Category: Get More Tax Clients

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

Note: This blog post was originally written in 2013, during the height of tax lien marketing’s prominence. Since then, lien filings have dropped by more than half, and the number of tax resolution companies chasing these fewer liens has more than tripled. Thus, tax lien marketing is no longer the panacea it once was. Today, less than 5% of all federal tax debtors have a tax lien filed against them at all. Bear this in mind if you choose to pursue this strategy. More than anything, I’d suggest using the information presented here to help you in developing a strategy for marketing to niche target markets.

Using IRS and state tax lien filings is one of the most common methods for getting new tax clients. It also happens to be one of the most effective. A few hundred million dollars of tax resolution services alone are sold each and every year in the United States simply by marketing to federal tax lien lists, which are available directly from your local county clerk and recorder, specialty list brokerages, and credit bureaus. While not the only way to generate tax settlement leads, the reality is that the presence of a federal tax lien signifies an obvious problem for the taxpayer — a problem you can help solve.

I would advise reading through this tutorial thoroughly. It covers a lot of ground, and introduces marketing concepts you may or may not be familiar with. This tutorial in itself is a complete marketing plan for generating $1 million a year in client fees. It’s also a fairly thorough introduction to direct mail and telemarketing for lead generation purposes.

The Big Picture Idea

There are a couple of core concepts I want to cover before we get into the nitty-gritty how to portion of this tutorial.

First, as a tax practitioner (or any professional service provider, for that matter), you need to realize one very important, fundamental concept: You are a CPA, tax attorney, or Enrolled Agent SECOND, and a sales and marketing professional FIRST. This is a very radical concept to most people, no matter what their line of work. But the bottom line reality is that if you are in a small firm or in private practice, then you need CLIENTS in order to pay the rent and put food on the table. In order to get clients, you have to do marketing (word of mouth and … Continue reading