Today I’m going to share with you one simple way to get more clients a lot of you aren’t using. It’s something that other industries are doing, but works very well for Lawyers and CPAs, and is one of the most fundamental building blocks of both well done sales and marketing programs. It’s using a CRM, Email Service Provider, and LinkedIn. By using these three simple tools you can increase your number of leads, and closed deals, a great bit..
Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)
In case you don’t know, this software will help you keep track of everything you are doing with your prospects, and make it easier for you to reach out to them in meaningful ways.
Some companies use spreadsheets to keep track of their leads, but this won’t provide the same abilities to track your actions, and is limited in many other ways as well. Free versions of software such as Hubspot are available, so price isn’t a barrier to use.
I always tell my clients that the best CRMs do two things: integrate and automate. To really help you the best in your sales and marketing a CRM should integrate seamlessly with your email and your calendar, as well as any other communications methods you are using such as texting and telephones. It should also connect with any lead sources you are getting leads from (ie google ads, facebook ads, and any other digital communities you are involved in)
Right now is definitely the busy season for accounting firms. Lawyers can be busy all through the year, depending on their specialty. When things get busy, you don’t have as much time to prospect. But you still want new customers coming in, and you still want to be nurturing your pipeline of customers that you have.
This is where sales and marketing automation come in. With automation, you can have your underlying system (preferably a CRM, but could be some other tool) do all the work of sending the right email to the right person at the right time, which is the heart of email marketing. Once you set up the triggers (# of site visits, which particular forms filled out, what content they have viewed or downloaded) the sky’s the limit on how you connect with them and what you can offer them. You can not only send them email, you can text them, message them over social media like facebook or Linkedin, and even send a voicemail. Then things get really fun. You then can set up sequences that can incorporate multiple messages or offers across any or all of those mediums listed above.
The best part is that once you set it up, it’s all done while you’re working billable hours with existing clients.
This level of functionality does have a cost to it, but Hubspot’s paid tools are super valuable and provide huge ROI in real sales opportunities if done properly. If you have achieved this level of seriousness about your firm’s growth, let me know and I can help walk you through the process of getting set up.
Email Service Provider
Are you currently using an email service provider (or ESP) such mail chimp or constant contact to deliver your email messages to prospects?
If you have generating new clients as one of your responsibilities, you need to be using this time saving tool to speed up your outreach to prospects. It also increases the buyer’s engagement with you and decreases both the length of your sales cycle and the amount of personal time you spend with them before they are paying clients, which increases your billable hours!
These tools have all gotten quite advanced in their offerings and are not just simple mass marketing tools. They include email sequences that involve triggers, and even allow you to tie them into other forms of digital marketing so you can retarget your leads on multiple platforms for optimal conversion.
This is going to sound like a weird question given the platform, but are you using LinkedIn?
I don’t mean going on and connecting with a few people here or there and sharing a few stories or even writing a line or two yourself every now and then. I mean are you using LinkedIn properly for your sales and marketing? Right now, it’s a more important tool than ever.
Are you using hashtags when you post? This will help you reach more people because as they follow the hashtag, you will wind up in their feed.
Are you making connection requests to people in your target market. Connecting with other people in your industry is fine, heck, I connected with a bunch of other people in the field of sales, but they aren’t your prospects, and LinkedIn provides you an unprecedented level of targeting on who your prospect are and how to reach them. Sales Navigator is super awesome for helping you get all the information you need to build lead lists that are solid gold! But you don’t have to pay to get value out of LinkedIn. In fact I would recommend starting with the free tools and seeing where you hit your limits.
And that’s just outreach, LI is also great for research! With LinkedIn you can find all kinds of useful information about your prospects. You can find what their achievements have been, their work history, where they went to school, etc. This can help you find some kind of common ground to start to grow rapport with your prospect and help them feel more at ease with you and the help you could provide.
All three of these tools are easy to work into your day, and make a big difference in your prospecting. The best part is they all have free versions you can start on and then you are free to upgrade to a paid version once you need those tools and higher limits.
If you haven’t started using them, and using them properly to grow your firm’s paid client base, you need to start today.
Need help starting and building your sales processes and marketing programs? We work with accounting firms and law practices to do just that. Schedule a discovery call today.