Five Ways To Generate More Income From Client Meetings

As an accountant, you’re used to operating under pressure. Each tax season, you work hard to ensure your clients get their help. But when it comes to your firm’s profitability, there comes a new set of pressure. 

The accounting world is changing, and with that come new and necessary methods to improve your firm and gain an edge against the competition. If you’re wondering how to generate more income from client meetings, this blog can help. 

Keep your ears open

What are your clients saying when you meet with them? Are you making the most of your time together? What are you talking about when you meet? One of the best ways to find more avenues to generate income from clients comes from what they say to you. Understanding their needs not only forges your relationship with your clients but also allows you to understand what more you can provide them. That can help improve their experience with your firm, allowing you more opportunities to leverage new services. 

Maintain regular contact

Many firms struggle to retain client engagement outside of tax and extension season. The worst part about it is that if you only meet with clients during busy times of the year, it limits your ability to expand your relationship with your clients, as the matter at hand will occupy your time. Firms of all sizes must plan ways to interact with their clients throughout the year. You may find out whether a small business customer is considering growing and requires tax guidance. Alternatively, a larger customer may want strategic advice, which may present a chance for a business to give consulting services and create more money.

Take notes

When your clients speak with you, you need to retain plenty of information. Keeping it all in your head may not be the best way to remember what was said. If you have a system where all your clients’ information is organized together, it’s ideal for expanding what you have to include notes from any meetings you may have had. Why should you go back to a practice you used in school? Information retention is an excellent way to improve client engagement and retention and cross-sell some of your other services. 

Have an agenda

Using the notes you’ve gathered from past interactions, have a set of topics you’re prepared to discuss with your clients ahead of time. A prepared agenda helps to keep your discussion on track. Consider the agenda a road map for your meetings, guiding every discussion point to a conclusion or plan of action. As you set an agenda for meetings, you’ll notice you spend less time following up with past matters and instead focusing on the actionable items to make the most of your time with your clients. How often have you finished a meeting and said to yourself: “Oh, we forgot to talk about X”? This is precisely where an agenda can help. 

An agenda can also assist you in cross-selling other services. You probably already know everything about your clients’ finances. And if you’ve kept notes from past meetings, you will likely have an idea of what next steps they want to take in their lives or business. This is where you can step in by having a prearranged list of topics to discuss, mentioning something you noticed or brought up, and leveraging the services you offer. 

Cross-sell your other services

If you offer a variety of tax and accounting services, you’ll likely have clients who aren’t signed up for all of them. Segment your client list into different services and approach them with an offer to sign up for any additional ones they don’t have. For example, if clients are signed up for general tax preparation services, introduce them to your tax planning or audit services. 

Cross-selling is not about selling a service or persuading a customer with a laundry list of benefits. It is a process that entails developing relationships. Knowing your customer professionally and personally will allow you to make a better-educated judgment about which services would benefit that client.

How can Taxfyle help

Spending time with clients and improving your engagements with them takes, well, time. With Taxfyle, we can save you some. We offer a network of thousands of verified tax professionals from across the United States who can help take some of the low-value work off your hands. By outsourcing with Taxfyle, your firm’s staff can spend more time on what matters most: your clients. 

Let the constraints of the busy season be a bygone problem. When you outsource with Taxfyle, your firm’s staff can have more time to bring your firm revenue.