3 insights to boost business development and marketing for your firm

The majority of accounting firm leaders didn’t go to school for marketing and business development, so it makes sense that these tasks are often not a priority. This is new territory, but it’s certainly not out of scope for firms.

The bottom line: Having a solid business development and marketing plan are a necessity for healthy growth.

This guide brings together several top industry influencers to walk through business development strategies. It will cover how to master business development, including identifying the customer journey, setting prospecting strategies, and acing the business development conversation.

Meet the influencers

• Jason Blumer, CPA, Partner, Blumer & Associates CPAs and CEO & Founder of Thriveal
• Jeff Phillips, CEO, Padgett Business Services and Co-founder, Accountingfly
• Jina Etienne, CPA, CGMA Principal Consultant, Etienne Consulting
• Misty Megia, CEO, Misty Megia LLC
• Amy Franko, Founder and CEO, Amy Franko Associate

Insight 1: Understand the client journey

Before you start any marketing or business development effort, it’s important to understand the defined stages of client conversion. 

Misty Megia, CEO of Misty Megia LLC explains the seven stages of the client journey and why each touch point is critical to reach your growth goals:

1. Research: Do your homework to identify ideal clients. This can include conducting a client intake survey to identify how the client heard about you, uncover pain points, and understand their long-term goals. Offering post-engagement surveys also provides valuable insight into your ideal market. 
2. Awareness: Ensure you’re seen and heard by creating relevant, helpful content like blogs, podcasts, and social posts and then launch content across multiple channels. If you support specific industries, write articles for trade publications and post industry-specific content online.
3. Exploration: Create relevant, timely, helpful content to build consistent and positive brand awareness. This can include blog articles, education-based docs like eBooks and guides, and social posts. More people are exploring online to find answers on business issues and insight on trends, so create informative materials that drive prospects back to your website.
4. Evaluate: Deeper evaluation helps you continue to mold your distinct brand, develop content that resonates with your target audience(s), and enhance the client journey overall. Assess your competitors, identify your key differentiators, and define your firm’s core values and ideal clients (e.g., specific verticals).
5. Purchase: This is the point when the client is ready to hire your firm. Make this process as frictionless as possible. Identify what steps can be automated and what you can do to reduce barriers of entry.
6. Consume: This stage identifies how the client consumes your services. The objective here is to make every interaction delightful. For example, your onboarding process must be smooth and simple and service delivery should be automated and in the cloud.
7. Get help: Offer several methods for clients to get help such as via phone, instant messaging (e.g., Slack), text, and chat. Make it clear on your website how clients can get help and consider offering one to-many education to address common questions (think FAQ documents and webinars).

‍"Understanding the customer journey is one of the quickest ways to identify opportunities for organizations to grow, increase revenue, and expand reach.” - Misty Megia, CEO, Misty Megia LLC

Insight 2: Soup up your business development

Business development plays a key role in modern accounting firms. This includes such elements as following a niche-market strategy, building strategic alliances, and understanding “trigger” events.

Influencer Amy Franko, Founder and CEO of Amy Franko Associates, offers five proven strategies to accelerate movement in the area of business development.

1. Focus on verticals: Identifying specific niches allows you to build vertical expertise and provide services that are scalable across niche clients. It also supports message alignment across your niche client base to realize a lower opportunity cost and higher ROI.
2. Build strategic alliances: Grow faster by identifying single sources for multiple referrals. Start by looking for sources within complementary industries that support your verticals (e.g., insurance agencies or law firms). Alliance partners can deliver prospects to your door via “warm” introductions. 
3. Define your process: Failure to build a sound business development program can often be attributed to process inconsistencies. Consider adopting tactics such as creating a uniform outreach structure (e.g., 3+3+3 = three calls, three emails, three times per week). Also, blocking time to devote solely to business development efforts and implementing a CRM (customer relationship management) solution to track progress and prospect follow-up.
4. Monitor trigger events: A trigger event is a significant change to the status quo that indicates the need for a conversation. Such events can include an industry shake up, a change in leadership, or current world events.
5. Earn conversations: Combining the above strategies opens the door to deeper conversations. Continue to build vertical expertise, make warm connections via strategic alliances, define uniform processes, and monitor and act on trigger events to earn conversations with key decision makers.

Insight 3: Master conversations

Once firms understand the core business development strategies, the next step is mastering the business development conversation. Franko explains the four intelligence categories that support successful conversations.

1. Industry trends: Stay current on industry trends to establish your firm as an expert and trusted source. Going into a conversation, know the key indicators that impact a prospective client’s business over the next 1-3 years. 
2. Leadership vision: Ask prospects pointed questions about where they want to take their business over the next few years. Then use this data to guide the conversation and show clients how they can achieve their vision. This is where you showcase the value of your services. 
3. Organizational challenges: What are the barriers that hinder decision makers in meeting their goals? Top issues typically fall into three buckets—people, processes, and technology. Dig deep to uncover organizational challenges and then drive the conversation toward the resolution, which include your services. 
4. Key initiatives and goals: Identify major projects a business has taken on within the last six months to a year. This will help you better understand the prospective client’s main goals. Make it your business to know their business, and then work your services into the meeting-of-goals equation.

“Research shows that clients value the overall business development experience with you, and it’s a key factor in the decision to select your firm.” - Amy Franko, Founder and CEO, Amy Franko Associates

Key takeaways

• Business development is an everyday job. 
• Building awareness around the firm’s expertise requires educational content, pushed out consistently to multiple channels. 

Key action items for change‍

• Identify a business development task force that will meet weekly to define the firm’s strategy and identify a champion to ensure ongoing progress. 
• As part of task force duties, define a sub-strategy for collecting intelligence on ideal prospects (e.g., specific vertical markets) and potential strategic alliances. This can be used as a template across verticals. 
• Build a library of education-based content (blogs, articles, eBooks, social posts) to build awareness online and drive qualified leads back to the firm.

Start your journey to marketing success today

To prepare your accounting firm for the future, you need foundational strategies and actionable todos. Developing a value-based pricing ecosystem requires vision and focus. We hope that this guide, with key insights and tactics from industry influencers, will serve as a manual to help accelerate your business development.

If you’re interested in learning more about BILL can help you grow your firm with AP/AR or  Spend & Expense, reach out to your account manager or request a demo.