Issue 23 – Winter 2009

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Leadership Lessons

Marketing Activities You Can Do

Given the economic uncertainty, many of our CPA and IT firm clients and friends have made a renewed commitment to marketing and sales activities in their firms. With thinning pipelines, increased staffing capacity, and conservative purchasing decisions being made, it’s more important now than ever to focus on activities that many team members can participate in to generate new opportunities for your firm.

One way to renew your firm’s marketing and sales commitment is to identify the activities your leadership team can commit to, so this edition of Leadership Lessons will focus on four personal marketing activities that you and other managers and partners in your firm can undertake. Doing so will help you smooth the peaks and valleys in your practice, uncover new ways to serve your clients, and identify opportunities you can follow up and close now.

While we recommend that your firm has an overall marketing strategy in place, and you can read our blog post on developing your firm’s marketing strategy, you don’t have to wait for a formal marketing plan to conduct these personal marketing activities and make a big difference. We will outline the four marketing activities here and then drill down on two of them – meeting with and surveying your clients and tracking your opportunities – in our Practice Perspectives article.

The four personal marketing activities you – and each of your leaders - can personally affect include:

• Meeting with and surveying your clients. Meeting with your clients will uncover new opportunities within your existing client base and also draw them closer to you as you identify new ways to help them achieve their business goals and solve their challenges. Whether you meet with your clients over the next several months in tax, audit, or accounting services meetings or you proactively reach out to them to schedule lunch, consider assigning each client service owner the responsibility to meet with their clients and complete a short survey - just four or five questions - that would help you identify unmet needs so you can fulfill them. In our Practice Perspectives article, we’ll discuss an approach and point you to a sample survey that you can implement with your team.
  
  
• Participating in networking activities. One of the successful tenets of any marketing activity is consistency. Continue to participate in – and show up for – your networking, conference, association, and board meetings to build your firm’s and your personal brand during slower months and busy season(s), too. Being consistent in your attendance at key association and group activities demonstrates that you’re not too “busy” for new clients or referrals and shows your commitment to the organization and its members.

Help younger staff identify organizations that they can meaningfully participate in – including new social networking communities – and then teach them how to successfully network. Begin by taking them along to your networking events so they can see “how it’s done.” Remember to teach them the basics that we take for granted, such as bringing business cards, introducing yourself to people you don’t know, setting a goal that you have to achieve before mingling with friends, and identifying leadership opportunities to get involved deeper in the organization.

• Conducting referral meetings. In addition to participating in networking activities, proactively meet with your referral sources on a regular basis. You have to eat at some time during the day, and meeting with one referral source per week for lunch (rather than eating at your desk!) will give you an opportunity to strengthen your relationships with your referral partners, uncover potential new business, and break up the week by getting away for a brief respite of proactivity. Track your referral source meetings to help you identify where you should be investing more in the productive relationships and where you may need to develop new referral sources when others are not progressing.

  Referral source meetings are another opportunity to teach your people and “succession plan” by developing rapport between your younger people and the next generation within referral sources’ organizations. Invite one of your team members to lunch and ask your referral source to do the same to make an introduction, teach them what happens in those meetings, and begin building new relationships so the alliance between your two organizations continues into the future.

• Tracking your activities in a sales and referral pipeline. Your sales and marketing activities will result in more success when you track your opportunities in a sales pipeline. Review it on a weekly basis to determine what sales actions you’re going to take to move opportunities forward or which referral sources or networking organizations need your attention. Doing so will increase the results you reap from your sales and marketing activities. Tracking these opportunities gives you visibility to the next step and helps ensure you’re following up appropriately, which in turn will help you close more business because opportunities won’t be as likely to fall through the cracks. In our Practice Perspectives article, we’ll explore a simple pipeline process you can use individually or incorporate into your firm’s overall marketing and sales culture.
  

When you regularly prioritize and commit to specific marketing activities, the long-term success of your firm is more secure, and you’ll build your book of business, too. Investing the time in these activities enables you to reap the rewards of your long-term investments in your clients, networking organizations, and referral source marketing activities. You will likely close more business with existing clients and generate a few new clients for your firm, too!

You can use a simple personal marketing plan template to identify your networking activities, referral source meetings, and client meetings and then track them in the pipeline provided in the Practice Perspectives article. Don’t take your foot off the business development gas pedal during busy season! It is important to keep up the momentum and continue to set new goals in these areas to ensure that you are continually identifying new business opportunities so you reach your slower months with the right mix of work to match your capacity. Your consistency is key.

We suggest that each partner and manager in your firm establish a goal for each of these four marketing activities that they will commit to for the coming year. Then share your commitments with someone on your team to help hold you accountable.

For additional information on how you can implement personal marketing activities in your firm, e-mail Tamera Loerzel at tamera@convergencecoaching.com or call (952) 226-1780. Connect with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/tameraloerzel.