...And other essential career and marketing tips from the experts.
by Rick Telberg
At Large
There was a time when (and there still are places where) marketing and accounting mixed like oil and water - they didn't. In fact, until 1977 it was actually illegal to try to promote accounting services.
Even today, marketing is considered irrelevant, unimportant, or unprofessional by too many in the profession.
In fact, marketing is integral to any and every business, every career, every professional. If you're part of the free-enterprise system, you're already marketing, whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not.
That, at least to Sally Glick, chief marketing officer of J.H. Cohn CPAs and president of the Association of Accounting Marketing, is the key difference in the accounting profession today.
"Marketing is integral to the firm," she says. "It is as essential as paper and pencils and CPE and technical skills. You can't just cost-segregate it out anymore. Without marketing you don't have clients; without marketing you don't have a business."
Glick, along with other luminaries of professional services marketing, such as Larry Bodine and Gale Crosley, will be joining me at The Accounting Firm Marketing Forum, Oct. 21-22, at AICPA headquarters in New York. Download color brochure in PDF.
So I asked a few of the faculty members for their current thinking on the state of marketing in the profession. Their answers are honest, and sometimes provocative - perhaps a preview of what conference-goers will get.
To Crosley, an Atlanta-based consultant, CPA firms are racing to adjust to the fallout from the auditing shakeup. "Sarbanes-Oxley is driving large opportunities down-market and creating opportunities for new offerings," Crosley notes.
And yet, many CPAs, expert in business as they are, still misunderstand the difference between marketing and sales. "The single biggest mistake CPA firms make is confusing marketing with sales and product management," Crosley says. "They can't build out a comprehensive practice growth initiative if they don't know the difference in the functional elements."
Is there hope for the shy or socially challenged CPA? Yes, says Crosley decisively. "Rainmakers can be made," she says. "No question about it."
Larry Bodine, a veteran of professional services marketing based in Glen Ellyn, IL., picks up where Crosley leaves off.
"The profession is starting to embrace the sales function right now," he says. "So far, only 12 percent of accounting firms have hired a professional salesperson to develop targets, leads and meetings. There is huge interest in the topic; however, most marketing professionals are limited to conducting research, strategizing with partners, editing new business proposals, identifying new business prospects and writing new business proposals. It's time to take the marketing director along on the sales call."
Today it is more important than ever to distinguish yourself and your firm. "Recent events have created brand confusion," Bodine says. "I can tell because when people discuss their current accounting firm, they have to explain what their name used to be. A great deal of brand equity was lost by scandal, reform and consolidation."
After chatting with Bodine, five key steps emerged as critical to making marketing a habit:
1. Never eat lunch alone. Get out of your office and take a client or referral source to lunch. "Business comes in belly-to-belly," Bodine says, "as one partner told me who had the belly to go along with the advice."
2. You can't get along without technology. You can, but only if you want to be invisible. Without a customer-relationship management system, you can't tell whom you know as a target client and which partners know them; it creates marketing anarchy. Meanwhile, the Web has become the new Yellow Pages; clients even use the Web to look up phone numbers. Certainly they will use the Web to profile your firm before they ever call the firm or request any printed marketing materials. A bad Web site will actually cause your firm to be disqualified from new work. And not using email - to send out e-newsletters and alerts - is equivalent to not having a phone, fax or FedEx. Staying behind on technology is a great way to go out of business gradually.
3. Focus on your clients, not yourself. Firms too often will describe their practices on their Web sites and printed marketing materials. They will elaborate on their internal administrative structure in an approach I call "marketing your organization."
Bodine says he saw this mistake at a Midwest firm that has a real estate practice, a real estate taxation practice, plus a taxation practice. "These distinctions serve only to confuse clients. They can't tell which practice they should choose."
Instead, accounting firms should focus on how their clients think: they see themselves as members of an industry, Bodine advises. Therefore, accounting firms should present themselves according to the industries they serve. An easy way to start is to print out a list of the firm's top 50 clients. Sort them roughly into industries and focus on the issues of that industry.
4. Rainmakers can be made, through training and practice, but they have to want to market. If accountants just want to bill hours and stay at their desk, you can't make them market. These service partners will do fine so long as there are major clients to inherit. Other partners are naturally comfortable with networking, speaking and writing. These are all learnable skills. But the trick is to figure out what aspects of marketing individual accountants like - some may hate networking but love writing; others may be willing to join a charity board but not want to speak in front of a crowd. They should build a personal marketing plan around the activities they enjoy.
5. Finally, don't try to wing it. "Write down your strategic marketing plan," Bodine urges. "Most firms don't have one. It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, where Alice asks the cat, 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," the Cat says.
"I don't much care where," said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
The question for you, whether you're trying to build a practice or even a career: Do you know where you're going?
