Get More Tax Clients

The cure for any revenue problem is simply to increase revenue. The more revenue flowing into your tax practice, the better things in general tend to be for everybody at your firm.

In order to get more revenue flowing into your practice, you must add more value to the world.

What does this mean, “add more value to the world”?

You add more value to the world when you make solve more people’s tax and accounting problems. When you give somebody a solution to a problem that keeps them awake at night, they happily pay you money for doing so.

In order to solve more people’s tax and accounting problems, they need to be made aware of the fact that there actually exists a solution to their problem. You need to make them aware of that solution. Also, realize that most people are a bit stubborn, and resistant to change. So, you need to tell them multiple times that there is a solution to their problem.

Because marketing isn’t a one-shot game, and you should be receiving marketing support on an ongoing basis, I have decided to make some drastic changes to how our programs here at Tax Marketing HQ are structured.

While our comprehensive systems courses (the Tax Resolution Toolkit and the Tax Marketing & Practice Management Mastery Course will still be available individually, as will the new subject-specific courses we create each month (such as last month’s Direct Response Marketing course), we are also making that course content available through our new premium membership plans.

These new premium membership plans are an outgrowth of this daily newsletter, merged with our tax lien data subscriptions, and enhanced with the marketing plans, ready to use marketing templates, and other resources you need to grow your practice.

Where is this coming from? So many tax practitioners have asked me to either take over their marketing entirely, or to bundle different pieces of our bigger courses together just for them, that I started seeing the need. Many readers of this newsletter need more than just mailing lists — they need ready-made marketing pieces, very specific “how to” instructions for getting their message out, assistance evaluating tax resolution cases, or want their marketing done completely for them and they just take the phone calls.

Depending upon the membership level you choose, here are just some of the new benefits available to members:

• Monthly premium marketing newsletter
• Monthly

Here’s how most people do marketing, particularly their direct mail.

They get a list, such as our tax lien lists. They print a flyer, brochure, postcard, coupon, etc. They send it to this list ONCE. Then, no matter what happens, good, bad, or ugly, they never touch this list again.

I received an email last week from a reader saying that direct mail doesn’t work. He went on to explain that last year, he had obtained 2,000 tax liens from us, then sent them all a letter. He got ZERO responses.

For one, getting absolutely zero responses out of 2,000 letters definitely tells me there was something wrong with whatever he sent them (which I happily would have critiqued for him at no cost if he had attached a copy to his email). But secondly, the biggest problem was that he only sent them something ONCE. It simply doesn’t work like that. You can’t send something to a group of people one time and one time only and then say, “Direct mail doesn’t work.” Direct mail DOES work…you’re just doing it wrong (sorry to be blunt, but the truth hurts sometimes).

Woody Allen is quoted as saying that “80% of success is showing up”. This is just as true for marketing as it is for performing artists. Statistically speaking, study after study shows that over 3/4 of all customers buy a product or service after the 5th contact from the salesperson or company they buy from.

Here are some other statistics: About 48% of sales people never make a follow up contact with a prospect. Less than 25% of sales professionals make two follow up contacts, and less than 12% make a third follow up attempt (e.g., a 4th contact).

If less than 12% of people make a 4th contact, and over 3/4 of sales are made after the 5th contact, then guess who’s getting those 3/4 of all sales?

That’s right: The company getting all those clients are the ones making the multiple contacts!

Let me phrase that another way: The secret to success in marketing is repetition.

I’m sure that you are fully aware of what battery company uses a cute little bunny rabbit banging on drums to sell their product. However, did you make that association the very first time you ever saw their commercial? Highly doubtful. Chances are, it took dozens of repetitions for you to make the mental … Continue reading

For the topic of lead generation (which I’ll be spending a lot more time discussing from now on), let’s start close to home: The area immediately surrounding your practice.

Unless you work from home and live in a pretty remote place, you’ve got a neighborhood that you can get business from. That “neighborhood” is going to cover more physical territory if you’re in rural Kansas compared to downtown Los Angeles, but it’s still a neighborhood.

It should be noted that working your local area, or “farming” as it is called by real estate agents, is one of the most time tested and proven ways for building a business. If you think about it, there was a point in human history where it was really the only marketing vehicle available for any business, and in some parts of the world, it still is.

The quandary to me is that so many people resist doing this one thing that is so basic and simple. I have consulted with small business owners in a number of other industries, and they’re always looking for something big and grandiose to spend their marketing time and money on. The simple fact of the matter is that most businesses are very local in nature, and most of your clients are going to be local to you. This is especially true if your business focus is primarily on one practice area, such as 1040 preparation, bookkeeping, or payroll processing.

There is a wealth of business in your local community — you just need to reach out for it. According to the IRS, about 60 percent of individuals still use a paid preparer to get their tax returns filed, which is double the percentage of people that use tax software (these are numbers just released from the current filing season).

This means that more than half the people you see walking around your local area are potential return preparation clients. See all those cars driving by them? All the folks at your local supermarket? All potential clients.

The very tiny percentage of real estate agents that follow the farming mantra just so happen to be the most successful real estate agents in any given area. These are the agents that are sending newsletters and neighborhood sales data to every homeowner in a neighborhood each and every month for years on end.

Using Click2Mail, the US Postal Service’s online retail partner, it costs about 32 … Continue reading