How To Get Bigger Clients For Your Accounting Firm

If you're trying to level up the caliber of clients your firm works with, you're probably realizing that attracting wealthy, successful business owners is a lot different from attracting regular everyday people with small businesses or W2 jobs. My team and I recently built a funnel for a CFO firm to help them attract seven and eight figure business owners for their, you know, super high ticket. It's like a five to ten thousand dollars a month offer. And there's a couple of key things we did with this funnel to make sure that we are attracting these high level entrepreneurs. And so in this video, I want to walk you through the three key things that we did to move the needle on this funnel and make sure that we're attracting the right type of customer. And number one is we need to be speaking to their actual situation. This is something we call your messaging. It's the message that you're putting out into the world via your marketing, right? What are you saying that's going to determine what type of person you attract? And so if your messaging is all around, you know, if you owe back taxes, if the IRS is sending you notices, you got hit by a huge tax bill last year, if your books and records are super messy and you only know how well your business is doing based on the number in your bank account, these, these are people running around like a chicken with its head cut off, right? They're just going crazy. They've got, it's like their pants are on fire. They can't stop running. This is not how rich people operate. And this brings us to a conversation around pain point marketing versus dream outcome marketing. Because rich people, by all objective standards, they've got it pretty great, right? They've got money, their business is doing relatively well. They're, you know, they're in the top 5 or percent or even the top 1% of business owners and of earners in the United States. Even if you're just doing a couple million a year, by the way, I think a million a year puts you in like the top 8% or something like that. What motivates rich people and what drives rich people is this big picture vision that they have that they're 100% focused on, right? And so if you're trying to attract a more affluent audience, then you need to be speaking towards that big picture vision that they have. And that's going to require you to go to your current customer list, go to the people on your list who kind of fit this description of this new, more affluent client that you're after, and ask Them? What's the big picture vision? Like, what's the end game here? Are they trying to set themselves up for a sale? Are they trying to buy out other businesses? Are they trying to, you know, get their business up to a certain point and then, you know, operationalize it so it's more passive and they can just, you know, keep the cash flow coming without having to work a whole lot? Are they trying to build an empire and, like, become the next Bezos or Musk? These are all very different motivations. And so you need to understand what actually drives my ideal customer. Because if we can identify, okay, my ideal customer is a person who's looking for an exit. They're trying to work really hard for the next five or 10 years and be able to exit their firm, their company, and, you know, make a buttload of money, go invest that in something passive and then go live on a beach somewhere. And if we know that that's the case, then we can build a message around how your service is going to help get them there. Right? So if that's your ideal client and you've got a CFO service, for example, we don't have to use broad, vague terms like financial strategy. We can get crystal clear on the specific situations that this person might find themselves in, where you're going to come in. And so we're going to help you build KPIs to track performance in your different departments of your business and make sure that these are operating at peak performance for the highest enterprise value. We're going to give you books and records that are optimized for what an investor or a potential buyer would want to see to be able to get you the maximum enterprise value for your company. And if you can talk along those lines, you can tell here, I'm not a cfo. I don't even. I don't actually know that much about the very specific things that a CFO does, but we can get crystal clear on the actual tangible outcomes this person is going to get out of your service. Right. By the way, if you want somebody who's done this all before and worked with firms just like yours who can come in and step into your business and help you build this all out, that is exactly what my team and I do. We step into your firm as your chief marketing officer and tell you exactly what strategies you need to implement, and then we go build it all out for you. And so if that's something you're interested in, click the first link in the description below and you can get more info There. But anyways, so the second key to attracting a more affluent client base is you need to make it easy for them to vet you before you speak one on one. Now, to be clear, the one on one conversation is incredibly important here. Like, incredibly important. The sales conversation that you're going to have needs to be top notch. But we're not talking about how to close these deals. We're talking about just how to attract these people in the first place. Right? Rich people are picky, okay? They know they're not an average client for most firms, they know their situation is much more complicated and much more nuanced than what most accountants are used to dealing with. And so they need to vet you. They need to believe 100% that you're the right fit. Right? And the way I like to think about this is like the movie Inception, right? So the kind of main storyline of the movie, sorry, if you haven't seen it, I'm going to spoil it here. But they need to kind of implant this idea into this guy's head without him realizing that somebody else implanted it. And so they do it by, they go into his dream and then he has a dream inside the other dream and they kind of like spark the idea there. And then he wakes up and he makes this big decision that they kind of influenced him to make, but he thinks it was his idea. That's what we need the customer to do. So we need to make them feel like reaching out and like signing up with US is totally 100% their idea. They're the hero in this story. But we're able to subtly manipulate them in a completely ethical way into making the decision we want them to make. And so the way you do this is through what we call a middle of funnel. So if we're attracting them with saying the right things on in our ads and our content and whatever, whatever way people are initially finding out about you, right? We're attracting them, but then they're going to vet us, right? They're not going to immediately like reach out and book a call. They're going to go, oh, who is this person? What's their credibility? What's their experience? What's their background? Do they know what they're talking about? And so this middle of funnel is how we're going to make it easy for them to go through and vet you. Right? So that's your social media content, that's YouTube channel or a podcast, that's your website, that's your email newsletter. You don't need to do every single one of these things. But you need to have some extraordinarily in depth resources that prospective clients can go through so that they can have a high level of confidence that you're the right fit. My personal favorite for this is a YouTube channel, because that's so easy to repurpose YouTube content into a podcast and into email newsletters that you send out. And so you're really taking down multiple birds with the same stone there. That's exactly