cpas have some ideas about client satisfaction that just aren’t true. tax season is the best time to get it right.
by rick telberg
at large
“selling?” first of all, cpas don’t “sell.” or do they?
and if they did, they’d call it “practice development,” wouldn’t they?
welcome to the real world. successful cpas are selling and they’re doing it all the time. many of them just don’t know it. or they don’t know how they’re doing it.
and you’re certainly too busy to sell, market or conduct “practice development” during tax season, right? wrong again!
tax season is, in fact, the once-a-year opportunity to show clients and potential clients who you are, what you do and how well you do it. and, to the prospect, how you sell is how you work. in professional services, the prospect first buys you, then the service.this all comes to mind as we mull some comments from charles h. green, author, with david maister and rob galford, of “the trusted advisor.” green was responding to our column “who keeps clients … and how?” about some of our client satisfaction work, when he asserted that cpas “want to believe two things that often aren’t true.”
“the first is that clients mean what they say to you about satisfaction,” green said. the truth is clients lie. they lie because they like you, or at least they once did. “consequently we get the polite head-nod, the equivocal murmuring. it doesn’t mean what we would like to think it means.”
the second mis-truth is that relationships are “linear.” to green, the gap between satisfied and highly satisfied clients is the same as the gap between highly satisfied and delighted. “the latter gap is much bigger, and qualitatively different.”
“a trusted advisor relationship is to ‘highly satisfied’ as a good french wine is to beer. nothing wrong with the beer, but it just doesn’t cut it for a really good meal,” green said.
green cites a little book called “you’re working too hard to make the sale,” which researched about 2,000 medium-complexity sales interactions.
they concluded two things:
1. the client buys the salesperson, not the product; and
2. people overwhelmingly prefer to buy what they need (i.e. what they have to buy anyway) from someone who knows what they want (i.e. someone who “gets” them on basic, bedrock issues — hopes, fears, wishes).
“more simply: we all prefer to buy our necessities from someone we feel good about personally, who we feel understands us,” green said.
“trusted advisor relationships, like good marriages, aren’t forever, unless you work on them. and they are not built just on needs assessments and good work; there is a personal connection there that can’t be denied.”
so stop thinking about the time between now and april 16 as “tax season.” and start thinking about it as “marketing season.” or “practice development season.” maybe even “selling season.”
[first published by the aicpa]
one response to “two things you don’t know about client satisfaction”
vernon jacobs, cpa
have you considered the opposite issue of creating unrealistic client expectations by selling too hard — meaning making promises or implied promises that raise a client’s expectations?
the widget salesman’s job is to get the order and he is rarely concerned about whether the money is actually collected. generally, the widget company has a bill collection department to deal with customer who don’t pay. with professional services, the sales person is not likely to be thinking about future lawsuits, but that’s where a lot of litigation comes from. the client who expects more than the firm can deliver is far more likely to sue. the problem is therefore to not sell so hard as to create unrealistic expectations by the new client or by the established client who is buying a new service — like financial planning.
service providers like cpas need to avoid adopting the pushy and aggressive sales practices of widget sales people lest they be buying a future lawsuit.
vernon jacobs, cpa
international wealth protection monitor
.