Your Best Advisory Revenue Is Already on Your Client List

‍Podcast Intro: Welcome to the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast, where our experts share best practices on running your firm in the digital age. This podcast is brought to you by CountingWorks PRO. Let's get started.

Lee Reams II: Welcome back to another episode of the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast. My name is Lee Reams II. I am the founder and CEO of CountingWorks and our sister company, TaxBuzz.com.

Lee Reams II: First of all, I wanted to start with Rebekah. Rebekah is with me again, our Chief Visibility Officer with CountingWorks PRO. Rebekah, if you could say hello.

Rebekah Winters Barton: Yeah. Hi, everybody. I am super excited about all the growth we've seen lately. This is so fun.

Lee Reams II: Yeah. I assume you are still glowing because of the Indiana win.

Rebekah Winters Barton: Obviously, it is a big deal when you have never won, and then all of a sudden you break through. But we do not know how to handle it.

Lee Reams II: Apparently not. And then what you have done is brought this huge ice age upon America afterwards. So that is how dramatic this is. Or traumatic, I guess.

Lee Reams II: All right. Today, I am going to pivot a little bit to an area that I am seeing and hearing a little bit more in our own client base. It is not necessarily the rush of, obviously, let's sell advisory and let's sell more advisory. I think it is the misconception of how you actually do it.

Lee Reams II: Meaning, obviously, your client database is your biggest asset. That is where you should be targeting your efforts. But I think what I see a lot of times right now is tax and accounting pros just shoving advisory down, or being more reactionary. Selling advisory is different. It is relationship marketing. It is, I already have trust, hopefully, with an audience, or they trust the content I have been creating that is getting picked up in Google. It is going through my social media posts. It is on my email newsletter. It is getting picked up in ChatGPT. By the time they are ready to actually reach out and talk to you, they probably are quite a ways along in the process of, oh, maybe advisory is right for me.

Lee Reams II: So what I feel right now, specifically with advisory being the big thing, is that most tax and accounting firms are still chasing growth in what I consider the hardest way possible, or they are not fully energizing and getting as much out of their existing client base. It is not necessarily, I need more leads. It is not necessarily, I need more traffic or more strangers to talk to and convince.

Lee Reams II: I think the ironic thing is that while firms are pouring energy into finding new clients, the most profitable growth opportunity they have is sitting right in front of them in their own database: their current clients. These are clients who already trust them, already pay them, and already open their emails. I think that is a big deal.

Lee Reams II: When firms say they want to do more advisory, they almost never start here. They never come up with a formula and a game plan. That is where we are going to talk about a couple things. Today's topic is: your best advisory revenue is already on your client list.

Lee Reams II: We are going to talk about one of the main things I see most often, which is, I want to sell advisory, so I either only wait until I talk to a client and there is an opportunity during an interview to kind of try to upsell them, which again is kind of just hitting them over the head. They are there for a compliance call, and all of a sudden, now it is, will you spend $2,000 a month with me for CFO advisory? That is one approach that happens.

Lee Reams II: The other thing I am seeing is sending out 2,000 proposals to your entire database cold, saying, hey, sign up for this. Give me $500. Give me $1,000 and sign up. But there is no preconditioning, no storytelling, no narrative, no positioning, no relatability, and no showing them what some of their financial outcomes could be.

Lee Reams II: I think that is a big deal. I think it matters a lot that tax and accounting firms step back and say, okay, advisory works best when it grows out of existing relationships. That is what today's episode is all about. We are going to talk about it economically, emotionally, and more importantly, operationally.

Lee Reams II: If you are familiar with the Growth Minded Accountant, I usually try to break these up into different segments. We usually go 20 minutes to 40 or 50 if it gets long. We are trying to do this one maybe 20 or 25. My first segment here is why current clients are your unfair advantage.

Lee Reams II: I will just back this up with real data. This is kind of obvious, and I will get you to jump in here, Rebekah. Bain & Company says existing clients are three to five times more likely to buy additional services than new prospects. Surprise, surprise to no one, at least to me. Harvard Business Review has consistently shown that trust, not price, is the biggest driver of expansion in professional service firms.

Lee Reams II: Why does this matter? Because your current clients already have context, history, and confidence in your competence. You are not trying to sell them things through marketing copy or business development people, which means when advisory conversations happen, they do not start at zero.

Lee Reams II: Let's talk about this, Rebekah: the importance of preconditioning and understanding, okay, I already have these tight relationships. They already trust me. For some of them, you are the most trusted advisor for a reason. How does that preconditioning make it so much easier that when you properly deliver the opportunity and the value, they are more likely to convert than with a cold, pound-you-over-the-head, here-is-a-proposal, sign-up kind of approach?

