The Complete VSL Scripting Process for Accounting Firms

This is a video sales letter. And this is the amount of money this VSL has made one of my clients in the last 12 months. And so in this video, I'm going to show you my exact process for scripting video sales letters for accounting firms. By the way, if that's not enough evidence that this works, Brock and Daniel have both made boatloads of money off the video sales letters I built for them, too. You can check out these interviews on my channel. By the way, if we haven't met yet, my name is Peter Vanderwaal. I'm the accountants marketing guy. My whole bio is down in the description. If you want to know more about my story. But let's jump straight into the video. All right, so what is a video sales letter? Now, this is a video that makes essentially what we would call the sales argument for your product or service in order to get leads to purchase or book a call. Okay? So in the context of an accounting firm, this is a video that's going to go before someone books a call with you, and it's going to give them context as to what you do, who you help, and how you do it. Okay? So basically, we're trying to help leads make sure that this is for them before they book. And it's going to be written in such a way that a good lead will see this and they'll go, this is exactly what I want. And. And a bad lead will see this, and they'll go, I don't think this is what I'm looking for. So what you can typically expect by implementing a VSL into your call booking process is, number one, leads are just going to have more context and more trust going into the sales call. There's going to be less of those dumb basic questions that are, you know, the same 90% of the time. And there's going to be more actual selling time on the calls. Number two, you're oftentimes going to get fewer unqualified leads booking sales calls because they're going to watch the video or they're going to at least watch part of the video. And. And they're gonna realize, oh, this isn't even what I'm looking for. This isn't even what I need. And so they're just not gonna book a call, freeing up that time for you to work. Ideally, work with more qualified leads on your sales calendar. So there's four things you need to have in place to build a good video sales letter that's actually gonna get the job done. And so in this Video. I'm gonna walk you through those four things and then I'll show you the exact process I use to put that all together and generate the actual script here. All right, so the first piece of the puzzle that we need to have in place here is what we call a clear and specific client avatar. This could also be known as like your ideal client profile. But basically this is who are we trying to attract? Who do we want to watch this video sales letter? And they're going to go, this is exactly what I'm looking for. And who do we want to watch this video sales letter and have them go, I don't think this is what I actually need. In other words, we're saying who we are for and who we are not for. And so this is just what a good client avatar or client profile looks like. So. So number one, who are they? So in the case of this firm that we're using as the example in this video, this is a high earning, like W2 professional think like doctors, tech executives, successful business owners. They make between 200,000 and half a million dollars a year. They're smart, they work hard, but they're tired of being punished for their success. Okay? Now the specific pain that they feel, this is really important to identify, okay, because this translates into how you're going to pitch your solution. Okay? So 90% of the best clients at this firm feel one specific pain and that's a $50,000 plus tax bill. So they probably have react a reactive, like local cpa, somebody who just kind of acts like a historian and just like tells them how much money they already lost, doesn't really give them any strategies to like fix that. And that leaves them feeling frustrated and stuck. They feel like they're bleeding cash that should be going to their family or to their next investment. Now the trigger moments, okay, this is, these are the moments that somebody would choose to potentially work with you, okay? These are the specific moments when this avatar is most likely to buy. So number one is the transaction trigger. So they may have just paid a down payment for a short term rental. They feel cash poor, they need a win, and they're looking for this tax refund that they've heard of that with cost segregation, but they don't really know how it works, don't know how to implement all that kind of stuff. Right. Another trigger is a CPA breakup. So it might be April, it might be October, like maybe they're extended it just saw their tax bill and they realized their local CPA, who's like a Nice guy, but they're very reactive. It's turning out that this guy's pretty expensive because they don't understand real estate or trigger number three here, the spouse hero. This is what these are just fancy terms we've come up. You don't have to come up with the fancy terms for it, but just understanding what the triggers are. So one spouse may work the high paying job, the other spouse wants to help and wants to contribute, but they don't really know how. And so they can turn tax planning into a quote unquote team sport by the second spouse qualifying for real estate professional status so they can get those tax benefits for the family. Now what do they want? Okay, so we've talked about the pain, we've talked about what would cause them to buy, what do they want and how do we communicate to them that we can help them get that. So this person doesn't just want like tax help, they want to feel like an architect. So they want to plan for the future and like be proactively building their future. They want to buy their time back, right? So they want to use the STR loophole. They want to invest in general to start paying for their early retirement so that they can reach their financial freedom number sooner. And they want confidence. So this is pulling a specific quote from a real client of this firm. They want to go from being loyal to an old CPA to saving thousands in the first year and having the sense of confidence that comes with those quick wins. Right now, at the end of the day, they choose this firm because this CPA speaks real estate, right? He's not just a tax person, he's actually a specialist who understands what we call the real estate portfolio life cycle. So we're helping them move from buying houses to building their legacy. Okay? Now this is the client profile. And by the way, if you want this sheet, I've got it linked down below. All you gotta do is just request access and then do like file, make a copy and you can copy this over to your Google Drive, okay? So that's piece number one, the ideal client or the client avatar. Now the second thing we need to have in place here is something called a unique mechanism. Okay? And I'm gonna give you a couple examples of this. Now, a unique mechanism is basically the way you are generating these results for your clients. So when we talked about what they want, the unique mechanism is how we're going to get them there. And the key here is to pitch your process in a way where it sounds different from what other Possible real estate tax advisors are doing. Because the last thing this ideal client wants is to work with another CPA who just does basically the same cookie cutter stuff as everybody else. So the unique mechanism for this firm is something we call the three phases of the real estate portfolio life cycle. And the idea is that your tax planning opportunities need to be aligned with where you're at in your investing journey. Okay, so there's three phases. The first phase is what we call finding cash for more deals. And this is where you're basically, you're new or you're just getting started. And the goal is to get the maximum tax benefits possible so that we can take those tax benefits and instead of paying the money in taxes, we can take that same money and use that to buy the next deal and the next deal and the next. And basically every deal creates new tax benefits and new free money to be able to invest into that next deal. Right? That's the idea here. So there's specific tax strategies that make sense at that stage in the life cycle. The second phase is what we call maximizing what you already own. So this is where we get into, you know, maybe you've got 5, 10, 15 units, and this is like optimizing your entity structures, working with like the rehab projects that you're doing and the renovations you're doing and getting the tax benefits from those. So there's a different set of tax benefits that come along with phase number two here. Now the final phase, phase three, is exit, what we call exiting without paying a fortune. And this just centers on like your exit strategy. Now this can apply into two different scenarios. This could apply if you're trying to kind of do the monopoly thing where you like, you know, trade up four houses for a hotel. In other words, you're selling a few lower end rental properties to buy one bigger, higher end rental property. Kind of like level up your portfolio that way. But this can also apply in situations where you are actually exiting into, I don't know, maybe there's a different investment vehicle that you want to use for retirement once you've hit your financial freedom number. So it's more about maintaining than it is about scaling really aggressively and continuing to grow your net worth really aggressively. So for you guys, when you're building your video sales letter, you want to think through how can I communicate the unique way that I'm actually serving my clients? What's different about our process, or not even about the actual step by step process, but the way we think about helping our clients? And you want to communicate that, because that's what's going to make you feel and seem like something different from everybody else. Real quick, this is just one part of a bigger marketing strategy. And I made a free course actually called Scaling Fundamentals that goes through all of the fundamental principles you need to understand to build a marketing strategy, to build an offer and a sales strategy, and even to build your systems and ops up for your fulfillment processes. So you can get access at the link down in the description here. It's totally free and it's a part of my larger scale, your accounting firm School Group, which is a nationwide community of accountants who are looking to scale in 2026. So go check that out. And anyways, let's get back to the video. Now, the third thing you need to have in place for your video sales letter is something I call oddly specific pain points. Now Alex Hormozi calls these moments, but either way, it's kind of the same idea. It's a recognizable pain point that your ideal client would hear and they would go, you know, it's kind of weird that this guy who's not me, knows that I'm dealing with this. Okay, so some examples, right, you bought a property and now you feel cash poor. Your spouse makes most of the income in the family, but you want a way to contribute to the family's finances. You're pretty sure you're overpaying in taxes, but you're not sure what to do about it. You've been working with a reactive CPA you've been using for 15 years. You're seeing all these tax strategies online and you don't know what applies to you, what doesn't apply to you, how to use it all. So these are oddly specific pain points that if you're not a short term rental investor, if you're not a high W2 income earner who invests in real estate, then it would be kind of weird that you would know these pain points that this person deals with. And that's exactly what we're