Mark Wickersham explains why accounting firms should pre-qualify clients before investing time. Use a client intake questionnaire and a short 10-15 minute discovery call to assess fit, then reserve 60 minutes for a separate diagnostic meeting where you uncover pain points and set value-based pricing.
Questions this video answers
1996
10–15 minutes (maximum suggested 30 minutes)
No — the speaker advises not to discuss price in the initial call
At least 60 minutes
Chapters
You must, you must, you must pre qualify your clients, your prospective meetings, because your time is precious. I've done this video. I was inspired by a wonderful post by Sam in the community where he shared a success story with his client intake questionnaire. I'll put a link to that below somewhere so you can use, you can see what Sam said. So anyway, if you're watching Sam, thank you so much for the inspiration for this particular video. So let me tell you about my mistakes. First, back in 1996, I started off my accounting firm as a sole practitioner. And for the first two, three years, I'd never heard of ideal client profile. And I took on anybody. So anybody that wants a meeting with me, a potential client, I would meet. I spent so much time meeting clients. Now, the first few months of my practice, that was fine. I had nothing else to do. I had no clients, that was okay. But as I built a client base, it then became challenging having to service clients and also go out to meet brand new clients. Now, that wasn't a problem if they were great clients or great prospects. And I signed them up and I was growing my client base. But what I found was that many, many meetings I had when I met the prospective client. I soon realized this was not a client for me. And so I either ended up taking them on because I wanted to justify my time for the meeting and that caused pain further down the line, or I just walked away and I'd wasted a trip to them because I used to, in those days, it wasn't virtual. And sometimes that I'd have a meeting that might be an hour long, plus half an hour, an hour of travel time, all wasted time. So that was a big mistake. And so what we have to do is we need to make sure that before we meet and talk to potential clients, we need to make sure, are they the right client in the first place. We don't want to be wasting our time. So let me give you two strategies that you can use. And the first one, you probably have an idea what that is now, because it's what Sam talked about, and that's the idea of a client intake form. In other words, if somebody wants to meet with you, then the first step that you want them to go through is to fill in a questionnaire to answer some questions. Now, it doesn't want to be too many questions, but enough questions so that you can get a feel as to whether you even want to go ahead with meeting them. So sometimes you'll look at that information, think, no, that's not the direction we're going as a firm, we don't want to work with taxi drivers or whatever it might well be. So you ask some questions and you get them to fill in a form and then you decide whether or not to meet them. That's the first strategy. The second strategy is to have some form of free initial consultation, but give it a name. I like the idea of a discovery call, for example. And this is a call. This is not a meeting. This is a call that you would, I would recommend you do online, perhaps a zoom call, for example. And it's a short meeting, I would say maximum 30 minutes, probably more likely 10 to 15 minutes. And this is the first step of the process. Once they've passed the client, the intake form, when you that you then have an online meeting with them and you talk face to face via, let's say, zoom. And the only purpose of this meeting, the only purpose is for you and them to decide whether you are a good fit for each other. Do you feel like they're a client that you'd like to work with for them as well? Are you an accountant or bookkeeper that they feel comfortable with? And so as a general discussion, you will ask some questions about their background and so on. What you do not do in this initial meeting is talk about price. Now, they may well ask the price question. And you need to make sure you've rehearsed your script, the words to say as to why you don't deal with price in this first meeting. The first meeting is just to get to know each other. Then at the end of it, you can make a decision. Is it worth your while investing time to have a proper meeting? A proper meeting where you may even talk about price. And if you are having a proper meeting and talking about price, you should never have a meeting with for less than 60 minutes because new clients are important. This could be a client that could be with you for life. We want to get the price just right straight away. We don't want to underprice. And so there's a process we need to go through. We have to ask the right questions. We have to figure out what are their pain points, what are their challenges, what are the problems they're facing. So we can properly diagnose the issue, so we can properly prescribe the right solution, and so we can properly communicate the value of what we do. And so we can also get the right price. That's not a quick meeting to do that properly, you need at least an hour to do that. And so this is why the initial consultation of let's say 10 to 15 minutes is so important because it then tells you is it worth your time investing in an hour or so of a proper meeting? What it also does is in those 10 to 15 minutes, you'll get enough information from them to start to do some preparation for that next meeting and start to think about the questions you might ask them to uncover. What are the big issues. So that's a couple of really big important keys to to pre qualifying clients, your time is precious. You cannot waste it with time wasters with people who aren't your ideal clients. Thank you for watching that video. If you found that valuable, if there's something you found useful there, could you do me a favor? Could you first of all please just hit the thumbs up button to say you like it. But could you also put in the comments below what was the most valuable thing that you got out of that video and what's been your experience with that? If you could share that, it'll be great feedback for me and if the more people who like the video then I will go away and create more videos like this. Also, this video that you just watched is an example of the sorts of videos that we put in the Value Pricing Academy on our school platform. And if you want to be part of that that Value Pricing Academy, you can join for free and we'll put the link below. You can join for free and be part of a community of accounting professionals looking to improve their pricing on this Value pricing journey and a place where you can ask me and my team questions. So once again thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you inside the Value Pricing Academy. Bye for now.
