A recent CPA Practice Advisor article entitled How Accounting Firms Can Prioritize Client Relations uncovered a surprising truth—the main reason new clients part ways with their accounting firm is because the firm isn’t responsive enough, particularly when it comes to emails.
With a possible recession on the horizon, it’s more important than ever for CPA firms to attract and retain clients, especially since the profession is under increased pressure (for example, fewer young people are choosing to go into accounting).
If You Don’t Keep Track of Your Clients, You’ll Lose Them
According to a Sage.com annual survey of the accounting profession, 46 percent of CPA consider building client relationships to be the most important success skill for accountants today, while 82 percent of accountants assert that clients are expecting more of them—demanding quicker service without a rate increase.
How can accounting firms stay on top of client communications and client requests when the emails are flying hot and heavy and CPAs are running around like The Flash trying to please everyone?
The answer is a Customer Relationship Management system, a sophisticated software tool that keeps track of all your client relationships and reminds you to follow up. Fortunately, we here at Engineered Advisory have a solution for you—ABLE CRM, our subsidiary devoted to helping CPAs funnel their limited time into the most productive relationship-building tasks.
The ABLE Solution
The ABLE customer relationship management (CRM) system simplifies the process of identifying and managing client relationships. It organizes all your contacts in one place so you can differentiate among your various relationships and understand how they contribute to your accounting firm’s growth. ABLE helps you define and manage these relationships in an intuitive way.
ABLE recognizes that 20 percent of your relationships drive 80% of your results, and its automated CRM system helps you identify these key relationships.
Once you install the ABLE CRM, it’s easy to follow the ABLE three-step process:
- Understand which relationships require high-priority care.
- Devote time to these relationships to understand their needs.
- Use ABLE to monitor your progress and keep up-to-date on your relationships.
Collaborate With Other Team Members To Meet Client Needs
By facilitating team communication, ABLE lets you share new opportunities with other team members and provide superior service to your clients. With our CRM, when a CPA in your firm identifies a client need, they can easily refer that client to another CPA in your firm who specializes in that need, keeping the business in-house. By expanding your service offering, you make it possible to charge higher fees.
How Does Your Client Communicate?
We don’t realize it, but we all communicate in different styles. Via its DISC® Profiling System, ABLE can actually identify the behavioral style of the person you’re addressing, which helps you achieve more effective communication. If you can understand where the other party is coming from and you can relate to them better, your sales performance will improve.
Track Your Sales Pipeline
When you're generating new business for your accounting firm, ABLE lets you see exactly how the sales pipeline is progressing. Since it reveals accountability across all team members, you can make sure that no important details are left unattended. Consequently, you can close a greater number of deals in a shorter timeframe.
ABLE’s Deals Pipeline enables you to keep on top of your sales opportunities. You can also analyze referrals, while keeping team members accountable.
By using the Deals Pipeline, you can see who’s responsible for the task, where the task sits in the sales funnel, and when it’s likely to close,. As a result, you can strategize your next moves for addressing your most promising sales prospects so you can seal the deal. It streamlines the process of managing your sales pipeline.
Stay on Top of Your Client Relationships
For CPAs, there’s too much at stake in client relationships not to make them a paramount priority. ABLE’s advanced CRM system puts client relationships under your control, with unexcelled visibility into how your organization is handling client care. Contact ABLE to see about catapulting your firm’s approach to customer relationship management into the twenty-first century!
