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So
you have developed a wonderful menu of products and services to offer
your clients and they just aren’t selling like you had hoped. Are your partners not talking to their clients? Are the clients not reading your newsletters, the mailings
you’ve been sending out? Do
you have marginal attendance at the seminars you offer? Maybe your partners just aren’t cross-selling the firm’s
products and services like they should. So what’s wrong?
There
are those who will tell you that cross-selling just doesn’t work and
you should stop trying. Let’s
take one more look at it and see if there aren’t a few things you
can do.
What
Doesn't Work
What
doesn’t work is telling your partners in a partner meeting that the
firm has a new consulting product or service and they all have to
introduce it to their clients. Asking
a tax or audit partner to sell a strategic planning engagement, for
example, would be frustrating for both the partner and the client.
Furthermore, if clients don’t need or want the services, then
you are forcing something on them which they will probably resent.
I’ve
seen firms demand quotas on consulting products and services. All
partners must introduce five clients to the new consulting product in
the next 90 days. Cross-selling
isn’t about the firm, it’s about the client. What do they need from us? How
can we help them to become more successful?
It
takes a tremendous amount of work to develop a new consulting product
or service. The niche
champion and development team have a huge emotional investment in the
success of their efforts. All
too often when they introduce or roll-out the new product, they are
disappointed by the response they get from their partners. Lack of enthusiasm and support for their efforts by others in
the firm leads to anger, disappointment, and taking things personally
which, in turn, will slow down or stop the marketing momentum of the
consulting niche.
What
Does Work
So
what works? What works is
developing a defined process that identifies client needs then aligns
the consulting products or services to meet those needs. Understanding your client’s business is the first step in
identifying what your firm should offer clients. If
your partners have strong relationships with their clients, you will
have the feedback you need to determine what consulting niches you
should pursue. Cross-selling
is much easier if the client needs what you have to offer.
In
order for a client to buy something new from your firm it has to
believe that a CPA firm is a logical place to go to find that product
or service. If you build
your menu of consulting niches out from the traditional services that
clients seek from you, they are more likely to buy additional products
or services. For example,
performance measurement, benchmarking, and business valuation are
logical extensions of our training as CPAs. If your firm offered team-building, organizational consulting
or conflict-resolution services, they may not understand the
connection to accounting or tax services, which makes them more
difficult to sell.
Partners
can’t sell what they don’t understand. Consulting niche champions must develop their marketing
approach and educate the entire firm on the benefits of the product or
service to give the firm the ammunition it needs for introduction to
clients. Cross-selling
begins with a deep understanding of the value the client will receive. If the partners don’t believe in the value of the product or
service, they will never introduce it to their clients.
Effective
cross-selling is dependent on relationships. It starts with the partners’ relationships with their
clients. If it’s right,
then when the partner says to the client, “You need to improve your
performance measures or you need to develop a strategic plan for your
organization,” the client will listen. If the partner then introduces the consulting niche champion as
a “guru” in performance measurement or strategic planning, the
client will have confidence in that person.
Cross-selling
requires celebration. The
consulting niche champion should focus attention on those firm members
who introduce products and services to their clients. Send out firmwide e-mails, talk up successes in partner
meetings, take them out to lunch, thank them for their referrals. Your partners are no different than your other outside referral
sources. They need
attention and nurturing in order to continue to refer you to their
clients.
Develop
client-service teams. On
all your more significant clients, develop teams of audit, tax and
consulting professionals who meet with the client relationship partner
to discuss client needs. The
client service teams can meet quarterly or semi-annually to identify
ways to help the client be successful.
Schedule periodic meetings with the client where the client
gets to know the entire client service team and the client service
team gets to better understand the client’s business.
Tie
cross-selling to compensation. “What’s
in it for me” is a powerful motivator or reward mechanism for those
who cross-sell firm services and identify client needs. The realization that partners and other professionals can help
the clients, increase their value to the firm, and get paid doing it
goes a long way to reinforce and promote the right behaviors.
In
the end, cross-selling is about building relationships, creating
value, identifying client needs and offering the right products and
services at the right time.
Rich Rinehart
is a CPA and consultant to
CPA/consulting firms. He
assists firms nationally with practice development, strategic
planning, facilitation of partner retreats, partner compensation,
succession and development of their
consulting practices. He
is co-founder of GRANT Partners, LLC in Denver, Colorado, consultants to professional service firms.
Rich can be reached at rrinehart@grantptrs.com.
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