A Question to Engage Client Accountants

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Last week, I con­ducted the first of six weekly online ses­sions to help advi­sors develop and imple­ment a plan to attract new clients in 2011.

In that ses­sion, I talked about how one advi­sor sets aside time each Fri­day to meet with the accoun­tant or lawyer of one of his key clients … and how he makes these meet­ings happen.

After­wards, I got this email from one of the par­tic­i­pants on the call:

I’ve gone for lunches with clients CA’s and lawyers in the past.  I find get­ting a meet­ing is not much of a prob­lem. I find that the dif­fi­culty can be in main­tain­ing ongo­ing con­tact that is a) mean­ing­ful, b) rel­e­vant and c) inter­est­ing to the COI.

When 2 or 3 months rolls by and it’s time to check-in with the COI, I would like some good ideas about what to call about. Any sug­ges­tions?

Engag­ing accountants

I responded by shar­ing a  recent con­ver­sa­tion with a suc­cess­ful advi­sor in Dal­las after my talk at his firm’s conference.

I’d talked about ways to engage prospects and he told me what he says at the end of meet­ings with client pro­fes­sion­als and high poten­tial prospects, where he feels the con­ver­sa­tion has gone well and the peo­ple he’s talk­ing to seem relaxed and interested.

He fin­ishes by saying:

One final thing. My team and I spend a ton of time each week mon­i­tor­ing the best sources we can find on a broad range of issues.

In that process, we often find arti­cles that address key con­cerns for some of our clients and send those along to them.

Some­times my client’s big con­cerns are things like the out­look for inter­est rates, house prices or the dol­lar, other times the main issues for clients aren’t related to money at all … for exam­ple, I have sev­eral clients strug­gling with lack of moti­va­tion among chil­dren in their twen­ties, I have oth­ers who are wor­ried about what to do with U.S. vaca­tion prop­er­ties that have declined in value.

Clients often tell us they find these arti­cles very helpful.

If you’re inter­ested, that’s some­thing I’d be happy to offer you also. So tell me, is there any one issue that if we came across some really inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion, you’d like to receive it.

Four key questions

I asked this advi­sor four ques­tions about this approach:

First, what kind of gen­eral reac­tion does he get?

What kind of issues emerge?

What does he say when prospects or accoun­tants shared a con­cern with him?

And finally, how does he fol­low through on an ongo­ing basis?

The gen­eral reac­tion he receives:

The advi­sor reminded me that he only asks this ques­tion to prospect and client pro­fes­sion­als at the end of meet­ings when he’s been get­ting pos­i­tive vibes. In light of that, the over­all response has been very pos­i­tive … he gets spe­cific responses over half the time. And even in cases where peo­ple tell him there’s noth­ing off­hand they can think of, no one seems offended.

The issues which emerge:

On the types of answers he gets, he finds that more often than not peo­ple pick up on the exam­ples he uses. If he tells prospects in retire­ment that exist­ing clients are con­cerned about issues like out­liv­ing their money, sav­ing taxes and the low inter­est they’re get­ting on sav­ings, those are the con­cerns peo­ple play back.

If he tells accoun­tants that other CPAs he’s talked to have expressed con­cerns about ways to bring in new clients and the eco­nom­ics of run­ning small and mid sized firms, then gen­er­ally they respond that those are the things that they worry about also.

And if he uses exam­ples of under­wa­ter vaca­tion prop­er­ties or unmo­ti­vated chil­dren, those con­cerns tend to come up as pri­or­i­ties as well.

His response:

When some­one voices a con­cern on which they’d like to receive infor­ma­tion, he thanks them for shar­ing this, asks for their con­tact info and tells them that while he can’t make any promises, if he sees some­thing inter­est­ing he’ll send it along.

He imme­di­ately black­ber­ries his assis­tant, ask­ing her to go online and look for a recent arti­cle on this topic. A favourite source is the Wall Street Jour­nal; while WSJ​.com lim­its access to non­sub­scribers to the first para­graph of most sto­ries, it has a ser­vice which allows advi­sors to email peo­ple full arti­cles, even if the recip­i­ent hasn’t signed up as a WSJ online sub­scriber.  His goal is to send a fol­low up email to the prospect or accoun­tant in the next day, includ­ing an ini­tial arti­cle on their issue wher­ever possible.

Fol­low­ing up afterwards:

On the final issue of how he fol­lowed through, this advi­sor has iden­ti­fied half a dozen hot but­ton issues shared by many exist­ing and prospec­tive clients and pro­fes­sion­als; among these are fore­casts for the US econ­omy, inter­est rates, the dol­lar and house prices.

In the course of his reg­u­lar read­ing, he looks for arti­cles on these issues that he can send … and by focus­ing on areas that are com­mon across clients and prospects, is able to deliver rel­e­vant, value added infor­ma­tion in a time effi­cient fash­ion.  Note that he is care­ful not to over­whelm clients and prospects, his goal is to send some­thing every month or two, always remind­ing the recip­i­ent that they’re get­ting this infor­ma­tion because they’d asked for it.

Let’s be clear, this approach will not be a fit for every advi­sor. But for advi­sors look­ing to build bridges with high poten­tial prospects and client accoun­tants, con­sider whether you can mod­ify this approach to make it work for you.

A ques­tion to engage client accountants

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Tags: Accountant, Accountants, Contact, Email, Hap, House Prices, Interest Rates, Lack Of Motivation, Lawyer, Lawyers, Money, Online Help, Participants, Prospects, Sessions, Vacation Properties, Value Clients
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