CPA - Accounting
Firm Marketing Newsletter:
How to communicate with prospects
In this week's
issue we take a look at what makes communication work for or
against your objective of attracting qualified prospective clients
to your firm and signing them onto your services.
This new approach
has made significant difference in sales success and profits
for practices round the globe... so it's something real and proven.
Quite an eye-opener, if I say so!
CPA marketing
communication: Creating that winning realization in the mind
of the prospect
Marketing and
sales are all about communication. Thus, the laws of communication
have a lot to do with how successfully you can FIND new prospects
and SIGN THEM ON as new clients.
Communication
is not just "talking."
I can chew
someone's ear off even if he doesn't hear or WANT to hear a word
of what I'm telling him. I can tell him how great I am and how
silly he would be not to make use of this opportunity that I
am offering. It would still be communication – but of course,
it wouldn't get me anywhere.
It's only when
you want your communication to cause a DESIRED EFFECT in your
prospect that you need to PLAN your communication very wisely.
For like it
or not, you always cause an effect with communication. In marketing,
that effect is either FOR or AGAINST you.
To be RECEIVED,
the communication has to be ACCEPTABLE for the receiver. This
is where the traditional presentation -type marketing often goes
awry.
Let me give
you an example.
Let's say that
I would want to interest accounting professionals to use my marketing
consulting services. So, here's my sales pitch done the traditional
way:
"Hello.
My name is Harry Kafka. I have 25 years of experience in specialized
marketing. I have serviced many multibillion corporations and
even done a presidential campaign.
"I
have received a lot of acknowledgment as a leading developer
of new, effective marketing systems for industries that are commonly
considered impossible to market inexpensively and with guaranteed
results. I have worked with some two-thousand-plus accounting
firms and practices.
"Now
you have the opportunity to use my services to get an unfair
competitive edge in your area and get new, year round clients
every month with guaranteed 22% increase in your profits."
Now, if you
would receive this kind of a message, how would YOU find it?
IRRESISTIBLE?
Would you RUN
to contact me, all eager to be helped by such an expert?
Right. Instead,
you would dismiss it without a second glance.
I doubt you
would even bother reading all of it.
Why?
Simple.
I am TALKING
ABOUT MYSELF all the time.
I'm aggrandizing
myself, promoting my self-proclaimed excellence... boasting how
great my expertise is and generally making an ass out of myself
by asserting my own importance to you, the person who SHOULD
be the most important one is this communication!
Thus, this
violates the acceptability of my communication.
Once acceptability
goes, there's absolutely NO hope of creating any INTEREST toward
myself or my services.
And good manners
went out the window from the word go...
Now, hand to
heart... isn't this how the traditional doctrine of accountancy
marketing TELLS you to do? They tell you to go out there and
let everyone know how great you are, right?
And when you
do... well, results speak for themselves.
All right,
so is it wrong to make your achievements known, to attempt impressing
prospective clients about the quality of your services and the
level of your expertise.
No it isn't.
That part is valid in any marketing doctrine.
It's only the
way it's achieve where most go astray.
The successful
way is NOT to say it, NOT to make any claims... but plan your
communication so that your PROSPECT comes up with those ideas
instead.
If that occurs
then he WILL realise the high quality of your services and the
unique expertise that you possess. Furthermore, he will TRUST
those realisations (facts)... they were HIS ideas, after all,
right?
CPA marketing
communication: How to induce ideas to your prospective clients
So how do you
achieve the seemingly impossible, have someone come up with the
exact ideas you wanted him to realise?
Well, let's
backtrack it. You need to figure out what you want your prospects
to believe and then find out what information they need and what
questions you must ask (and how do you create a circumstance
in which this all is completely natural) so that what he ANSWERS
is more or less the datum you wanted him to understand and associate
with you.
Does this sound
complicated? Well, it may be that way if you have to create the
system... but it's really very simple once you HAVE the tool
to do it. So simple in fact that almost anyone can use the tool
and achieve the expected results!
But let's look
at how to figure it out.
What interests
your prospect most?
HIS OWN business,
his own opportunities, his own problems... and above all, his
own NEED OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
Like you, he
has no desire to listen while I BRAG about my achievements.
Like you, he
is not READY to accept HELP from anyone he doesn't know right
on the first contact.
Like you, he
will DISLIKE the fact that I, in my approach, actually TELL him
that HE HAS A PROBLEM.
So you create
a list of questions, ensuring they advance from an agreed-upon
reality (HIS reality) on the subject matter to what he needs
to realise to sign onto your services.
You would need
to do some research first and interview a good number of decision-makers...
and then create your tool and test that to find the correct sequence
of questions and perfect each point of the interview so it takes
the prospect onto the next level.. and so on.
Princples of
CPA marketing communication
 Prospects are valuable. We want to
do all in our power to OBTAIN more qualified prospects and make
a presentation that creates such a good impression that every
prospect decides to sign on as a new client out of his or
her own FREE WILL.
For that to
occur, you need to work with some cunning in your advertising
and presentation.
You cannot
just SAY OUT LOUD those things that you want your prospect to
believe and understand.
It doesn't
work that way, like my little self-aggrandizing "message"
in this issue shows. There's a sort of automatic rejection for
information coming from another person, especially when we feel
he has a vested interest in having us believe his data.
Thus, whatever
you want to him to believe, DO NOT SAY IT OUT LOUD. I know it
seems crazy but that's how it is.
To make him
understand and BELIEVE that he should sign on, you need to say
and ask something ELSE.
This something
else has to be such that, once HE looks at it and answers the
question, WILL RESULT IN A SELF-CREATED REALIZATION along the
lines of what you want to convince him about.
You sort of
"tickle" it out of him by being interested in his views
and asking for his informed opinions and preferences on various
aspects of accounting services, their usages, shortages, benefits
and whatnots.
This is actually
the insider secret of how some practices CLOSE 80 PERCENT OF
THEIR PROSPECTS onto their accounting services at the FIRST MEETING
with business owners.
I know you
think it cannot be done. That's fine and I don't want to enforce
any facts on you as it is vital that you evaluate things for
yourself and trust your own instincts.
Yet whether
or not you think it's possible, won't change the reality nor
will it effect that huge closing rate of those practices.
The approach
is gradual – just the correct gradient, increasing interest
as you go along.
The approach
is innovative – you only need to read out the ready questions
and LET THE PROSPECT'S MIND DO THE REST: He will look at each
of the subjects and form an opinion.
These opinions
each BUILD on the previous ones... each in fact a small decision
but so innocent that he won't even think of them as "decisions"
but rather like realizations.
He will feel
GOOD, in other words, quite clever and very comfortable... and
so will YOU, of course, as things are going swimmingly!
This approach
is COMFORTABLE for both for the accounting professional and the
prospect. He will see it as receiving a very pleasant SERVICE
from you instead of being sold to.
This the Client
Requirements Interview in Part 4 of your Modern Accountancy Marketing
Course
and just one example of a multitude of ready-to-use tools for
marketing communication.
You don't win
clients by effort or might. All the money in the world won't
guarantee success in signing on new clients.
But intelligent
marketing communication tools will.
And if you
venture to try these tools, you may find out how effortless it
can be to let your PROSPECT do the talking, thinking and SELLING
of your services!
Have a successful
week,
Best wishes,
Harry Kafka
HDK Consultants
Ltd
32 Manning Close
Richmond Square
East Grinstead RH19 2DR
West Sussex, United Kingdom
Tel. 01342-328 116
From U.S: 011-44-1342-328-116
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