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Why accountants should stop selling advisory services
By Patrick McLoughlin
I was on a webinar a few weeks back, focused on helping accountants to grow their ‘advisory’ services.
The central message was:
‘Advisory is an optional service,
so you have to be good at sales and marketing.’
That’s very damaging advice and certainly not my experience. Bring that energy to your conversations and communications with clients and you’ll fall flat on your face.
Advisory Services: key skills
The accountants most successful at generating ‘advisory’ work are no better at sales and marketing.
Instead they’re focused on listening and understanding. They’ve learnt to sit on their hands and resist the urge to interrupt with answers and solutions.
First, they check their assumptions to get a clear picture of where the client is and where they want to get to.
They don’t sell their ‘advisory’ service but enable clients to self-diagnose the help they need.
They’re committed to helping clients achieve their potential, not make a sale.
Selling advisory services: Selling Vs Helping
Salesperson and trusted advisor don’t sit so well together. You can tell when you are being sold to and when someone is trying to help you.
Take the opposite approach to selling and detach yourself from ‘wining the business’. If you focus on a genuine desire to help, the bank balance looks after itself.
‘Advisory‘ isn’t some new, mystical service that you bamboozle clients into paying for.
Just because a service isn’t compulsory, it doesn’t mean it isn’t in demand.
So, let’s stop talking about ‘advisory’ and direct that energy into helping your clients.
Now I’m not an accountant. But since the late 90s I’ve listened to thousands of business owners discuss their relationships with their accountants.
Their opinions haven’t changed much over the last twenty years either.
Many still view them as a necessary evil, a grudge purchase: someone to do no more than keep them out of trouble.
Others talk of their accountants as Oscar winners do of their partners:
“Without them,
none of this would have been possible”.
Business owners are crying out the help you can bring them. Otherwise the business coaching industry wouldn’t have blossomed over the last decade or two.
Yet few of the business owners I listen to are having these conversations with their accountants. The vast majority tell us their accountant has no idea what they’re trying to achieve with their business.
A business is only the owner’s vehicle to get them where they want to be. For some clients that goal is early retirement. For others its paying off the mortgage in 5 years or putting the kids through private school.
As an accountant you are perfectly placed to chart that journey: to convert their dreams into numbers and navigate the numbers to their dreams.
If you start from there you’re on the road to helping your clients and making yourself irreplaceable.
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