What Your Clients Really Want
From Rick Telberg's cpa2biz.com blog:
Clients are not interested in tax returns, financial statements, audits, bank reconciliations, etc. They expect you to take care of those things but they don't want to talk about them. What they want to talk about with you is how to make their businesses successful.
If you are managing your own practice, many of your management initiatives are also applicable to their businesses. Here are some discussion subjects relevant to your practice and your clients' businesses.
- Partner with other businesses. Promote their products or services in your reception room and your publications. Ask them to do the same for you.
- Small, frequent ads are better than large, infrequent ads. Before anyone remembers your ad, it will need to appear six times.
- Did you know that Google Local is taking the place of yellow pages?
- Increase prices--but also upgrade the service. Creating a package of services at a fixed price can offer convenience and value.
- Reduce prices--maybe a package of services at a lower price makes sense.
- Small businesses can't create brand identities the way big businesses do it. You need to configure your promotions to create quick responses. Use special offers with special value that have expiration dates.
- Use your customers and suppliers in marketing. Give them reasons to refer you. Just a thank you note may be enough. If you aren't sending thank you notes every day, you should.
For the complete article, click on the following link:
https://www.cpa2biz.com/News/Columnists/Telberg/The+Only+New+Years.htm.
I'm going to disagree that small companies have a harder time creating brand. I think many to many advertising, and the other high cost tools used to establish brand, are becoming easier to overcome using newer technologies. It's not been an issue for me. Indeed, it would probably be harder for me to establish brand if I were larger.