Getting started on your client's marketing

For Accountants Guiding Business Owners along the Advisory Pathway

You’re now well established as your client’s ‘trusted advisor’ because through preparing their budget and management accounts you’ve learned more about how they work than anyone else. And by attending monthly / quarterly meetings to interpret what the figures are saying you’re helping to uncover the business causes of financial underperformance.

You’ve switched your implementation style from Consulting to more affordable Coaching, but now more is expected of you as the ‘fount of all knowledge’, the first person they now bring a problem to, and ‘bounce ideas off’.

This is an important moment because you don’t know everything, yet you must remain credible. The trick is to be ‘Socratic’, by which I mean you perfect the framing of questions that get to the answer. So, forget your years of being their ‘expert’ accountant and start being their objective ‘processor’.

Likely their first question to come up is “what can we do about Marketing? I’m spending loads on it but almost nothing coming back”. And you say “well, that was flagged in the original Business Dashboard® Report, so let’s take a look at your options”..

Take your client through these to establish where to begin. By a process of questioning, you’ll establish how much they know about their market, whether their problem is products in the existing market, or the market itself and if they have a selling system. All of which precedes what they’ll really want to go for which is to ‘Raise Awareness’ (M06) or ‘Generate Sales Enquiries’ (Mo7) .  

Don’t let them do that until they can convince you about the preceding 5 Methods otherwise, they’ll be throwing good money after bad.  

See what I mean by questioning? You’re no longer the expert but the informed questioner working to a process, their ‘trusted advisor’ and ‘assertive Coach’.

So in all likelihood you’ll start them on ‘Research and Analyse your Markets’ (M01) followed by ‘Contact Database’ (M05). 

In the next post we’ll open up one of these to get you started.

Practical stuff from AI Business Advisor® See the series here