Category: Selling Tax Services

The Resolution Consultation That Turns a Scared Taxpayer Into a Signed Client

The person sitting across from you is not evaluating your expertise. They are deciding whether they can finally exhale.

Most tax pros walk into a resolution consultation believing the job is to prove how much they know. So they open the IRS transcript, start explaining collection statutes and Offer in Compromise math, and watch the prospect’s eyes glaze while their own mouth runs. The prospect leaves “to think about it,” signs with nobody, and the pro decides they are just bad at sales.

You are not bad at sales. You are running the consultation backwards. The scared taxpayer in front of you cannot hear your brilliant strategy until they feel understood, and they will not hand a stranger five figures until they trust the human, not just the credentials. In this post I am going to walk you through a consultation that signs the right client without a single high-pressure move. Discovery first, then framing the engagement, then presenting the fee without flinching, then handling the objections that actually show up. This is the same client-conversion work we teach inside Tax Resolution Academy®, and it is built to keep you on the right side of both your ethics and your licensing board.

The Consult Is a Rescue, Not an Exam

Here is the problem. You treat the consultation as a chance to demonstrate competence, when the prospect is treating it as a search for safety.

By the time someone books a resolution consult, they have usually spent months (if not years) in quiet panic. They have lost sleep. They have hidden the notices from their spouse. They have typed terrified questions into Google at midnight and gotten half-answers from boiler rooms promising the moon. They do not arrive wanting a lecture on Form 433-A. They arrive wanting one thing: to know that a calm, competent professional has seen worse than this and can make it stop.

Read that again, because it reorders the whole meeting. The first job is not to inform. The first job is to make them feel that they are finally in good hands. Get that right and the strategy talk lands later, on a prospect who is actually listening. Get it wrong and the smartest plan in the room dies on a person too anxious to absorb it.

Start With Discovery, Not Your Pitch

The fastest way to build trust is to stop talking and start asking. A resolution consultation should … Continue reading

Using Audit Protection Plans & POA Monitoring to Boost Bottom Line Profits

Chances are you’ve already heard of this offering, but perhaps never given much thought to it. It goes by various names, such as “Audit Defense Service”, “Audit Protection Plan”, and probably the worst possible name, “Audit Insurance”.

Quick tip: Do NOT call it insurance. State insurance regulators will have a field day with you.

Pricing for this service can range all the map, from as little as $30 through services that Block and TurboTax offer, to $200 and up from bigger audit protection plan companies and bigger CPA firms.

What exactly are we talking about? Audit Protection Plans.

Firms have been offering some variation of audit defense, either packaged and sold directly with tax return preparation or as an add-on, since at least the early 90’s. Typically, an audit protection service offered along with return preparation applies to that return only, and provides a certain amount of work that will be done on the client’s behalf in the event they are chosen for an IRS or state examination of the return. Plans typically impose one or more limitations, such as to the number of hours of representation that are included, or excluding certain credits such as EITC.

By offering audit protection plans to all or most of your tax preparation clients, you are essentially spreading the cost of audit representation for whomever needs it across a large number of people, akin to an insurance program (but again, never call it insurance!). Since the IRS audits less than 0.5% of all tax returns, the overall odds of being selected for examination are about 1 in 200. Additionally, over 70% of examinations are correspondence audits, meaning that the representation work is actually done asynchronously (not in real time with an IRS employee), making it far easier to schedule such work around the rest of your day.

If you have 200 tax prep clients that each paid $99 for an audit protection plan, just as an example, that’s an extra $19,800 coming in to your practice from your existing clients. If only 1 in 200 requires audit representation, on average, then you can easily see that just offering the protection plan becomes ones of the most profitable services within your practice. In addition, you can charge different prices based actual audit risk. For example, since Schedule C filers get audited at a higher rate, your audit protection plan rate for that kind of return … Continue reading

Close more tax resolution sales today

The past few weeks I’ve touched on quite a few aspects of what you should do to close more sales, particularly within the tax resolution space.

It’s such a big topic, with so many details and intricacies that I can’t possibly cover in this newsletter, that I decided to create a new course covering the topic in depth. If you have in-depth questions about the tax resolution sales process, then this course is for you.

This course will walk you through the complete tax resolution sales cycle, beginning when a new prospect contacts you from your lead generation marketing. You will gain a better understanding of the consultation stage, learn how to simply and effectively close sales, and how to increase sales closing rates over time via effective post-consultation followup.

The needs-analysis based, consultative selling system taught in this course removes all sales pressure from the interaction, both for yourself and your prospective client. You will not only give more consultations, but close more of them, and each consultation will be more effective for both yourself and your prospect.

In addition, you’re going to get an “outside the industry” perspective on sales techniques. While our services don’t really require any of the “old school” sales techniques that are taught by the most well known sales trainers, I think it’s important for you to understand them and have them available to you. When you are wearing your sales hat, it is better to be prepared and have all available tools at your disposal, should you ever need them.

To recap, here is what you will you receive in this comprehensive tax resolutions sales course:

  1. Nearly two hours of video sales training that walks you step-by-step through each phase of the sales cycle, from initial prospects to collecting payment.
  2. Access to the 1-hour audio presentation titled “Timeless Face To Face Sales Strategies”, which gives you insights into the sales process from outside the tax universe.

Whether you need a comprehensive closer training program for your firm, or are a solo practitioner wanting to learn how to close the deal, then this course is for you.

Update: This course is now part of the comprehensive tax resolution marketing program.

… Continue reading