Category: Get More Tax Clients

Tax resolution is dead

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. Several years in fact.

Some people may think it’s just a matter of semantics, but there is a lot more to it than that.

But the more thought I put into it, the more I know I’m right: Tax resolution is dead.

What the hell am I talking about?

I’m talking about terminology, public perception, and professionalism. The term “tax resolution” has become tainted in many respects, due the actions of a small number of large companies. The phrase now evokes images of boiler room sales people cramming a canned sales pitch down the throat of somebody that can’t even rub two dimes together.

I personally quit using the phrase over a year ago to describe what it is that I do. When somebody asks the inevitable question in our social system, “What do you do?”, my answer, also referred to in the sales world as an “elevator speech”, is pretty simple. I do not consider myself a part of the tax resolution industry, rather, “I represent small business taxpayers in front of the IRS to remove the stress and anxiety of audits, seizures, levies, and other collections action. I deal with the IRS for you, so you can continue doing what you do best, which is running your business.”

Contrast that to, “I do tax resolution.” Which sounds more professional to you?

My friend and mentor James Orr has ingrained into me the concept of always being on “the right side of the desk”. When people call you, even if that phone call was sparked by your marketing, that puts you on the right side of the desk. When you have positioned yourself as a professional, rather than a shark hunting for prey, you are on the right side of the desk. When you “represent people”, rather than “settle debts”, you’re on the right side of the desk.

I personally think that this approach is even more important more those of us that are Enrolled Agents. Why? Because nobody knows what we are! “Attorney” and “CPA” are common, everyday words — everybody knows what they are. Enrolled Agents have to explain what we are. Instead, let’s remove that explanation from the equation, and get right to the core benefit we provide our clients.

In my writing to you, I’ve continued using the term “tax resolution” because it’s the common … Continue reading

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