Category: Get More Tax Clients

Tax Resolution Marketing: How To Save Yourself $15,000…

In other posts on this blog, I’ve covered the topic of client acquisition cost fairly extensively.

I’ve also written extensively about the lucrative nature of this particular service. To give you the short version, there are 12.4 million active IRS collections cases right now, and the average 1040 client pays about $2,500 for full service representation. Business clients are even more lucrative, paying average fees of $3,500 for straight forward 941 cases, and thousands more on top of that for a variety of unique situations, lien work, 6672 representation, etc.

Combining these two factors, something readily apparent should emerge: You need to determine how much you’re willing to spend to acquire a client.

Without a sales staff to pay commissions to (which skyrockets your client acquisition cost, plus introduces a host of other problems, of course), my cost of client acquisition has average around $400 for tax resolution work. That’s a rough average across all my lead generation efforts, both paid and free, as well as my lead follow up costs to convert leads into prospects over time (there’s a HUGE marketing lesson in that sentence, by the way).

I’m more than happy…no, I’m ecstatic to pay $400 to make $3,500. That math works for me. $400 in…$3,500 out. Sure, there are ups and downs. Some cringe-worthy marketing tests sometimes. But all in all, that’s the formula.

How much are you willing to spend to acquire a customer? Seriously, think it over. It’s one of the single most important questions you can ask yourself if your goal is to GROW your tax practice.

My answer to that question is actually much more than my $400 average. In fact, it’s three times as much. Yes, I’m willing to spend up to $1200 to acquire a single client. In fact, given some challenges with conducting tax resolution marketing campaigns in my new home town, that number is probably going to increase. By the end of summer, I expect to be willing to spend $1600 to acquire a high-fee tax resolution client. Mind you, that won’t be my average, just my maximum.

If those kinds of numbers induce a panic attack, I’ve got some good news for you.

Two years ago, while visiting the beautiful city of Tallinn, Estonia for a full month, I conducted an experiment. It was a wildly successful experiment, and over the following 18 months I repeated it twice.… Continue reading

This Is Your Tax Resolution Competition

Lest you think the days of unscrupulous tax debt resolution companies are behind us… Think again. Check out this short piece of investigative journalism broadcast last week on a Los Angeles TV station…

If you want to read the extensive consumer complaints, check out their Yelp page.

See all those complaints on Yelp? People that paid $3,200…$3,300…$2,300… Those are real tax resolution case fees, for people that really needed help — and had the money to pay the fees.

These folks are out there, waiting for YOU to enter into their lives. So, why aren’t you?

Tax prep season is winding down, and tax resolution season is winding up. You’re probably tired of me saying it, but truth is truth: Second tax season can be more lucrative than first tax season.

Now is the time to be revving those engines for tax resolution season. If you’re ready to come out of the gates running, then please join me in Atlanta on May 5 and 6 for the 2015 Tax Resolution Leadership Conference.… Continue reading

Have you written your book yet?

It’s the final few hours of the NAEA national convention here in Las Vegas. It’s been a blast getting to meet some long-time Tax Marketing Tips readers face to face, plus being introduced to many new readers as an exhibitor here in conjunction with NTPI. Many thanks to everybody that has dropped by to chat!

This week I want to touch on a subject that is a little off the beaten path of my normal messages: Authority positioning.

We live in a culture that loves to love expertise and authority positioning. If you think about it carefully, it’s the reason NTPI itself exists. As a profession, we tend to embrace anything and everything that that let’s us display expertise (I’m quite opinionated on the subject of “credentialitis”…).

Within the general public, however, it’s a whole different ballgame. Our clients and prospects don’t have a clue (nor do they care…) about all the alphabet soup we put after our name. As an EA, for example, I’m stuck with the challenge of having to explain what I even AM — so I generally don’t bother (it’s rarely questioned by tax resolution prospects, by the way). CPAs and attorneys have built-in designation recognition, but anything beyond that, in terms of public perception, doesn’t mean anything to them.

But if you do something that positions you as an authority, that displays your expertise in a manner that is highly valued by the general public, then that suddenly becomes worth a LOT.

When you write a tax advice column in the local newspaper, or appear regularly on a local business talk radio program, or write a book — you suddenly attach to yourself much higher perceived expertise in the eyes of the general public.

When I wrote my first book over Christmas weekend at the end of 2011, it was driven by being snowed in. But in retrospect, it became one of the best marketing moves I’ve ever made for my tax practice.

After publishing “Tax Resolution Secrets“, it quickly became the best selling tax resolution book on Amazon. It began to routinely generate two to three leads per week coming into my tax resolution practice. With this steady trickle of free prospects coming in, I was able to pick and choose the clients I actually wanted to work with.

Did the book generate perfect prospects every time? Absolutely not. There were definitely a fair number … Continue reading