Could These 5 Steps Help Your Accounting Firm Acquire More Clients?
For many accounting and CPA firms, gaining more clients is their top priority, but it isn’t always easy to do so in a market that’s increasingly competitive.
If your accounting firm wants to boost its client numbers, here are 5 steps you could take to do exactly that:
- Target high-value clients
Targeting your ideal clients can lead to significant gains, and here are a few ways to achieve this:
- Build your services around a particular sector, industry or business type and outline this clearly
- Refine the types of value-added services and software you aim to provide to your clients
- Make sure that both your marketing and your website are targeting clients that match your long-term strategy and goals
- Invest in digital marketing
There are so many more ways to connect digitally with an audience today, that not taking advantage of this simply doesn’t make good business sense. By investing in expert digital marketing services, you can better promote your business and connect with clients in a way you may never have been able to before.
- Try to gain referrals from existing clients
Winning over business owners through referrals from existing clients is achievable, but you will need to do a few things in order to help this along:
- Make sure that your existing clients are happy with the service you’re providing for them
- Revise the services you offer clients and where necessary, update them to provide what referred clients might be looking for from you
- Set up an incentivizing system whereby existing clients can refer your services to their contacts, while being rewarded for doing so, whether this be through reduced fees or a pro bono project
- Utilize tech to give more value to clients
Many modern business owners are incredibly tech savvy, and typically expect their accountants to be familiar with the same technological advancements. By creating a robust software foundation and investing in automation, you can attract more businesses keen to move away from traditional, potentially riskier firms. In addition, automation and other types of tech can give your firm more time to complete their work, which naturally increases efficiency, but could also mean that you don’t need as many staff to complete the work. Or, you could invest in outsourcing and save money associated with in-house accountants.
By automating some low-level tasks, giving cloud access to your clients, and using smart tools for reporting to give clients more effective and insightful guidance and support, you could make yourself a lot more attractive to tech-savvy firms and give them the confidence to hire you.
- Hire the best people
Being able to provide your clients with an outstanding service doesn’t just come down to having a team with a good head for figures, or a workforce who are able to utilize technology and automation to provide their services. To provide genuine value to clients, accounting firms must employ professionals with fantastic interpersonal skills, and who are able to build lasting relationships with clients.Acquiring new and valuable clients doesn’t have to be an uphill battle, and by trying out some of the steps listed above, your accounting firm could be well on its way to a client list that’s positively bulging at the seams!