One common struggle for many accounting professionals is building a reputation as a valued accounting advisor. This requires gaining the trust and confidence of your clients. It also includes the confidence to be proactive in your relationships.
Think of an accounting professional who has achieved the level of valued advisor. What are the habits that he or she employs? Today we have gathered a list of some of the habits of valued accounting advisors. Consider adding these to your weekly to-do list in order to help yourself evolve as an accounting professional.
Cultivate These Accounting Advisor Habits
1. Become familiar with your clients’ goals
First, in order to be able to offer proactive advice, you need to have a thorough understanding of your clients’ goals and strategies. Make a list of your top clients, then gather information and familiarize yourself with it. What information should you ask for? Ask your clients for:
- A copy of their strategic plan
- A list of their top one, three, and/or five-year goals
- A description of their aspirations for their business or personal finances
Once you have acquired this information, study it and make notes about how you can contribute to your clients’ goals. To make this process easier on yourself, work it into your new client onboarding routine. Lastly, be sure to keep an organized database of information about your clients’ goals and dreams.
2. Keep up with your contacts on social media
One of the best ways to stay up-to-date with what is happening in your contacts’ professional lives is to link with them online. Take the time to follow each one of your client contacts and companies on LinkedIn. Check LinkedIn regularly for updates and developments within this population. Make note of any board memberships that your contacts hold, nonprofits that they support, or other groups that they are affiliated with. If you notice something important, make a note of it and plan to follow-up with the contact about it.
3. Keep track of business opportunities
Whenever you discover a potential business opportunity—whether or not it is likely to happen—make a record of it. Always add some sort of follow-up task for each business opportunity to your to-do list. This prevents potential business from being lost through the cracks. It can be helpful to give a category to each business opportunity on your list. For instance, some category examples include cross-sell, inbound referral, RFP response, and more.
4. Be on the lookout for thought leadership opportunities
Lastly, it is a good idea to keep up with the news—both that of the accounting industry and of your clients’ industries. Whenever you run across a good article, save it to a designated thought leadership location. Try to save a minimum of two shareable articles to your thought leadership collection each week.
Regularly sharing relevant content with your contacts is a fantastic strategy for staying top of mind. On a weekly basis, pick a few contacts that you have not interacted with recently. Share an article with them, along with your take on it.
Experienced Accounting Advisors Use a CRM for CPAs
ABLE is a contact relationship management system for accounting professionals. It helps users make the transition from number cruncher to valued accounting advisor. Users only need to spend approximately 30 minutes of their week in ABLE to glean great benefit from it.
Here’s what a typical ABLE session involves:
- Schedule major interactions with clients whose dashboards are yellow or red.
- Complete any tasks due, both for contacts and pipeline deals.
- Update the status of any deals that have changes and add in notes.
- Identify and send one piece of thought leadership content to a targeted audience of contacts.
As you can see, the tools that ABLE offers make completing the habits of a valued accounting advisor much easier. It offers a centralized database for storing all contact and business opportunity information. The CRM for accountants allows you to make tasks for yourself and your teammates. In addition, it helps you remain top-of-mind with your contacts by reminding you to interact with them.
Are you ready to become a valued accounting advisor? Is your firm looking to step into the new digital accounting era? Learn more about ABLE today. Click here to schedule a free, no-obligations demo.