For those of you who feel uncomfortable carrying out marketing or business development activities, here’s one way to increase your fees by doing what you’ve always done!
In order to increase your fees using this method, you need to be able to answer ‘yes’ to the following questions:
- Do you provide an initial consultation for prospective clients or to discuss other services with existing clients?
- Are these consultations free?
If you can answer yes to both of these questions, you’re halfway there to increasing your fees!
But here’s what makes the difference.
Create ‘A Thing’
Rather than saying on your website, social media adverts etc that you offer a ‘Free Initial Consultation’, you need to make it into ‘A Thing’.
Every accountant (and professional service firm for that matter) offers free initial consultations. In fact, do you know anybody that does charge for this service?
To make this free consultation offer generate new enquiries for you and be a catalyst to increase your fees you need to create something that people will value.
So simply reword it. Examples could be:
- Free business health check
- Free personal tax review
- Free IHT review
- Free business start-up checker
- Free tax and financial affairs review
You can choose more than one, or offer different versions throughout the year, depending on your clients. But the important thing is to say it’s free and to give people an introduction as to what they will get out of the session.
Promote ‘A Thing’
Once you’ve renamed your initial consultation meeting, you then have to be proactive in making people aware of this. Ways to achieve this include:
- Creating an image that you can use across different media to highlight your free ‘thing’.
- Getting a banner or large button added onto your website promoting your free consultation, perhaps with a registration form for people to fill in.
- Adding it as a PS to your email signatures or letters.
- Creating a postcard or leaflet to send out with letters, accounts, reports etc.
- Posting about it on social media, at least once a month.
- Mentioning it in adverts and blogs.
- And so on.
All you’re doing is taking an activity that you already do, but making it sound more appealing and desirable.
It can be used to target prospective clients, but also to remind existing clients about other ways you could help them.
Try it, what have you got to lose?!
Here are some other ways in which accountants can increase their fees.
