Ask Yourself Three Questions
- Where do most of your new clients come from?
- How do you know that your clients are happy?
- How can you effectively cross-sell services to your clients?
For most of us the answer to the first question is, “Most of my new clients are referrals.” Recommendations make up the bulk of new business for almost all professionals, not just accountants. Some people, however, find it awkward or overly forward (some even say ‘unethical’) to ask their clients outright for referrals. A survey built into your CPA website design can be a simple, non-pushy but effective method for gaining leads from clients.
Identifying happy clients is usually much easier than identifying unhappy ones. Clients, for example, will only refer your services or invite you to birthday parties if they’re happy with you. These clients can provide us with valuable information, though – you need to know what you’re doing right so that you can keep on doing it.
Unfortunately, many unhappy clients won’t tell you until it’s too late to fix the problem. A survey gives them a way to tell you what you need to improve in time to fix the problem!
Finally, a vital source of business is cross-selling new services to existing clients. But again, how can you go about effective cross-selling without being pushy?
A survey can be a very simple, cost-effective solution for all of these problems. A quick and easy client survey allows you to gauge the satisfaction of your clients, nip potential problems in the bud, cross-sell services and gain hot leads.
Few firms regularly survey their clients, and even fewer get surveys right. Typical reasons given for avoiding surveys altogether include: “We won’t learn anything we don’t already know”; and “We’re too busy serving clients to survey them”.
Behind these excuses lies a dangerous attitude: “We’re worried that we’ll hear something we don’t want to hear.”
Designing Your Survey
Even when firms do survey, the questionnaires are often too long, too complicated, and produce results that don’t really lead to any obvious conclusions or actions.
Avoids these traps. Keep it down to a few well chosen questions so clients are more likely to take the time to complete it.
Carefully word the questions to get straight to the heart of the matter and at the same time make them general enough that the client can say what he wants to say. A good survey will provide you with precisely the information you need to decide on effective follow-up actions.
Example
The Questions
- Can you suggest any ways that we can improve our service to you?
- Our mission is to help you achieve success on your terms. To what extent have we helped you do this in the past year?
- We are here to help you achieve your personal and business objectives. Where do you want to be this time next year?
- What would it mean to you to achieve these goals?
- What more can we do to help you in the next year?
- Is there anyone you know that you feel would benefit from our expertise? If so, you may wish to use the space to provide contact information. We always appreciate your referrals!
What the answers can tell us
- This question gives clients an opportunity to express dissatisfaction, but forces them to do so in a way that gives you constructive feedback and an opportunity to fix the problem.
- This is a chance for the client to give you positive feedback, but it requires them to be specific, enabling you to identify areas where things are really working well. If this client appreciates a particular service, so will others.
- Questions 3, 4, and 5 are all about positioning yourself as a trusted adviser. This question will help you identify your clients goals and judge the feasibility of your clients expectations.
- This will help you understand your client. There are very few “selling points” (things that people really want). This question might help you identify what selling points are most important to your client. Does he want power? Security? Status? Acceptance? Is he just looking for a good time? This question often provides us with insight as to what this clients best selling point is.
- These answers allow you to further identify the right services to cross-sell. The answers will give you an ice-breaker when calling the client: “I noticed that in our survey you said you wanted to cut down on the time you spend on routine admin work. Did you know that we can help?”
- This is a great, non-pushy way to gain strong leads, since it forces the client to think about specific contacts.
Adding the Survey to your Accounting Website
Every CPA Website Design provider is different. If you are already one of our clients adding a survey to your accounting website is free, and getting started is easy using our Customizable Online Feedback Forms. If you are a Gold or Platinum client just type up your questions and send them to support@cpasitesolutions.com and ask us to set you up with a Customer Satisfaction Survey page. If you are a silver client just log into your portal and click “Modify Your Site”. Go to “Add Page”. Select “Form Page”. Click next. You can rename the page and position it on the Nav Bar normally. To modify the form itself, just click on it.
