It’s Urgent… How many times have we heard those two words?  In our 24/7 world, response times have contracted, and things that used to be just “important” have now become “urgent” thanks to our constant smart phone availability, and the expectations of our customers, clients and colleagues.  In a sense, it’s a trap we set ...

Anyone who walks in the door willing to engage your services is not necessarily the next RIGHT client. Conceptually, most of us agree with that statement.  However, very few of us practice this in reality – especially given the slow recovery from our recent economic downturn and the struggle many firms are experiencing retaining their clients ...

ARE YOU A DISTRACTED DRIVER? As our society continues to get increasingly busy, it seems we are also getting more and more distracted.  We are all multi-tasking to try and complete everything we have to get done on a daily basis, and the rush of it all has become detrimental to our well being. Unfortunately, ...

Many of our CPA friends will be meeting with a large number of clients over the next several months.  To maximize this face-to-face time, take the opportunity to find out how your clients feel they are being served, what your team may be able to do better, and what additional services you could provide them ...

In last week’s blog post, Michelle Baca presented the first four steps for developing winning proposals, which focused on the internal preparation of your proposals.  This week, Krista Remer will complete the series on proposals by sharing steps five through seven with a focus on how to actually deliver your proposal and then follow up ...

Have you noticed that at nearly every major accounting conference, there seems to be a session on how to develop effective proposals? It also happens to be one of the topics that we are asked most frequently to offer our advice on. Because this continues to be on the minds of our clients, we wanted ...

According to the 2009 AICPA PCPS CPA Firm Top Issues survey (http://tinyurl.com/ydx8alr), the most significant concern facing CPA firms today is client retention.  This is certainly a shift from previous years, where the quest to find and retain talent were the top concerns of the profession.   Clearly, this is due to the recession, increasing competition ...

It’s hard to believe, but our blog, Inspired Ideas, celebrates its first birthday today.  In the inaugural post, I shared my epiphany about the power of social networking – in particular my exposure to the LinkedIn platform (www.LinkedIn.com) – and how I really believed that the groundswell of web-based networking and communications tools would drive ...

One of our most popular training sessions this year has been our course entitled, “Embracing Social Networking in Your Firm.” The session covers the most popular social networking technologies including LinkedIn, Facebook, and of course, Twitter. Twitter is a tool that allows people to know the answer to the question “What are you doing?” Twitter ...

Recent economic conditions have caused us all to refocus on our marketing and business development strategies. It used to be that firms struggled just to keep up with the work that they had and were more focused on recruiting staff than generating new opportunities. The tide has certainly shifted and marketing and business development are ...

In this time of economic uncertainty, a critical recover strategy is getting a tighter handle on your engagement opportunities. By reigning in your firm’s sales process, you can apply the right resources, at the right time, to the right opportunities, and close more new business. Set up a sales pipeline report to track each engagement opportunity ...