Accounting firms are responsible for providing tax, bookkeeping and financial advice and services to

people and businesses. There is a lot of competition in the accounting field for customers and
clients. Like any business, an accounting firm must market itself to its existing customers and
potential customers. Large firms that have branches in cities all over the world often have marketing
and PR teams to handle their business development, but smaller firms need to be strategic in their
marketing efforts. Market an accounting firm by developing a strong brand, increasing visibility and
encouraging communication.

1 Develop a marketing plan. In order to achieve any marketing goals, your accounting firm will need
a written plan for its marketing initiatives.
 Include your business targets in your marketing plan. For example, if you are reaching out to
small businesses with at least 30 employees, write that down. If you want to market to individuals
who need tax help, include it in your marketing plan.
 Do a SWOT analysis. Your marketing plan should include an appraisal of Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) that affect your accounting firm.

2 Get referrals from your current clients. Asking the people and businesses you current work for to
recommend you to a friend or a colleague is free and doesn't require much effort.
 Offer discounts or promotions to customers who help you bring in new customers. For
example, take 10 percent off the monthly retainer of any client who refers a new client to your
accounting firm.

3 Brand your accounting firm. Your brand is the way you define yourself. It includes your mission,
values, logo and business practices.

4 Improve or develop marketing materials. Take a look at your newsletters, brochures, business

cards and any other materials you give out about your accounting firm.
 Consider working with a graphic design firm to really make your materials stand out.
 Make sure your materials accurately reflect what your firm is capable of and who you are. All
of your branding should be consistent.

5 Develop or improve your website. Many people use websites to find out about a company. Make
sure your website is engaging and provides information potential clients need.

6 Network more. Market your accounting firm by becoming more visible.

 Join your local chamber of commerce and attend as many events as you can. Stay in contact
with everyone you meet.
 Become a member of local and national professional associations or civic organizations. Talk
about your accounting firm and the services it provides. Take advantage of any resources on
marketing different associations in your field may have.

7 Embrace social media. Your clients are online, and you need to be as well. Develop a Facebook
page and a Twitter account.
 Start blogging. Not only will it allow you to stay in touch with clients and potential clients,
you can market your accounting firm as a thought leader in the accounting and finance industry.
Blog about relevant issues that will get your firm noticed.

8 Offer community services. Do some pro bono work for local nonprofit organizations or charity, or
hold a class on how to fill out tax forms. This will increase your visibility and develop good
community relations.

9 Consider paid advertising. Even if you do not have a huge marketing budget, you should pay for
some targeted advertising in strategic places such as local television, newspapers and radio stations.
FIRMS DO TO COPE WITH INTANGIBILITY OF SERVICES

1. Strict Ethical & Legal Constraints

While constraints on marketing have loosened enormously of late, there are still a host of ethical
and legal restraints that require careful attention. They are enforced by national, state, and local
professional societies, certification boards, government agencies, and other bodies.

Marketers of goods and commercial services are mostly free to sugarcoat, soup up, or scale down
their offerings to please customers, as long as they obey health and safety regulations. Enough
leeway exists to allow many desired but potentially harmful offerings like cigarettes to be marketed
aggressively.

But ethics and standards discourage professional firms from knowingly marketing services which,
while “pleasing customers,” might mislead or eventually harm customers or third parties. Thus,
lawyers usually avoid claiming they can win certain types of suits and editorial consultants tend not
to guarantee their ability to get articles placed in specific publications. Moreover, CPAs typically
resist any client pressures to overlook financial irregularities. Such activities would not only hurt the
interests of clients or patients, of course, but they could also lead to formal complaints from third
parties like investors and insurance companies, loss of licenses or certifications, and financial ruin.

How far to go to please clients and patients is a question that professionals will likely face more
often as competition intensifies. The temptation to make ethical compromises will grow as
unscrupulous practitioners prosper. As the managing partner of a medium-sized CPA firm remarked,
“Ethics are only for people who have enough clients.”

But ethical compromises must be resisted. Unlike a big consumer product company that is suddenly
discovered to be marketing a dangerous product, a professional service firm cannot simply drop the
harmful product and wait for the storm to pass. The professional organization that is guilty of
providing unethical or even illegal forms of “customer satisfaction” may face problems. Smaller
localized firms, in particular, may become targets of bad-mouthing by opportunistic competitors or
by angry ex-clients or ex-patients. Though large national firms are less likely to suffer in this way,
their misconduct can damage the reputation of their entire profession.

The professional service firm can take several steps to ensure that its marketing activities stay within
ethical and legal boundaries. First, it can participate in peer review and self-regulation programs. A
self-initiated program (supported by capable legal counsel) can help not only to avoid legal and
ethical difficulties but also to deal with the thorny problem of maintaining quality control.

