Category: Get More Tax Clients

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

My favorite Forbes contributor is at again.

For the past year and a half, Forbes blogger Stephen Dunn and I have been having a “spirited discussion” regarding the content of some of the tax resolution articles that he posts on the Forbes.com site.

Stephen is an experienced tax litigation attorney, and writes about tax law matters for Forbes. Every six months or so, he’ll write a fairly scathing commentary on the subject of tax resolution.

On the surface, Stephen’s pieces are consumer warnings about the flagrant tax resolution con artists that exist. His observations about that unruly sector are warranted, but his articles on the subject always take a sharp turn that really rub me the wrong way.

This article that he posted a few days ago is his most egregious yet — they keep getting worse.

Instead of just delivering a necessary consumer warning regarding due diligence, Stephen tends to veer off and attack the competency of CPAs and Enrolled Agents in regards to IRS collections matters. The fact that he does this in such a frequently read location is what makes me feel compelled to correct him.

I think it’s one thing to educate consumers, but it’s a whole other thing to misinform consumers for the sake of spreading an “attorney only” agenda. It’s also just not cool to openly disparage his professional colleagues (CPAs and EAs). You can read my lengthy comment to him at the bottom of his article, so I won’t rehash the whole thing here. But more than anything, it’s the smug sense of superiority that comes across in his writing that really gets my goat.

Fortunately, not all attorneys are like Mr. Dunn. All of the attorneys that I’ve trained in IRS collections representation over the past few years have actually been a pleasure to work with — every single one of them. I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but the fact that so many attorneys have come to somebody like me to obtain tax resolution training is a testament to the fact that the financial and tax procedure aspects of tax resolution are significantly outside the normal realm of “litigation” as to require specialized training. Even NTPI and ASTPS workshops have plenty of attorneys in attendance.

IRS collections representation is extremely multi-disciplinary. It seldom requires interpretation of law, almost always requires financial analysis, and always requires good communication and negotiation skills. All practitioners, … Continue reading

Happy New Year’s Eve! I hope that 2013 was your best year ever, and that you’re already working on making 2014 even better.

In the spirit of Continuous And Never-ending Improvement (CANI), and because I had some spare copies of Tax Resolution Secrets that I wanted to get rid of prior to the move to Georgia, I recently decided to test a new postcard to market for tax resolution leads.

I was definitely anxious to get it out the door, and I placed the Click2Mail order on Thursday, December 19th. That means that postcards were hitting mailboxes the day before and the day after Christmas. Definitely not the best timing, but I really wanted to do the test and it was better to get it out the door than not do it all (that’s a marketing tip in and of itself, by the way).

Note: This was a proof of concept test. You should NEVER do single mailings as part of your real lead generation campaigns.

Here’s what I did: I selected business liens between $15,000 and $75,000 in value across the entire country, with phone numbers only, and inched the date forward until I had a reasonable number. I ended up with 799, with a cutoff date for the lien filing that was only 10 days prior to my mailing date. After removing non-standard addresses, I ended up with 720 that actually got mailed.

For the postcard, I actually created a Frankenstein of three of my favorite (and best performing) plain postcards, then rewrote that draft into a cohesive unit with an offer of a free copy of my consumer paperback book about tax resolution. The postcard directed people to a web page specially set up to order the book.

Premium members that are actively logged in to the site and reading this article at the blog will see a link at the bottom of the article for downloading the postcard and a screen shot of the landing page.

I should say that part of the reason I wanted to perform this test was because I’ve received a number of comments from readers lately questioning the efficacy of postcards. In the past week, I’ve had 12 new, unique visitors to the special landing page I set up for people to order the book, and 2 people actually requested the book.

At the same time, I have had three new people sign up for my … Continue reading