what I do with this YouTube content. We post this on Spotify as a podcast, we post it on Apple as a podcast, we repurpose it into email newsletter material to send out to our email list, which then routes them back around to the YouTube channel. And then eventually they click the first link in the description and they book a call and hopefully they buy from us. And so you can see it's like this circular cyclical thing where somebody just goes through as many times as they need to go through, with new content consistently coming out every week, where eventually over a period of weeks or months, they're going to buy. And it doesn't even actually matter how long it takes because that's going to be completely up to them. What matters is they're staying in our process until they finally click that button down below and book a call, or they finally follow one of your calls to action and book a call. And the important thing to note here is this doesn't need to be like densely educational content. If you watch any of my videos, I'm very rarely showing you, here's how to launch an ad campaign, or here's exactly how to script a social media video, or here's how to post on Instagram. I'm teaching high level strategic stuff. I'm teaching the what and the why. I very rarely teach the how because frankly, you as an accounting firm owner probably don't care too much about the how. You want to know what you need to do, you want to know why you need to do it, and you want to know that you're hiring the right person to do it. But if you're in the phase where you're concerned about how to do it yourself, how to DIY it, you're probably not a good client for my company. And by the way, that stands true for you as well. If you're trying to attract a more affluent type of client. By the way, if you want the notes from this video to look back on and get some value down the road, you can click a link in the description there. It'll be somewhere beneath this video and you can download the notes from this. But the third thing that we need to do to make sure that we're attracting a more affluent type of client is we need to cut the bs, okay? Rich people do not want to jump through a million hoops just to get information about who you are, what you do. Can you actually help them? Right. This kind of goes back to the conversation we were just having about letting them feel like they're vetting you while you're kind of subtly indoctrinating them into your mode of thinking. But it goes a little bit deeper, right? Because a lot of times if a firm is trying to level up the type of clients that they're attracting and that they're speaking with, maybe you get a lot of referrals who are on the lower end of the income spectrum. We might call brokies. And you just add a bunch of questions to your form to try to weed these people out, right? So you have a call booking form and instead of just like name, email, phone, and like, what's your website? It's like, what's your business revenue and what makes you feel like you'd be a good fit for our service? And how many business entities do you have? And you know, all of these questions that a lot of them, by the way, are not necessarily top of mind information for every single business owner. And so you may not just be weeding out the people who are too low on the income spectrum to work with you. You may very well be weeding out people who are a high income earner, who are an affluent prospect, quote unquote, who just get frustrated and just get pissed off by the number of questions that you have on your stupid call booking form. And there's a lot of other things that kind of fall into this same bucket, right? There's sometimes you'll see these countdown timers on a landing page where it's like you click an ad, you land on a landing page and it's like this offer expires in 9 minutes and 43 seconds and it counts down, but then you refresh the page and the counter restarts. It's like anybody can see through that. We all know that that's what's going on here. We all know this happens for everybody, no matter when they click on the ad. Another item I'd throw into this BS bucket is most low ticket products and lead magnets. And it's not because low ticket products are bad or lead magnets are bad. And by low ticket product, I'm Talking something like a $47 course or a $17 guide or like something that's like a digital product you' offering for like under a couple hundred dollars. Typically what people will do is they'll run ads to this low ticket product, say it's a $199 course and it costs them maybe $220 to get somebody to buy. So it's $220 in ad spend. We make 199. So it's basically a $21 lead cost for somebody who's taken out their credit card and bought from us already. And so the game then is just upselling that person into our actual high ticket service. And this can be a very effective funnel type. But most people do it so poorly and they end up attracting a bunch of broke people who all they can Afford is a $199 course. Not people who are qualified to level up and kind of move up the ascension ladder into their high ticket 3,000, 5,000, $10,000 a month service. Typically, in my experience, the most effective way to get in touch with higher value, more affluent prospects is just through a very simple, straightforward book, a call funnel. So we have the top of funnel, which is where they're finding us. They're getting it like we're first getting in front of them. And that's where we need to be saying the right things to make sure that we're grabbing the right people's attention. Right. That could be ads, that could be social media content, that could be cold outreach even. Then we have our middle of funnel, which is how they're vetting us and how they're kind of building that initial trust relationship and we can kind of indoctrinate them into our way of thinking. And you know why our service is something that they need. And that would be your YouTube content, your email newsletter, your, even your website would fall into this category. Right. And then we have our bottom of funnel, which is typically, in my experience the most effective thing you can do here is just a very, very, very simple, what I call like an application funnel. And I've got YouTube videos going into this specific funnel in depth. But essentially what it is is just a video sales letter, which is a 5 to 10 minute video is very direct and to the point. Here's what we do and how it could benefit you. Then you've got an application beneath that and then you've got some case studies and testimonials beneath that. And that is really all you need for somebody who's watched maybe a few YouTube videos or read a few email newsletters or listened to a few podcasts. That is really all you actually need to get them to book a call with you. If you put too much more in here, it's just going to get in the way and it's going to cause unnecessary friction where people who would have been a good prospect are going to get frustrated by all these hoops you're making them jump through. It's like page after page after page of fill out this form. Then, you know, do this thing, then you'll get qualified for this next step and then you can finally book a call. No, we just want them to fill out a form that makes sure they have at the, you know, these very basic minimum qualifications. It takes them five seconds to fill out this form and then they book a call for a time that works for them in the next three to five days. That's it. And if you've been making your leads jump through a bunch of unnecessary hoops, I would get rid of those immediately because you'll find people will be very appreciative of how simple and straightforward it is to get in touch with you. Hey, if you enjoyed this video, then you'll definitely like this one. Go check it out and I'll see you over there.