941 Marketing Challenge Day 29

At the very end of 2013, I made a significant change to how I sold my IRS Collection representation services.

It was a change that forever altered how I approached tax resolution clients.

In short, I stopped selling the service on a 1:1 basis, and started implementing what is called one to many selling.

Instead of scheduling one-on-one consultations that soaked up time I wasn’t getting paid for, I moved to a webinar-based sales process. I started doing weekly webinars for business owners that had tax debt problems. I was running Facebook ads, doing direct mail, and directing inbound leads from my book and other sources to a webinar registration page. Instead of a special report download, I started offering live education to consumers to make them aware of their options. On these webinars, I would offer attendees a low-cost research and analysis service, from which I would upsell them to full service representation. I called this the split sales model, since it split the process of account research and financial analysis away from the full representation process.

This is an example of a process that improves efficiency and profitability.

It’s also a process that I think tax resolution practitioners should all give a try.

This is a more complicated process than most of the things we’ve discussed over the course of this month, but it’s transformative if you start doing it.

To make it work, you simply need a webinar platform, a presentation, and to start directing your lead flow to the webinar registration.

For purposes of direct to consumer webinars, I recommend using Zoom. It’s affordable, simple to use, and for folks that are likely to attend a webinar, they’ve probably used the platform before.

So here’s your challenge for today:

  1. Sign up for a basic webinar account with Zoom (or use whatever you already have if you have something else).
  2. Pick an evening or a weekend afternoon about two weeks from now, and schedule a webinar.
  3. Create your registration page with the webinar provider’s system.
  4. Email your lead list, post on social media, post on your blog, post a video, etc — incorporating all the 941 marketing channels you’ve created over the past month — and get word out about your webinar.
  5. Present a webinar on your scheduled date, educating attendees about the basic tax resolution options and offering them a low-cost Investigation of Liability (marketing term) service.
See also  941 Marketing Challenge Day 10

This webinar need only be 20-30 minutes in length. Your first one doesn’t need to be super polished, and it won’t be. What matters is that you start the process and have the experience doing one-to-many selling for the first time.

Would you like a Done For You PowerPoint presentation for delivering on such a webinar? Diamond members have access to both my original 2013 edition, and the “prettier” 2015 version of my consumer webinar presentation for their own use. Become a Diamond member here.