Increasing Your Marketing Prowess: How CPAs Can Market with Confidence
This article discusses common misconceptions that CPAs have about marketing and how even the most successful innovators have marketed their ideas effectively. It offers practical tips for CPAs to market themselves authentically by focusing on excellent client service, continuously improving their skills and committing to execution.
By Jack Thurman
What do Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? Besides being billionaires, trailblazers in technology and over the top driven people, another common quality would be laser focus on succeeding in their area of expertise. A critical step in their success was developing and delivering compelling stories of the value of their products, services and companies.
So why do many CPAs not effectively market their services? Some common reasons may include:
- The perspective that smart people don’t need to market their services
- The belief that they don’t have the extroverted personality needed to do it well
- They don’t have time to do marketing
Before we discuss how to effectively market, let’s deal with these obstacles or fallacies many CPAs use as rationale for not marketing.
Highly intelligent people don’t need to market their services. Review the names at the beginning of this article. Did any of these people diminish their reputation or the appearance of their intelligence by building and delivering compelling stories of their products or services? They all had to successfully market or sell themselves and their companies to financial backers, potential employees, consumers, and shareholders. Their ability to successfully communicate value actually augmented the perception of their intellect.
You need to be an extrovert to be a good marketer. Networking events like business luncheons, community fundraising events and industry happy hours may energize extroverts, but for many introverts, they can feel exhausting, awkward or even inauthentic. Fortunately, modern marketing has evolved well beyond the traditional model of working the room and exchanging business cards. Today, some of the most effective strategies for building visibility and trust don't require loud personalities or constant social interaction – they require substance, strategy and sincerity.
Recent insights from Harvard Business Review and other respected publications highlight that successful long-term marketing does not depend on whether a person is an extrovert or introvert, but whether the marketer has a sincere desire to provide value to the client or consumer of their services.
You don’t have time to do marketing. This is purely a time prioritization issue. Taking care of clients and attracting new ones are both priorities for personal and firm-wide success so it is imperative that you find time for both. A critical step in overcoming this obstacle and increasing the prioritization of marketing is building a structure and process. Schedule one- to two-hour blocks of marketing time within your week that are coordinated with your annual written action plans. The action plans need to be detailed and quantifiable, yet not so detailed that you spend an inordinate amount of time creating them.
Tips to Market Your Expertise
Now that we have addressed the common excuses for not marketing, let’s move on to three quick tips for how exceptionally busy CPAs can most effectively market their services.
Tip 1: You Be You. Don’t strive to be an extrovert or someone you are not. The first step is to continue to do what you care most about: take great care of your current clients. Draft ideas on how to improve your service to them. Some ideas include improving the speed of response time, better understanding clients through site visits, cross-selling other services that the firm provides, ensuring your work product is top quality, and discovering their problems so that you can work together towards a solution.
Why is the first step in marketing to take great care of our current clients? To use a quote from Horst Schulze, former COO of Ritz Carlton, “We market best by taking care of our clients best!” If your current clients are happy with your service, they are more likely to refer new clients, and receiving a referral from a client is probably the easiest and most rewarding manner to market.
Additionally, by providing great client service, your retention is strong and growth from new clients is more impactful. The most critical step in improving your marketing skills is to focus on taking great care of your current clients.
Tip 2: You Be You, Yet Continuously Improve. No businessperson, athlete or musician is successful in the long term without continuously taking proactive steps to improve on their skills. It is critical that a professional of any type seeks ways to increase or improve their productivity.
This is a step that few take, yet it quite often is the step that determines long-term success or long-term mediocrity. Bring along a partner in your firm who is exceptionally strong in marketing – and has a similar personality – to your next meeting with a prospect and ask them prior to the meeting how they would prepare for it.
After the meeting, ask them to candidly provide three to five areas of improvement for you, as well as three to five things you did well. Take detailed notes on their observations and determine strategies to improve next time.
Another step to improvement is not only to be highly prepared for each meeting as it reduces the stress of putting yourself out there, but also to become efficient in the meeting preparation. Make a quick agenda and walk through the flow – you don’t have to have all the answers and solve their problems on the spot. You just have to ask the right questions to determine the next action step.
Another highly impactful step for improving your marketing ability is self-examination of your credibility. Ask yourself very honestly, “Do my words, appearance and actions build credibility or trust with my clients or do they diminish my credibility or trust?”
David Maister, author of the book True Professionalism, once said, “Credibility isn’t just content expertise. It’s content expertise plus ‘presence,’ which refers to how we look, act, react, and talk about our content.” Based on your honest assessment of this, identify where you may need to improve – and take intentional steps to strengthen those areas.
Consider reading books such as True Professionalism or articles in the Harvard Business Review. A more advanced step may be hiring a professional coach to improve your mindset and one-on-one communication.
Tip 3: You Be You, Yet Continuously Improve and Continuously Execute! Often career professionals acknowledge they need to draft great marketing plans and market, read books and articles on the topic, and even hire a coach to improve. Yet with all of this preparation, there is still no execution.
To avoid this inactivity, build accountability. Go to your mentor or the partner you report to and show them your plan and goals and state you are going to execute on this and get their buy-in that they will assist you in encouraging you to execute. If you don’t have a strong mentor or partner, commit to a family member what you want to achieve.
In summary, make a written plan, knock the socks off your current clients and have an accountability partner to maximize marketing efforts.
About the Author: Jack Thurman is a retired partner of BKD, LLP where he was the Managing Partner of the BKD Wealth Advisors practice for 21 years.
Thanks to the Sponsors of Today's CPA Magazine
This content was made possible by the sponsors of this issue of Today's CPA Magazine:
Topics: