Tangible Benefits Are Easier to Sell
“Half the time we win clients because I tell them, ‘our best performing electrician (as an example) has a net profit of 24%. What’s yours?’” says Steph. “They say ‘wow, I’d like that as well’.”
One of the biggest worries accountants have when implementing advisory services is that no one will want what they have to offer, or the value will be hard to demonstrate. The best solution to this problem is to get people interested by showing them the concrete benefits of engaging your services.
Sam suggests that you begin by thinking about the industry your client works in, and factoring in all the different inflows and outflows they may have. Then calculate exactly how much of every dollar they earn as a margin, what needs to be paid out and how much could be retained as profit.
“If that operating margin is anywhere below where you think it should be… that is your tangible demonstration of the value you can add,” says Sam. “So you say, ‘you’re at 15% margin, and you should be at 30%. If you’re turning over a million bucks, you’re leaving $115k dollars on the table. You pay me 30, 40, 50k, and we’ll get that money for you.’” That, says Sam, is a much easier sell than the general, sometimes ‘woolly’ benefits of advisory services.
Benefits don’t always have to be that tangible, though. Sam believes that if you give people information for free, they’ll pay for the implementation. Do you have internal resources that could benefit your clients if you made them public? Why not share the knowledge, and sell your help in putting it into practice?
Finally, you could always give clients a taste of what you could do for them by hosting free webinars and seminars. When I created my boutique advisory firm, this is exactly what I did to grow my contacts. Once I had convinced a few prospects that I knew what I was talking about, selling advisory services and getting referrals became much easier.
