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Accountants are compromising the growth of their practice by continuing to neglect focusing on sales, according to one consultant, particularly given the already challenging conditions for organic growth.
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Accountants compromising growth with sales neglect
14 February 2017
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Superannuation Advisor Australia director Mike McHenry says there needs to be more discussion and education around how to achieve organic growth.
“Very few of them, I reckon not even 1 per cent of practitioners in the accounting space, have had any sales training, none,” Mr McHenry told Accountants Daily.
“But now they’re at the pointy end of the ship and they’re expected to go out and sell because that’s how you pick up business, so how are they going to do that?”
As competition between practices intensifies, firms need to look at their sales approach.
“What they need to do is create capacity to either get training in place to learn how to do it and devise a value proposition that they can sell to the market or if they can’t do that, get a sales team in,” Mr McHenry said.
Before employing a sales team, practices must work out their value proposition so the team knows what they are selling.
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“They’ve got to work out their value proposition, what are they selling and to who. Whose problems are they going to solve?” Mr McHenry said.
“Once they work that out, they can put your sales team on and educate them on the product and get them out banging the drum, but they need the capacity to begin with to spend the time to think about it.”
The biggest part of the value proposition is identifying why clients should choose their practice over another, according to Mr McHenry.
“Once they’ve got capacity to devise their value proposition and work out what their products are, they can splinter up their business and say ‘Let’s have a focus on cash flow, let’s have a focus on financial planning, let’s have a focus on finance’.
“Break them up into segments and work out why would someone buy our finance instead of from a bank, why would someone come to us as a financial planner instead of down the road?”
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