Professional organizations can, in addition, make a commitment to educate clients or patients about
what constitutes acceptable professional behavior. Sometimes people ask for ethical compromises
simply because they do not know any better. An explanation of how and why services are being
performed in certain ways can help to limit inappropriate requests and to build trust and avoid
misunderstandings between practitioners and the people they serve. As author Norman Cousins
recently remarked to a group of medical school graduates, “Doctors who spend more time with their
patients may have to spend less money on malpractice insurance policies.”

Finally, certain firms can become more selective in accepting customers. Clients or patients who are
especially demanding or who seem likely to complain excessively can be dropped or avoided. Some
CPA firms are increasingly refusing to work with clients whose companies face serious financial
difficulties. Such weeding out should be aimed at unethical clients or patients, however, to avoid
public complaints (that could lead to restrictive legislation) from those who are legitimately too
poor, too troubled, or too ill to obtain competent professional assistance.

2. Buyer Uncertainty

Professional services are what economists sometimes call “credence” goods, in that purchasers must
place great faith in those who sell the services. Professional services usually lack many attributes
that a buyer can confidently and competently evaluate before—or even after—making a purchase
decision.

When consumers buy a new sofa, they can sit on it, touch it, and compare prices before making a
decision. Or after eating in a restaurant, the experience itself is usually enough to tell diners whether
they are happy with their meal and would return.

Most people are ignorant of professional services and timid when they have to use them. Often they
are unsure if they have to use one. Even if they recognize their need for help, they may entertain
wrong ideas about what the service should cost and what the professional can reasonably be
expected to do for them. Finally, they may not know where or how to get the facts for making a
better-informed choice.

Even when customers can find out what they need to know, they may still lack the technical skills
necessary to assess how important in terms of performance it is for professionals to have certain
credentials, experience levels, or pieces of equipment (and the skills necessary to use that
equipment). Moreover, uncertainty often continues after the service has been rendered, since
laymen are generally unable to determine whether a case was pleaded properly, an audit done
thoroughly, a building designed safely, or a surgical procedure handled competently. Frequently, the
service has failed to meet their exaggerated expectations, which leads to dissatisfaction and
damaging word-of-mouth criticism.

The widespread buyer uncertainty is a basic marketing issue for providers of professional services.
Such services must emphasize education rather than persuasion in their marketing.

The professional service organization should design its personal contacts, PR activities, advertising,
and service delivery approaches to teach clients or patients about the following:

When they should seek professional services.

Which attributes to consider in evaluating different providers.

How to communicate their concerns, desires, or other issues to professionals.

What they can realistically expect providers to accomplish.

Teaching these things to prospective and current customers will reduce buyer uncertainty while
increasing buyer loyalty. The executive director of a major architectural firm expressed the objective
this way: “You’re selling a feeling of comfort with you and an understanding of clients’ problems and
anxieties.”

Two increasingly popular choices for educating and “comforting” buyers are seminars and
newsletters. For example, the Baltimore CPA firm of Kamanitz, Freiman, and Uhlfelder has
developed and is conducting comfort-enhancing seminars designed to acquaint clients’ spouses with
tax, financial, and estate planning.

Professional organizations’ newsletters have become widespread and their topics are quite diverse.
The Big 8 CPA firms all publish both general and specialized newsletters (e.g., Coopers and
Lybrand’s Executive Alert Newsletter and Touche Ross’s Private Companies Review). And many
smaller CPA firms as well as other practitioners publish their own newsletters or make use of
newsletter preparation services, which provide original stories and artwork. The firm simply adds its
name to the masthead.

3. Need to Be Perceived as Having Experience

Because buyers of professional services are often uncertain about the criteria to use in selecting a
professional, they tend to focus on one question: Have you done it before? People prefer to use
accountants and management consultants who have worked in their industry previously, lawyers
who have litigated cases just like theirs, architects who have designed buildings like the one they
want to build, and surgeons who have performed the needed surgical procedure hundreds of times.
Using an experienced professional makes a risky purchase seem less risky. Among other things, if
anything goes wrong, a buyer may avoid being blamed by superiors or family members for carelessly
choosing an unproven professional.

Even sophisticated buyers—such as in-house legal counsel, controllers, or resident architects—place

a premium on experience. For instance, in-house corporate lawyers have become increasingly
inclined to seek out specialized firms to handle sophisticated legal matters.

This experience requirement creates problems for many professional service organizations. Firms
with expertise in limited areas often have difficulty diversifying into new lines of work. And
inexperienced professionals often find it difficult to find any work at all. “Newness” in the
professions isn’t nearly as favorable an attribute as it might be for a soft drink company or an airline.

