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CPA & Consultant for Accounting Firms
Sales is sleazy, homecoming, and webinar recap
Happy Friday!
I was so excited and focused on the webinar this week that I almost forgot to write this newsletter, but thankfully, I have someone who keeps me on track. His name is Eduardo Gamez, and if you're looking for help with any sort of marketing, I highly encourage you to reach out to him here.
Otherwise, I am on the road to Laramie, Wyoming, for the University of Wyoming homecoming game tomorrow, and I'm excited, as it's been 15 years since I graduated. Hard to believe. I got a bachelor's degree in accounting because I thought it was the most honest, hard, and respectable degree, at least in business, that I could get. Before that, I had gotten my real estate license at the age of 19 and quickly realized a couple things:
- Nobody wants to buy a house from somebody from a teenager.
- It was all just sales, which I thought of as sleazy, tacky, and no place I wanted to spend my career.
Fast forward, and I've spent most of the 15 years after college, with an accounting degree, doing sales and marketing. The reality is, if you run an accounting practice or offer any sort of service, you do sales. The question just becomes: are you doing it well? Are you doing it intentionally, and are you doing it with proven methods as opposed to just off the cuff? That's a lot of what I talked about in my webinar.
The webinar
You can watch the replay here, and if you haven't gotten a copy of the workbook or the playbook, you can find that here as well.
I am beyond inspired by the interest, the attendance, and the engagement during the webinar, which just encourages me to keep working to serve people like you who want to bring your offering into the world in a way that's honest and respectable.
More than 50% of registrants actually showed up live. That's a great surprise. Most webinars, you're lucky to see a quarter of the people who registered. Great operators show up.
What's the #1 thing slowing your firm down right now?
Finding new clients: 53%. Too much admin, not enough advisory: 40%. Hiring or retaining staff: 7%. Pricing and collections: 0%.
Do you have a CRM?
No, it's all in my head: 56%. Yes, and I use it daily: 22%. Yes, but it's collecting dust: 11%. What's a CRM: 11%.
How do you get most of your new clients today?
Referrals only: 40%. Mix of referrals and outbound: 40%. I honestly don't know: 20%.
A couple of key things to keep in mind
You need a CRM. Half of the attendees who watched the webinar don't even have a CRM. This alone can be a game changer, but the CRM is only as good as your commitment to using it and keeping it updated.
Don't worry too much about making it perfect. I highly recommend HubSpot and highly recommend not trying to build your own. It's just a lot of extra work that's already been done, so why not take the best tools that are already out there, engineered by the best engineers and created by the best product teams, to help serve your goals?
The difference between qualification and discovery: qualification should happen as soon as possible. This is tied directly to understanding your ICP, or ideal client profile. When you have a clear person that you serve with a clear problem that you know how to solve, that makes your messaging, your marketing, your outreach, and your growth much easier. If you serve restaurants to help them manage their bookkeeping and taxes, it's a lot easier to find them. If you just offer services in bookkeeping and taxes, all of a sudden your messaging is far more general and resonates far less. If you're making under $10 million a year, you have not exhausted a niche. That doesn't mean you have to turn away business that you can properly serve and make money off of, but it does give you an advantage in how you craft your marketing plan.
The offer
I offered on the webinar yesterday the opportunity for three people to send me a sales call because, of course, I recommend that you record all of your sales calls. I will provide you a coaching breakdown of that call. I'm happy to sign an NDA for this, and there is no charge.
I'm also looking for one firm to analyze or design your sales process to help make things run more seamlessly.
Win: Playbook to Slides
AI win for this week: I took my playbook and had Claude automatically design and draft slides based on that. It made it tremendously easy, and I did make some edits to personalize it, but it took the weight off of making a presentation.
Helpers worth following
Since he keeps me on track every week, it's only fair he gets a mention here.
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Eduardo Gamez Runs Marketing for Fractionals. He's a growth partner for fractional CFOs, accounting, and consulting firms, specializing in growth marketing. He built my website, helped me set up all the technical parts of the webinar, and he's the one keeping me on track every week, from strategy down to actually hitting send on this newsletter. If you need help with marketing, reach out. Connect with Eduardo on LinkedIn |
That's it for now. I am on the road to meet up with old classmates and even catch up with some professors, especially my marketing professor from college, whose class I now see has guided a lot of the work that I do.
Go Pokes!
—
Luke
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