Rebekah Winters Barton: Right, because there are several reasons for it. Cold calling in any situation, or cold selling, rarely works the way people want it to. People do not want to buy a product or spend a lot of money on a service when it is just being thrust at them and they have no idea what it is. They have no idea why they should buy it.

Rebekah Winters Barton: Preconditioning is key because it is basically warming people up to the idea that, hey, maybe there is more out there for me. Maybe this person who I already trust, who I already know delivers on their promises in other ways, on my tax return, on my bookkeeping, whatever it may be, is already delivering for me in that way, and is likely to deliver for me in other ways.

Rebekah Winters Barton: If you start oiling the machine and letting people know, hey, we are offering this, this is an option, here are some possible outcomes, and you have some social proof going out, you are really setting the stage for what you are going to offer them before trying any kind of actual sales pitch or product offering. You do not want to hit people over the head.

Rebekah Winters Barton: I think this is not true just for accounting. This is true for every industry. This is just the way people are. This is sales psychology. This is not specific to this field. Think about how you would want to be approached in any other facet of your life. That is how your clients are going to feel as well.

Lee Reams II: Yeah. If the average buyer needs seven contacts with your brand before they decide to purchase, and then you just go and hit them over the head with a new product and expect a one-call close, I think that is a huge disconnect. Maybe it is just that people in the tax and accounting space are not necessarily salespeople. We are not necessarily marketing experts, and we kind of miss this preconditioning thing.

Lee Reams II: I want to start back before we get into the full deal. What is the difference between compliance and advisory? Compliance is a much different animal to sell than advisory is. Compliance is backward-looking. It asks, what happened last year? What do we need to report? What forms are required? It is historical, transactional, and increasingly automatable. That is a difference.

Lee Reams II: Advisory is forward-looking. Advisory asks, what decisions are you about to make? What happens if nothing changes? This is really important to think about because you want to create your narrative, your messaging, and your positioning around this. What does success look like a year from now?

Lee Reams II: Compliance tells clients what was, and it is usually too late to do anything to correct it. Advisory helps clients decide what should be. That changes everything, including how you market it and how you sell it.

Lee Reams II: This is why most fail. Most firms make the mistake of trying to sell advisory the same way they sell compliance. They send a proposal. Here is my client database of 1,500. I am going to send 1,500 proposals for a service I have never, ever mentioned to my client base. They may list deliverables, and they blast it everywhere.

Lee Reams II: But advisory does not necessarily fail because the price is too high. It fails because clients do not necessarily understand the problem, or their problem. I had mentioned this earlier about preconditioning. I know we like to give stats because it helps back the social proof, but according to Harvard Business Review, buyers are already 67% of the way through their decision-making process before they ever speak to a provider.

Lee Reams II: So if your proposal shows up without any education, the problem is that it is premature, even to clients who trust you. You cannot sell insights to someone who has not been taught how to see the risk. Advisory has to be framed before it is sold.

Lee Reams II: I like to use the foam-the-runway principle. Rebekah, get ready. I am going to ask you a bunch of questions here. This is what I mean when I say relationship marketing comes in. In a relationship-based business, you never lead with the sale. You lead with understanding. Education foams the runway.

Lee Reams II: McKinsey has shown that B2B buyers who receive consistent educational content are more than twice as likely to choose a provider who educated them, even when that provider charges more. So what do we mean by educational material?

Lee Reams II: If I am selling advisory, for example, I want a tax prep client to go to tax advisory. Or I want an hourly bookkeeping client to go to CFO advisory. Or I have clients that I want to now introduce to capital advisory. Should you get a loan? What are the different loan types? Again, normally this is historical. They come to you after they have already signed the line of credit. That is the problem, because you are not providing that foam on the runway. You are not giving the ideas of, is this right for me? Does this speak to me?

Lee Reams II: How do you do that, Rebekah? Through blog content, social media, emails, and everything you say inside your marketing universe, your funnel, so to speak, starts foaming the runway. Talk about it and why it takes so long, why consistency matters, and how this builds trust over time.

Rebekah Winters Barton: All of those things you just mentioned, Lee, are very, very important here. Blog posts are important for multiple reasons. They are important for AI search. They are important for building content clusters. They are important for building authority on the wider internet.

Rebekah Winters Barton: Social media posts are important for the same reason. Those are going to go out into the world. They are going to start establishing you as an expert within this area, as a thought leader within this area, which is really important. You want people to think of you when they think of a topic.

Rebekah Winters Barton: If you are trying to do advisory, and let's just say you are trying to do advisory for small business owners who are looking for lines of credit or loans or other ways to grow their business, or business financing needs, you want to set yourself up as an expert in the business finance area within your part of the country or within your region.