This situation tends to push professional service organizations toward specialization as they discover
that they can best maintain or increase business by offering a limited set of services (that they have
provided many times before) to a limited market. This discovery, particularly in intensely competitive
markets, has led to some interesting specialties:

 A CPA firm in Washington, D.C. that specializes in serving law firms.

 A Minneapolis law firm that specializes in handling liability suits filed against A.H. Robins
Company, Inc., the manufacturer of the ill-fated intrauterine birth-control device known as
the Dalkon shield. As of 1981 the firm had handled more than 900 cases.
 A national management consulting firm that specializes in serving what it privately labels
“pussycats.” These are small- to medium-sized companies that have rather unsophisticated
managers and unfocused consulting needs.
 Pussycats are distinguished from “bulldogs” (which are small- to medium-sized companies
with sophisticated managers seeking specialized consulting help), “tigers” (which are like
bulldogs, only bigger), and “elephants” (which are like pussycats, only bigger and less
numerous).
 A San Francisco dental practice that specializes in “cosmetic dentistry”—fixing buck teeth,
weak chins, large canines, and so on.

To overcome the need for experience to break into a new service or market, a firm has three
options:
1. Recruit people possessing the needed experience.

2. Merge or otherwise join forces with a firm that has experience in the service or market.

3. Reduce fees.

All three approaches are widely used. For example, a growing East Coast executive search firm,
which was started by a partner with extensive experience in banking and financial services, has been
expanded by adding partners with experience in real estate and mortgage banking as well as high
technology. This approach has also been used successfully by the Washington, D.C. office of Peat,
Marwick, Mitchell, the CPA firm, which began adding banking clients after it transferred in some
banking experts from its other offices.The approach’s major drawback is that personality conflicts
and jealousy can develop when new “star” professionals are given powerful and prominent
positions.

Architectural firms, eager to have a presence in new locations to counter concerns about their lack
of experience with local politics, weather conditions, or cultural tastes, have employed merging or
joint venturing. Merging and joint venturing are also being used by several of the Big 8 CPA firms in
concert with Japanese accounting firms in an effort to attract more Japanese business.

The big risk is that the two organizations may not blend well. For this reason, merger or joint venture
agreements must be drawn up with extreme care. Both organizations must try to foresee all possible
difficulties.

Perhaps the riskiest way to add new services or invade markets is via charging low fees. This
approach can create an image problem if clients or patients think that low fees mean poor quality
work. Nevertheless, a young, small firm may have no choice but to take this tack. And more
established firms, which have already attained a reputation for doing quality work, can use this
approach to crack new markets. For example, several years ago, a few of the Big 8 firms carved out
shares of the municipal accounting field by offering to do audits for certain large city governments
for as little as $7 per hour.

The need-for-experience problem makes it especially important for professionals to do marketing

research to assess the billings potential of any specialized services they are considering providing.
This research should be followed by careful analysis and planning to direct the organization toward a
specialty or a mix of specialities that will allow its experts to pursue professionally and financially
rewarding careers.

4. Limited Differentiability

The differentiation of products and services is hard for most marketers to achieve, but it is an
especially difficult task for marketers of professional services. How do they distinguish their products
from those of competitors, especially when many professional services are virtually
indistinguishable? Differentiating one accounting audit, title search, or eye examination from
another is very difficult. The situation is quite different from consumer products like breakfast
cereals, which can be differentiated by simply sprinkling on a new coating, stamping out a new
shape, or putting a famous cartoon character on the package.

Many professionals have recently attempted to differentiate their services by using humorous
slogans or advertising appeals. Dentists claim they “cater to cowards” and lawyers advertise “no frill
wills.” Others have tried to stand out by using clever labels for their services, such as TRAP (Touche
Ross Audit Process) and STAR (Deloitte, Haskins and Sells’s Statistical Techniques for Analytic
Review). But such tactics may not be enough.

One useful approach is to conduct research on the attributes clients or patients think make a
particular professional service different from and more attractive than competitors’. The practitioner
can then seek to establish itself as a possessor of the desired attributes. It should develop and
communicate a distinctive personality or image for itself, which appeals to both its professionals and
the people it wants to serve.

Professional service firms can emphasize three attributes or personality features to set themselves
apart: “gray hair” (more experience, specialization, credibility, and contacts), more brains (better
solutions to problems), and superior procedures.To emphasize superior procedures, professionals
report finding it useful to possess and promote such service features as:

Personal involvement in cases or projects by high-level professionals.

Easy access to services.

On-time completion of work.

The use of state-of-the-art support equipment like computers, communications systems, and testing
devices.

Easy-to-understand reports, presentations, and invoices (i.e., “We talk your language”).

Frequent follow-up contacts to ensure satisfaction.

