the golden ideal, where the client manager is just so keyed into the client and their needs that they are on it. Obviously, we strive for that's their job, but in the spirit of systematising it as well, there are a couple of things that you can do to try to make sure stuff doesn't slip through the cracks or to make sure you're really monetising it. One of them is to send out a newsletter. We think about marketing in terms of external clients and even today's topic of production, proposal, and discovery in terms of new clients. But, as Thomas said before, there's so much gold in our own firms that we haven't mined yet, and it's the lowest kind of hanging fruit. It doesn't cost us anything extra to get them. They're already paid clients, so it's likely they'll happily take on more of our services as long as they're happy with us. Yeah, I think marketing to existing clients is something we don't think of, and so, yeah, there are several ways of doing it. We're trialing out cause-worn associates having a monthly newsletter. That's spruiking one of the services to our client base that they might not be aware of that we offer. You don't want to get too spammed about it. But I was talking about this with Ed the other day and he said other firms are talking to your clients. Bookkeeping Christy, you've got a huge advantage in bookkeeping, but we might only talk to some of our clients, even our bigger ones a couple of times a year. Ed said other firms including possibly his he's got so many on his mailing list are talking to our clients. He said you don't want to be spammy, but a monthly check-in email letting them know about changes to tax law, for instance, is a lot of those happening in Australia at the moment or services that you offer. Even if they don't currently need bookkeeping, they might be citing an SME in the new year. Even if they don't have a trust for a super fund yet, they might be earning more money and they might be thinking about doing that.

Tim Causbrook:

Marketing's a long runway. You're not just marketing to clients who need your services now. You're marketing to clients who you hope will grow into needing more of your services. The first person they think of isn't your opponent, it's you. There are less spammy ways of doing it than sending out newsletters to emails. One that Brenton discussed with the wise team, which is a really neat idea, is I can't remember what the tool is. Someone else might be able to remember, but there's a tool, that software company, that puts stuff in the banner of your emails. Is that right? And you can change. Someone in the marketing team might not help me out here and you can change what's in there whenever you want. I think it's called Black Pearl. Black Pearl is it.

Tim Causbrook:

That's one example. Yeah, so every time your client sends, your staff sends out an email to the client. If you really want to be sprucing the bookkeeping, you can put that in the banner of the email. So it's just trying to get in front of the clients as easily as you can any of those new services that you offer or existing services they might not know you offer. And then the sales part is when the client manager comes in and they'll say Hey, Kristy, or Hey Tim, or whoever it is. I saw that you guys do bookkeeping now. That's great and it makes it easier. And then the client manager, all they have to do is just say yep, and they go straight into this phase of discovery proposal production. So, in the spirit of systematizing as much as possible, we'd encourage you to look at ways of talking to all your clients and letting them know that you do those things.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

I'll add something that we've been doing as well. So actually credit to our Eng here. We created what we call a client master checklist in carbon. So it's essentially the monetization sheet, but we treat it as going through each of these services to actually find out does a client has a super fund. Do we do the bookkeeping for the client? Do they have trust? Do they have other family members? Do they have things outstanding on their ATO? Do they have basses outstanding? So we created a carbon job template that we just want questions answered for in each one.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

As people are going through the work of these clients, say the tax returns or financial accounts for the year, we encourage the team that is working on that client to also be completely meeting that checklist.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

So it's almost like additional work, almost together with actually trying to finish the work at hand, and what we encourage the team to do is to complete that and come up with recommendations that the client manager can take into the client approval meeting.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

So we already have a chance to bring the client into a meeting to discuss and have them sign off on something. It'd be really great also to bring just a couple of additional agenda items that we've just taken the effort to go in and find out about. So it could be like some entity that we've totally forgotten about, but it's got like 10 years outstanding. They might not trade with it but still charge a $50 new return for 10 of them something and exercise like this. It brings the whole team involved, because it's very easy to do a monetization sheet, it's easy to have a giant Excel sheet, but then we never really act on it. If we bring the team in on it and it becomes an activity where the team is treating it like a project to try to find some gems inside this client group and then raise it to the client manager, that's a really nice habit and process to build as an ongoing thing.

Tim Causbrook:

If you're not already doing a client net promoter score survey, I'd encourage you to do that again. We look at doing that for referrals. But if you think about the logic, if they give you a nine or a 10, they're more likely to accept more services from you. If they give you a four or a five, the last thing they're going to want is more services from you. And so, if you're thinking, one way of doing it systematically is what Thomas said to look at just every client. We recommend doing it at the start of the financial year.

Tim Causbrook:

Whenever that is a new, old geographic location, In addition to scheduling the current work that we're doing for the client, we actually try to do it at the same time. Just get it done with one big bulk for the year. And then really the low- hanging fruit of that, because you'll probably find almost every client will have some kind of service that you're not actually offering that you could give for them. It can be overwhelming. Like Thomas said, you either do it when you do the work or you look at the low- hanging fruit thing, the nine and 10, if you are doing net promoter scores, just go for the nine and 10s to start with and you'll find it's much easier to sell this is really good if you have an assistant client manager as a trainee. It's much easier for them to sell to a very, very happy legacy client, probably in some cases than a brand- new one. Kristy, do you have anything you want to add to that?

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, look, I think too on the lower scores from clients, they potentially also need more service, but they certainly need a senior approach. But perhaps the reason they're feeling dissatisfied is they want more from you because they need more help. So it's not a definite no, or you know, gosh, we've just got a love on them to get them up in score. Have a look at it from a sales point of view of what they need?

Tim Causbrook:

It's really good.

Wize Mentoring:

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/p odcast to download a free copy of The Accountants 20-H our Work week Playbook. We've included a link in the show notes below. See you on the next episode.