Rebekah Winters Barton: Another great way to do it, and we have already talked about tapping into that current client base, is where upsell campaigns and email campaigns can be critically important. You want to show up in the inboxes of people who already trust you. But it does not always have to be a sales pitch.

Rebekah Winters Barton: You can do very educational-based campaigns that maybe answer one common question a week for a period of four to six weeks about how business financing works. What are the different options? Hone in on a different option every week to let people know what is out there for them.

Rebekah Winters Barton: That is just one example. There are obviously a nearly unlimited number of examples you could use with different niches and different industries. But that is how you really start getting in people's heads in the best possible way. You become the authority in the area where you want to lead.

Rebekah Winters Barton: All of those different things you are putting out there on the internet, blogs, social media posts, emails, TikToks, Reels, anything you are posting, YouTube videos, all of that is going to come together and tell the internet, tell the algorithms, as well as the people viewing the content, what you are good at and how much authority you have.

Rebekah Winters Barton: You are going to start worming your way into their minds when they think about these topics. They are going to be more likely to trust you because you have already proven that you provide them with information that is valuable before they have ever even gotten on the phone with you or sat down at a table.

Lee Reams II: Yeah. You just nailed it. Education actually allows the client to self-select. It could be a life event that just occurred, and they just got that article in the newsletter about credit card stacking, for example. They might think, I do not even know that credit card stacking exists, or what it was. But this now makes advisory not feel like an upsell. It starts feeling like you are helping them and getting them to a better financial outcome.

Lee Reams II: That is where the true ROI is, and that is where this flywheel starts. Why do you go after current clients? I think it is kind of obvious. Your current clients already ask you questions. Hopefully, they hesitate before quick decisions. Hopefully, they are actually asking you. They worry about consequences. They feel uncertainty but do not always know how to name it.

Lee Reams II: Education gives language to what they are already feeling. Once that happens, advisory becomes the natural next step, not necessarily a sales conversation. No one wants a sales conversation.

Lee Reams II: Let's talk a little bit about life events, client moments, and things like that. Advisory is not just one service. It is a portfolio of responses to different client moments. That could be tax changes. It could be life events, buying a company, selling a company, or business growth. Maybe they are growing at 50%, and that creates a whole new set of needs. That could lead to capital advisory.

Lee Reams II: They might have cash flow stress. They might be dealing with tariffs. They might be confused about AI and how it is going to affect their business. Each moment becomes an opportunity for you. Education leads to a conversation, which then leads to the advisory engagement.

Lee Reams II: When this happens inside your existing client database, conversion rates are going to be much higher. Pricing resistance is going to be lower. More importantly, retention improves. You do not want to sign people up for advisory and have them churn in two to three months. More importantly, they see the value. They see the outcomes you are delivering. It is a partnership. You are working together. Your referrals are going to increase.

Lee Reams II: That is how advisory becomes evergreen, and it becomes a natural part of how you sell things. You build it in. You build this kind of education marketing on autopilot.

Lee Reams II: At CountingWorks PRO, we have what we call playbooks. We have playbooks for every single advisory type you could think of. The way we do it is we personalize it to each firm. We personalize it even to clients at times. We set up this automated process where, on cadence, every two weeks a blog article is posted. In that blog article, we then share it on social media. Maybe every three weeks there is an outbound email that is more like, hey, did you know that I do such and such, and these are some of the outcomes? Maybe you share a story of another client with a success story.

Lee Reams II: That is how this flywheel starts. What you will see, and we have had clients where we have turned it on and they are like, oh my God, I am selling advisory. What are they doing? They are just calling me. It is like, by the way, you forgot we turned this playbook on. But that is the way it works.

Lee Reams II: I think one of the problems is that the honest truth is most firms understand this intellectually, but they just do not execute it properly. When they sell advisory, they are again just waiting for maybe a meeting and that certain client who says, okay, they meet my criteria. Now I have some sort of upsell campaign. They are not in any way foaming the runway.

Lee Reams II: Explain a little bit, Rebekah, when it comes to the psychology of trust, building trust, and more importantly storytelling, getting people to put themselves into these articles, where they can say, I can see myself, and I can see myself with that end result. How does that all work when it comes to copywriting, marketing, and putting together the story to make it work with your client base?

Rebekah Winters Barton: I would go so far as to say narrative is the number one most important thing you can do in marketing today. You can have the best ad campaigns on earth, but if people cannot see themselves working with you, it is all for naught. It does not really matter how much jargon you are throwing out there, how good of a deal you are offering, or what special offer you have.

Rebekah Winters Barton: If people then come to your website, or they are seeing your social posts, and they cannot understand what makes you valuable and why they should work with you over everyone else, there is no point. The way you get people there is through storytelling. It is through narrative.

