Category: Get More Tax Clients

How I get inbound tax resolution leads with no marketing

In a typical week, I get at least one, and sometimes as many as three or four, people contacting me completely out of the blue that are telling me that they think I’m the best person to help them with their tax problem and wanting to hire me.

These are folks that I’ve never talked to before, never marketed to before, never had any one on one contact with at all. But they’re reaching out to me, with their checkbook open.

How is this possible?

It’s actually quite simple: I took the time to establish myself as an expert.

Never forget that people do business with other people that they know, like, and trust. This is the single most important thing you can ever learn about running a service business. Period.

Establishing yourself as an expert, as the go-to person in your area or specialization, you automatically build credibility. Providing ways for people to get to know you, even if you never actually speak to them, builds on this. Over time, people that know you will get to like you and trust you (assuming you’re likable and trustworthy, of course).

People get to know you via the content that you produce. On my tax firm web sites, I provide a ton of free or extremely low-cost information for people, including how to negotiate their own Installment Agreements and how to draft their penalty abatement applications. I also provide pointers to appropriate IRS resources and other information that can help them.

This material costs me nothing but time in order to create. After the initial creation of a few backlinks to those sites via press releases, articles, or videos I post elsewhere ,I do no further active promotion of those sites, I just let Google and Bing find them on their own and determine whether they are worth including in search results or not. I don’t try to “game” the search engines, and I update the sites far less frequently than the so-called SEO “experts” say that I should.

It also helps that a little over a year ago, I took the time to write a short book and self-publish it on Amazon. That book is now one of the best selling books on Amazon on the subject of settling tax debts. The end of every chapter includes a call to action referring back to my primary practice web site, which offers additional resources. … Continue reading

New video series: “Inside the IRM”

I’m very excited to announce the launch of a new video series, Inside the IRM.

I’ll be providing commentary and insight into interacting with the IRS, based on a guided tour through the Internal Revenue Manual. I’ve decided to start with IRM Part 5: Collections, simply because that is the section of most interest to myself and, I’m sure, to most of you.

The purpose of each video will not be to simply read you the IRM. Rather, I think it’s worth dissecting the IRM as a means of learning how the IRS thinks and, more importantly, how they’re supposed to act. My goal is really to provide you with a better understanding of how the IRS works, and make sure you know what the IRS really can and can’t do based on their own procedures.

Most important of all, however, I hope to show you how to use the Internal Revenue Manual to better represent your clients. I will be pointing out provisions of the IRM that could be applied to your advantage in certain situations, and discussing how Revenue Officers and other IRS personnel are supposed to act in specific circumstances, so that you can know when things are going right and when a Revenue Officer is abusing their authority or not properly treating a taxpayer. Correlating the Service’s internal procedures with specific client situations and sharing my experience in working with Revenue Officers as it relates to the IRM will hopefully benefit you as a fellow practitioner.

I’ll most likely do these several times per week, and post them along with each day’s marketing update. I didn’t think I could go on about one little section of the IRM for an entire hour, but in this first video I managed to do that (I’ve long known that I have the gift of gab, I guess now I just found another way to embrace it beyond just the written word!). I’ll definitely try to keep them shorter in the future.

These will be posted on YouTube, so feel free to collect them all and trade them with your friends!

Please provide feedback, comments, and even criticisms on these so that I can make them more applicable to your practice.

Here is the first edition, covering IRM Section 5.1 and the basics of how the IRS is supposed to work collections cases.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM0xXJ0HaB4[/youtube]… Continue reading

Super-secret RCP reduction tip for Offers in Compromise

I know you’d rather hear about marketing, but I have something that could be of benefit to your clients that I want you to know about.

Based on recent conversations with a few tax practitioners, there is apparently a super-secret method for reducing the Reasonable Collection Potential calculated for an Offer in Compromise. I’m calling it “super-secret” because nobody I’ve been talking to about it so far has noticed it. It’s a method that is hiding in broad daylight, because it’s actually printed right on the Form 656.

One of the elements of the Fresh Start changes that the IRS didn’t make a big deal about in the media was that, for the third time in 18 months, they decided to slightly alter the Offer in Compromise payment options. They reverted to the “Lump Sum Cash” and “Periodic Payment” naming conventions that existed a couple years ago, but made the payment terms for the Lump Sum Cash offer much more clear.

You’re probably already aware that the remaining income multiplier was reduced from 48/60 down to 12/24. If the Offer in Compromise will be paid in full within 5 months of acceptance, the multiplier is 12, otherwise it’s 24 months. You’re probably also aware that it’s currently taking about seven months for an Offer Examiner to be assigned, plus another month or two for the Offer to be processed and accepted.

This gives your client nearly 9 months to get their finances straightened out. More than enough time to figure out how to come up with the Offer money and put it aside. In fact, they can have even more time. After acceptance, the Offer doesn’t need to be paid over the course of 5 months, it needs to be fully paid within 5 months, in order to qualify for the 12 month multiplier.

See the difference there?

In reality, from the time of submitting their Offer, your client can reasonably expect to have a whopping 12 to 14 months to come up with the cash. By filing the Offer with a 12 month multiplier, you get the lowest possible RCP calculation. You simply file it as a Lump Sum Cash Offer, include the 20% down, and need to come up with the other 80% a full 5 months after acceptance. In other words, in section 5 of Form 656, you put ONE payment, dated 5 months after acceptance of the Offer.

With … Continue reading