looking for here. We're looking for this ideal client who's going to watch this video sales letter. We want them to go, wow, this guy really understands what I need and what I'm dealing with every single day. That's the feeling we want to give them. And the fourth element we need here is client case studies. Now, I just pulled a few. This firm actually has a ton, which is amazing, but we pulled a few and I specifically chose ones from different stages of the real estate portfolio life cycle. So for Example, Josh here is an experienced real estate investor who needed help to maximize the benefits from his mature portfolio. So I would consider him to be in stage two. Right. Moving on to Johanna. Johanna was doing kind of that monopoly strategy like we talked about, where you like trade up lower end properties for higher end properties. And, and so I would say that fits more into stage three of the portfolio life cycle. Right. Audrey, she's a travel nurse, she's a newer investor and so she would fit more into stage one of the real estate portfolio life cycle. Alex I think would also fit into stage two. Mark probably fits into stage one here. He was kind of newer, getting into short term rentals when he first started working with his firm. And so I just collected, what I did here is I, I grabbed their name, I just wrote down a little summary of the transformation that they experienced working with this firm. And, and then I took either the transcript of their testimonial video. So some of these are actual testimonial videos we have on the site or in some cases like this one here. This is actually just a Google review that this guy left on this firm. And so I just copied the Google review to grab what he said. The most important thing here is we just want to have plenty of context to be able to like figure out the right way to communicate what happened for this client and how it happened. So that's the video sales letter prep sheet and we've got this complete at this point. If you want to grab this doc again, you can get the link down in the description below. But let's move to the second tab here, which is the VSL scripting playbook. Now this is a custom playbook I've built for my team here at my agency. And this is the exact process we follow building video sales letters for all of our clients. Okay. And so we're going to be using what I call like an AI enabled process here. So in other words, we're taking what we the, the raw material that we've put together so far on the VSL prep sheet and we're going to be putting that into a custom AI tool that I've built in order to generate a full word for word video sales letter script. So let's just talk through the process here before we get started. So this right here is a custom marketing advisor I built for this client. We build one for each of our clients at the agency. We also build these for our coaching students over at Scalia accounting firm for them to be able to use the tool themselves. But either Way, I've got the process right here and I've got the marketing advisor right here. So, number one, what I'm going to do is I'm going to download this page as a Word document Current tab. Yep, that's right. And then I'm going to download the prep document we made again as a Word document. Okay, so export both of those. And what we're going to do is just drop these both in here and let me just rename them really quickly. So we're going to drop those both into the AI chat here, and now we're going to go back to the AI framework and we're going to use this prompt. All right, so we're going to paste that in there and just to walk you through the prompt. Basically, this is going to generate the outline for the video sales letter. So it's not going to be like perfectly scripted word for word, but it's going to be a rough outline that we can get started with and then we can move on to actually scripting it once we're happy with the outline here. So what I always find helpful whenever I'm using AI is I'll take the AI output and. And then I'll drop that output back onto a blank Google Doc and I can. That way I can kind of like wordsmith it and work through it and make the edits that I want to make, and then I can give it my rewrite and I'll just say, here's my rewrite. Note the changes that I made and reflect those in our next steps. All right, so here's our outline. Let's just read through this really quickly. So section one, we've got opening recognition, and we're using those moments or those oddly specific pain points that we came up with. Right. So asking if they've noticed. The harder they work, the more they earn, the more the IRS seems to punish them for that success. Describe the moment they opened a huge tax bill, feeling cash poor after making a down payment, sitting with a local CPA who acts like a historian. I mean, we're naming the problem here. So we're calling this the reactive tax trap, where success leads to bleeding cash that should be going to family or future investments. Nice. Love it. So then the problem diagnosis. So the root cause is that most CPAs are trained to look backwards at the previous year's data. And by the way, if you want to read through this more in depth, you can just pause the video. I'm going to scroll through here. But moving on to section number three is the self diagnosis checklist. So it helps them understand who this is for and who this is not for. Right. This is where we're getting super, super clear. Section four, Making it personal. This is really, really valuable to have in your video sales letter because if you can take it from being like a career problem or like a money problem to like a personal, like family problem, then that just makes it feel a lot more real. And so when you, you know, talk through the family impact the cost on their legacy. And kind of the paradox of this, the more successful they become at their job, the less time they have to