Rebekah Winters Barton: It is extremely important, and the way you can do this is by simply writing content that addresses the pain points people have, or posting content that addresses the pain points people have. Write about, for example, social proof. Write about a real situation where you assisted a client in saving X amount of dollars on their taxes because they did not know what deductions, credits, or whatever they had available to them that particular year.

Rebekah Winters Barton: That is a very simplistic example, but there are a lot of ways you can go with this. You need people who are reading your content, watching your videos, and interacting with your social media posts to see themselves in the situations you are portraying.

Rebekah Winters Barton: That is why it is also very important to discuss the outcome, not just the service. Anybody can say, well, I prepare taxes. But not everybody can say, for my clients, I save X amount of dollars on taxes every year. Often in storytelling, you need to lead with the result. You need to tell people why they should care.

Rebekah Winters Barton: How is your service going to change their story? That matters as much as what you are going to do. It is very important to let people know how you are going to shift what is happening in their life or in their business. That is where storytelling comes in. Once people start to see, oh wow, this could be me, and I could also have this result if I choose this firm, it becomes really essential.

Rebekah Winters Barton: That is a very brief way of describing it so we do not run too over time today. But I think everyone needs to be working on creating a story for their firm. You need to be working on telling that story in everything you do. Fluff does not cut it anymore. Jargon does not cut it anymore. You need to be providing value and telling people exactly why they should work with you and what great outcomes you are going to provide in every piece of content you post.

Lee Reams II: Yeah. The difference between what we are talking about now versus the way traditional advisory is sold is that, right now, it depends on your memory. It depends on your motivation that day. Do I want to bring this up to this client? Or even the one-off effort, right? It is not really repeatable. Systems beat willpower every time.

Lee Reams II: When you have a system in place, if you picked up two to three new CFO advisory clients a month, add that up. Ten months later, I have 30 at $2,000 a month. This is getting really lucrative. That is why playbooks, automation, and triggers matter. Segmenting your client base matters as well. Positioning the advisory to the right audience is also really important.

Lee Reams II: That is a whole separate topic that we go through. We are going to do a positioning and relatability podcast, I think in two or three weeks, maybe three weeks. We will really dig deep into that. I do not want to go into that today.

Lee Reams II: The goal here is to understand that your existing client base is where all your opportunities are. If you have segmented that client base, meaning you are selling tax advisory to the right clients, you are selling CFO advisory to the right clients, and the messaging is to them, you are not trying to use one advisory language across the board. That is kind of the first step.

Lee Reams II: The second one is to automate this process. Tell a story. Foam the runway. Do not just go out and send 1,500 proposals with some hard sale that no one has ever heard about and then say, oh, why did I only get two or three people to sign up? If you had foamed the runway, you probably would have gotten 25 or 50 of them. You have to understand that.

Lee Reams II: Your current client base is a gold mine. You could double or triple the size of your business. Your best advisory revenue is not hiding in future leads. There are other ways to do that, and we obviously talk about that on the Growth Minded Accountant, but I want you to focus on your existing client base.

Lee Reams II: If you educate first, frame early, and build systems around real client moments, advisory stops being hard. You do not need to sell harder. You do not need to blast and then say, oh my God, it did not work. You need to teach sooner. You need to educate. You need to build trust. You need to be that thought leader. That is how growth-minded accountants build advisory practices that actually scale.

Lee Reams II: That wraps up. We are trying to keep these a little shorter. I wanted to mention that I am incredibly blessed that we have gained. We are almost to 5,000. I mean, we are probably at 5,000 subscribers at this point today. The speed that the Growth Minded Accountant has been taking off since the end of last year into this year has been great.

Lee Reams II: We are going to continue delivering this type of content. We think it is the golden age for tax and accounting firms. We do not believe knowledge-based businesses are going to be eradicated by AI. We believe these are actually tools to make you more successful than ever. We are going to help you communicate that to your clients. We are going to help you save time on the menial tasks and onboarding clients. We are going to continue to talk around all of those subjects in the near future.

Lee Reams II: Our latest, most popular podcast is the Growth Minded Accountant episode we did with Adam Lean at The CFO Project. I highly recommend it. I think we are at 14,000 views now and climbing. There is some really good information. If you are not even sure how to sell advisory or how to set yourself up to create systems, this is a great podcast. Go to YouTube and look for The CFO Project podcast. I highly recommend that.

Lee Reams II: Again, until next week, we have a couple more great, needle-moving things coming up. We are going to talk about pricing in a whole new way. We are going to talk about positioning and relatability. A lot of good content is coming up. Thank you for being a subscriber and a listener to the Growth Minded Accountant. We look forward to our growth and your growth through the coming years, and we are looking forward to a great tax season. Good luck.