Power Up Your Profits : 31 Days to Better Selling
On June - 28 - 20103 COMMENTS
Product Description
This book is also available in CD format for the same price of $59.00. There are 10 CDs total…. More >>
Product Description
This book is also available in CD format for the same price of $59.00. There are 10 CDs total…. More >>
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Do your firm professionals seem to have a difficult time discharging their marketing and business development responsibilities? If so, this book may be a valuable tool to help them determine exactly what to do and how to do it. Troy has developed a primer on professional services marketing that every firm member can use to begin building their book of business. Every chapter has specific ideas, suggestions and techniques that can be put to work immediately.
The book begins by defining the some goals and parameters for marketing professional services. The goal is not just to get more clients; the goal is to get better clients. That means you have to be careful and deliberate in deciding both how to market and to whom. The idea is that superior service is required to attract and retain the best clients and just selling your services to anyone will not be effective. The professional marketers job is to find our want clients want, and then deliver it. We need to remember that our job is to help clients build their business. In turn, we will be able to build our own.
Troy points out that the essence of all marketing is communication, and in order to communicate with our clients, we have to spend time with them – whether or not we can bill the hours! Professionals who sit in their offices reading periodicals and waiting for the phone to ring are not serious about building their firms. The point is – clients buy us, not just our services, and we are responsible for showing clients why our services are beneficial to them.
The initial focus of marketing accounting firm services is to be sure we do everything to hold on to our best clients. Only when they are being fully served in a superior manner can we switch our attention to getting new clients. Even then, we have to know how we want as clients. David Maister once said that when your are hunting lions, there is no point in shooting rabbits, squirrels and everything else that moves. Troy shows you how to hunt lions.
Troy provides innumerable insights into our marketing responsibilities:
· We have to deliver and discuss EVERY product, otherwise the client may not understand the value.
· We have to take our young people out to client meetings so they can observe and learn appropriate behaviors.
· All marketing is based upon relationships. Those who can establish and nurture the strongest relationships will get the best business.
· You don’t have to be am extrovert to market. People buy professional services from those they like and trust. You can only gain this favored position by spending time with them.
And these tidbits are from the first five chapters!!
The book is designed to be a thirty-one day read. Troy suggests you read one chapter a day. That makes the lessons manageable within busy schedules. I promise the book will be full of highlights, underlines and margin notes.
If you are looking for a definition of quality – see Chapter 2.
Looking for ideas on aggressive methods for generating leads – see Chapter 7.
Trying to decide how to analyze current clients and use that information to identify prospects in similar businesses – see Chapter 10.
Want ideas on how to form alliances to expand and enhance the services you can offer – read about coopetition in Chapter 14.
I think you get the point by now. If you want to jumpstart your marketing efforts and empower your business builders, Power Up Your Profits is a great investment for your firm.
Rating: 5 / 5
There’s no question about it. A salesman sees the whole world as a universe to be sold to as surely as a surgeon sees all of medicine at the end of a scalpel. Troy Waugh, CPA though he might be, is nevertheless a salesman. He has written an interesting book about it for CPAs. He draws upon his own experience, and supports his point of view with the observations of a great many people who bring authority to the process. For the CPA who wants to know about selling his or her services, this is a valuable and interesting book.
It’s interesting, though, to realize how profoundly different people process the same information. Waugh sees the process of bringing one’s services to the prospective client as an exercise in selling, with all the optimisms, closing techniques, relationship establishing devices at play. And he’s not wrong. It would be hard to deny that his methods work for a lot of people.
But there are other systems and other approaches. In fact, to make a point, he quotes a book (Spin Selling) that is really about a selling system that’s very different from his.
The problem of selling for professionals is that nobody can sell a service except, ultimately, the individual who performs the service. This puts the selling role on an individual whose training, and frequently, temperament, is generally inimical to selling and the sales process. Professionals, even those who have sold successfully, don’t want to sell. They just want to have sold, without going through the process. They tend to see selling as demeaning and unprofessional. They don’t have the salesman’s mindset, and take each no as a personal rejection. And yet, if they are to grow a practice, they do have to sell.
Nor do they generally understand the relationship between marketing and selling. How, then, can they be expected to be successful at something they don’t fully understand, much less value?
Waugh’s book speaks to these people, with guidelines and instructions that are helpful, and even inspirational. He makes and demonstrates several crucial points, such as that better selling helps clients, because better selling educates. He deals with the seller’s attitude, which, for professionals, is crucial. He talks about client retention, and getting more from current clients, which is a subject too little addressed. As a former practicing CPA, he clearly understands clients and client relationships.
Troy Waugh is a bright and imaginative individual who writes from experience, rather than academic theory. To the individual practitioner who wants to learn a process that’s far more valuable than newcomers to the professions are led to believe, Power Up Your Profits can be an invaluable tool.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you know absolutely nothing about professional services marketing and work for a small, local accounting firm, then this book may interest you. Gives a very general understanding of marketing concepts but not enough to really help you do anything. If you work for a Big 5, don’t waste your time with this book.
Rating: 2 / 5