If you have your website through a different CPA Web Design firm you will need to contact them to determine availability and cost for your online survey.
It doesn’t matter how good your CPA Website is if nobody knows about it. In order to make money off a site, people need to KNOW about it.
Once you have a website, you’ll want to publicize it as widely as possible.
We’ll be talking about these strategies a LOT! Put your URL on all your stationery, business cards etc. Also… Include it in your email signatures and ask your friends and clients to mention it to their contacts.
And remember the golden rule of website marketing!!!
Online directories such as Superpages, YellowBook, and City Search can also be useful ways to drive traffic to your site.
You’ll also want to consider search engines. There are various ways of approaching search engine optimization. Submitting your site to Google, Ask. com etc is easy, but getting to the top of the rankings and staying there is not and, depending on what you want to achieve, can be quite expensive. Google offers pay-per-click advertising for search terms, which can be very effective. This subject requires a whole fact sheet for itself – if you’d like CPASiteSolutions’ free guide to search engines, email a request to ken@cpasitesolutions.com.
Who’s Kenny Marshall?
Kenny is a vice president and marketing consultant with CPASiteSolutions.com, a leading provider of websites for accounting and CPA firms. He has been marketing accounting services for over 10 years and has been working almost exclusively with internet marketing for more than half that time.
In all my years designing websites for CPA’s one of the most infuriating problems I have is when a new client comes to me with an existing website ready to take the next step and we find out that he doesn’t even own the domain name he’s been using for years!
Don’t be taken in by this scam. Many web hosts will offer to reserve the domain name for you, then turn around and reserve the domain in their own name in an account that you can’t access. And don’t think that dealing with a large company is any protection! My biggest competitor does this, and they actually charge people a $50 fee when they leave if they want to take the domain name with them!
When allowing a host to purchase your domain name ask them some screening questions:
- Will the domain be registered in my name?
- Will I be listed as the “Administrative Contact”?
- Will the domain be reserved in a retail account in my name with a control panel that I can access?
- Can I lock you out of that control panel if I choose to?
- Can I continue to manage my domain through this control panel even if I decide to stop hosting through you?
If the answer to ANY of these questions is “No” politely inform the representative you are speaking with that you will reserve the domain yourself.
It is easy to register your own domain and it will guarantee that you can keep control of your address even when you change website providers. Registering a URL is easy and usually very cheap (less than $15 a year).
My company provides a service that meets all these criteria and caters specifically to accountants and CPAs. When I do a client registration I set them up with a retail account in their name on this service. They can lock me out simply by changing their password and if they ever leave our hosting service they will be able to continue to manage their domain themselves. They not only own their domain, they actually have administrative control over it.
Your domain name is your real estate on the web. Make sure you actually own it and not your web host!
TIP
When you change your Email address always make sure you log into your domain name registrars site first and make sure they have the new email. It may save you a HUGE headache when the time comes to renew.
I can tell you exactly what their response will be. Your son or daughter will look at you like you’re an alien (you know that look) and say something like, “You don’t have a website?”
Out of the mouths of babes, eh?
Ask anyone between the age of twelve and twenty-one: the web makes the world go ’round. Whether it’s renting a summer house, buying insurance or choosing a dog groomer, the first thing most of us do these days is consult the internet. If you’re offering a service in a competitive marketplace and your prospects can’t find you on the internet you will miss out.
Professional service firms are no different.
And the website is not just there for anonymous browsers googling for “accountants in Sacramento”. These days you can bet that word-of-mouth referrals will have a quick look for your site before deciding to become a client. Referral sources will pass on your URL or perhaps even just say “they’re on the web”.
We’re beyond the time where accounting firms can get away with not having a website. Today, if you don’t have a site, people will wonder why.
Maybe you just can’t keep up?
And this will only become more and more the case – it’s never going to go back to the way it was before the world wide web came along, so go out RIGHT NOW and start looking for a good CPA Site Design Firm.