manage the wealth they're creating, which leads more leakage to the irs. Now we also want to disqualify upfront. So this is again getting super, super clear about who this is not for and what this offer is not. So this is not a get rich quick scheme and this is not a generic tax prep mill that just like files all your forms in April. This is strictly for high earning professionals ready to move from buying houses to building legacy through proactive strategy and the solution. So this is where we walk them through the actual three phases of the real estate portfolio lifecycle and we talk about some of the tax strategies that might apply at those different stages. Right now, section seven, this is something new we actually added into this framework recently. This is something called damaging admissions. So what you're doing here is you're making everything else you just said feel more honest by admitting things that are hard or things that are difficult or things that are like less than ideal about your offer. Right. So admitting that this is not instant, it's not easy, it requires a proactive partnership, it's going to require actual participation in your real estate investments. And we can. This gives us the opportunity to like call out fakes too here. Right? Because if somebody promises you can zero out your taxes without doing the work, they're putting you in a lot of risk. Right. Section eight, the cost of waiting. If you ever heard the term urgency used as a marketing or sales term, this is what we're talking about here. We're creating a sense of urgency and giving them a reason to book the call now versus waiting and booking the call later. Right? And then finally our call to action, telling them exactly what to do and what's gonna happen next when they do book that call. So this is a pretty good outline. So what I'm going to do here is we're going to go back to the AI framework. Normally we would want to correct or edit the outline. I'm not Going to get real granular here because that would make the video way too long. But this is a really solid outline just from the get go. This is rare though. Most of the time there are going to be some edits that you need to make so you can go through and you can kind of reword the way it communicates something to make it better match how you would communicate that thing. So next though, we're going to turn the outline into a script. So you are a VSL script writer. I'm just going to change this a little bit. Using the outline you already generated, write a first draft script. All right, so we're going to have it write that script. And this is where we might need to do some additional wordsmithing to take that script and just like edit some of the wording, some of the phrasing, make it more readable, make it more speakable, that sort of thing. All right, awesome. So we're going to just take this whole thing and we're going to copy it over to our Google Doc here. All right. And we've got our sections. Right. So we've got those opening recognition moments. This is kind of a hook, right? Have you noticed that the harder you work and the more you earn, the more you seem to get punished for your success? It's a strange feeling. You're winning in your career, but your bank account doesn't seem to reflect the effort. Yeah, that's good. Think about the last time you sat across from your local cpa. Maybe you just finished one of those reactive meetings where they acted more like a historian than a partner. They handed you a report on the past and they told you that you owe a $50,000 tax bill. When you asked what you could do about it, they just shrugged. They told you you make too much money, there's nothing we can do. Or maybe you just hit a major milestone, right? You bought your first short term rental that you've been looking at for forever. You wired a massive down payment and now you feel cash poor. You're smart and you know there are ways to win that cash back through things like cost segregation. But you don't have a plan to unlock that money. You feel like you're bleeding cash that should be going to your family's future or your next big investment. If any of that sounds familiar, then you've hit what we call the reactive tax trap. It's that frustrating place where success is actually working against you. Because that tax strategy that you have is stuck in the past. There's some rewording I would do here particularly like this last sentence. So something like this, right? It's that frustrating place where your success is actually working against you because you're using a tax strategy built for everyday middle class families and, and you're on your way out of the middle class. So I like using the word architecture here because it sounds so much more proactive and so much more intentional. And that's what people are looking for when they're looking for tax advisory services like this, right? So again, I'm not going to go through this whole thing here. I'll leave this video sales letter script on that Google Doc that's linked down below if you want to check it out. And that way you can get a good picture of like what the end product should or could look like. But guys, that's been my entire video sales letter scripting process. I hope this video was helpful for you. Would love to see your video sales letters once they come out. So either shoot me a DM on LinkedIn or on Instagram with that video sales letter once you finish it or even just drop it here in the YouTube comments. And I would love to check it out. Now here's the thing we briefly talked about, but it's one of the most important prerequisites to having a good video sales letter. You need to understand your niche and your ideal client profile. Now I made an entire video going over how to pick your niche in accounting and how to define that ideal client profile. So I want you to go check that video out next and I'll see you over there.