Most accountancy practices would like to generate more advisory work from their existing clients. The difficulty is often not a shortage of opportunities but identifying those opportunities at the right time.
A client may be considering buying a property, taking on an employee, purchasing a new vehicle, selling their business or changing the way they extract profits from their company. Unless they tell their accountant what they are planning, valuable opportunities to provide advice can easily be missed.
Regular client communication can help bridge that gap.
Clients do not always know when they need advice
Accountants understand the tax and financial implications of business decisions. Clients, generally, do not.
A business owner may therefore make a decision without appreciating that there was an opportunity to obtain advice beforehand. By the time the accountant discovers what has happened, perhaps when preparing the annual accounts, it may be too late to recommend a better course of action.
Regular newsletters, tax updates and business articles can prompt clients to think about issues before they act.
Each communication creates another opportunity for the client to say: “This applies to me. Can we talk about it?”
Staying visible also strengthens relationships
There is another benefit.
Many clients have relatively little direct contact with their accountant during the year. If most communication concerns accounts, tax returns, information requests and tax payments, it is easy for the relationship to become focused almost entirely on compliance.
Useful information arriving changes that perception.
It reminds clients that their accountant understands the wider issues affecting businesses and individuals. Instead of being seen simply as someone who deals with HMRC and Companies House, the accountant can become a regular source of useful business and financial information.
That can improve client retention as well as generate additional work.
The challenge is maintaining regular communication
The obvious difficulty is finding the time.
Someone needs to identify suitable subjects, research them, write the material, check that it is technically accurate and distribute it. Websites need updating, newsletters need producing and social media channels need fresh content.
It is easy for client communication to slip down the priority list when there are accounts to complete and tax deadlines approaching.
Outsourcing some or all of this work can therefore make considerable sense.
Making communication work harder
Informanagement provides professionally prepared tax, accountancy and business content that practices can use across newsletters, websites and social media.
Importantly, communication does not have to mean sending everything to everybody. Client profiling can help firms distribute information to the people most likely to find it relevant.
The objective is not simply to communicate more frequently. It is to communicate more effectively.
If better communication encourages just a handful of clients to seek advice before making important financial or business decisions, it can generate additional fees while providing those clients with a better service.
Perhaps the question for accountancy practices is not whether they can afford to communicate regularly with their clients, but whether they can afford not to.
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