We are obviously neck deep in the Internet age.
With that, business owners are constantly bombarded with the message that if they’re not “all in” on digital marketing, then their business will simply implode within the next X years.
For some businesses, this is absolutely true.
For other types of businesses, it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Taxpayer representation is one of the latter.
Yes, you need a website (with a blog). Yes, you need to be creating content. Yes, you need to be building an email list of leads and prospects.
These are certainly things you should be doing. I’ll never tell you otherwise.
But, like many things in business, it’s an 80/20 thing. Ye olde Pareto Principle.
The simple, unvarnished fact of the matter is that the majority of all tax resolution services sold in the United States is still done through cold call telemarketing.
You can choose not to accept this fact, that’s up to you. But fake news it is not. The large, national tax resolution firms are still primarily telemarketing driven.
What about smaller practitioners, like us? The vast majority of smaller tax practices are generating these clients through either referrals from other CPAs, EAs, attorneys, financial advisors, bookkeepers, etc., or from delivering speaking presentations to niche industry groups.
Seriously. That’s how most small tax practices are generating leads. Referrals from other professional service providers and through speaking gigs.
So if you ignored any of Dan’s emails last week about the power of public speaking, I’ve got some uncomfortable news for you. 🙂
Before I left on my current vacation, I asked readers to email me their questions that I could answer in future emails, blog posts, YouTube videos, etc (there is a marketing lesson right there, btw, for those of you inclined to learn it).
The vast majority of the questions I got back were along the lines of:
- How do I get clients?
- Where should I buy leads from?
- I have $X dollars to spend. Should I do Facebook ads or direct mail?
- I tried X, Y, and Z, and they didn’t work. What should I be doing for marketing?
Well, what you do is:
- Network with other financial service providers and ask them for referrals.
- Start giving Tax Talks to specific, niche groups with a high propensity for tax debt or audit problems.
- Cold call tax liens.
Seriously, do that, and you’ll be doing 90% of the absolute most effective marketing that actually WORKS to attract the vast majority of tax resolution clients across the country.
This email is probably the most important Christmas gift I can give you. I honestly can’t boil it down any simpler. Before I left for vacation, I updated some older blog posts and created a reference page for them that discuss these ideas further, and the best thing I can probably do to answer many of the questions that were emailed to me is to give you this link again:
For the public speaking component, I hope that you picked up one of Dan’s PowerPoint presentations last week to help you get started, since there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. If you ignored those, do a search in your email system for “Dan Henn CPA” and you’ll find them.