5. Immeasurable Benefits of Advertising

Advertising is generally a very useful tool for helping an organization differentiate and sell its
offerings. For professional service organizations, though, it has limitations. Managers should
consider carefully the possibility that advertising can backfire. People still are unused to seeing or
hearing advertising for many professional services, and they may not like it. Clients, patients, referral
sources, and even competitors could interpret advertising by a firm as suggesting that it lacks
competence. (“If the firm is so good, it shouldn’t need to advertise.”)

Even if the advertising seems to be acceptable, it may still not be worth the expense. Professionals
typically need to reach a very narrow audience, which will notice advertisements only at the very
infrequent times it needs the service and which requires complicated explanations of the service;
more cost-effective are personal selling, seminars, or other promotional approaches.

Most professional service organizations legitimately fear results from advertising such as those
obtained by the Boston law firm of Springer and Langson, which went bankrupt after
spending $300,000 in a few months to advertise the services of its 28 lawyers. Robert Springer’s
reaction was, “Maybe in 10, 15, or 20 years people will be able to accept this as a way of life and not
look down on firms that do advertise… It’s an expensive procedure with high overhead.”

Despite the dangers, more professionals of all types, including an estimated 14% of the nation’s law
practices, are advertising.And several success stories have emerged. The San Francisco CPA firm of
Siegel, Sugarman, and Seput, for example, was reported to have grown from three partners
and $8,000 in billings in 1977 to 27 people and $1.75 million in billings in 1981, using advertising as
its only business development tool. Similarly, the California law firm of Jacoby and Meyers
reportedly grew from 7 to 22 legal clinics in one year through the use of extensive television
advertising. The Michael Baker Corporation, an engineering firm, reportedly used extensive
advertising in coal industry publications to grow from near-zero to more than $5 million in billings in
that industry between 1977 and 1981.

For many professional service organizations, the most logical way to approach advertising will be
closer to the techniques of the Michael Baker Corporation than to those of Springer and Langson.
Identifying a target audience that can be reached with low-cost advertising in specialized
publications is generally a useful way to become familiar with the benefits and drawbacks of
advertising. Careful monitoring of the results of this approach—by tracking such areas as the
number of inquiries received and the receptivity of clients to sales calls—should allow an
organization to fine-tune its advertising program. This cautious, “experimental” approach to
advertising can work well and avoids the risks of Springer and Langson’s “big splash” approach.

6. Converting “Doers” into “Sellers”

Whether or not advertising is used, personal selling must play a big role in the marketing of any
professional service. Traditionally, professional service organizations have left selling almost
exclusively in the hands of those senior people who exhibit an interest and a flair for it (“finders”);
project management and technical tasks have been left to others (“minders” and “grinders”). But
increasingly, these organizations are finding it necessary to get broader participation in selling.
Clients and patients generally prefer to be courted by the persons who actually perform the services.
Customers usually feel uncomfortable buying from people they will never see again or from officials
who only sell.

As Weld Coxe, a management consultant to architects and engineers, has stated, “Clients have
demonstrated a clear preference for marketing organizations composed of closer-doers [those who
“close” deals or who sell in addition to other work], where the professional making the sale can
assure the client that he or she will be personally involved, to a credible degree, during the
execution of the project.”14 Similarly, Robert Denney had this reaction to his experience working with
accountants:

“One of the fundamental misconceptions many accountants have about marketing is that all of this
activity should generate new business without any personal effort on their part. They think someone
else can bring in the new clients and then they can take over and do the work. Unfortunately,
they’re wrong… It takes an accountant to sell accounting services.” 15

The need to have professionals who can both provide services and sell them can put a severe strain
on an organization. Many lawyers, accountants, architects, doctors, and other professionals simply
do not want to sell on the ground that it is too commercial, too demeaning, and too difficult. An
emphasis on selling can demoralize highly competent practitioners, who may choose to seek
employment at another firm where they merely have to practice their profession. Moreover, trying
to train those people who like the idea of selling will be fruitless if they lack the right background or
personality.

Firm managers can take several steps to help overcome this problem. First, they can consider
potential selling skills when recruiting and hiring new people. Jerry Sincoff, executive vice president
of the large architectural firm of Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum, has argued, “When we all went
to school we didn’t learn about personality development; but it is important to have people in the
office who can speak about themselves—and the firm—in a fine, clear way.” 16 Thus, when all other
things are equal—including competence at performing professional tasks—the applicant who
exhibits an interest in and a potential for selling well should get the nod.

Second, officials can incorporate a sales training program into staff development programs. They can
teach professionals basic selling skills, such as identifying and qualifying leads, stimulating referrals,
courting prospects, making presentations, negotiating deals, closing sales, and managing
relationships. A variety of such sales training programs are available.

Third, top managements can wholeheartedly encourage selling and make it financially and
professionally rewarding. They can ask new professionals to participate in marketing planning and to
perform certain selling functions. Some firms have even assigned young professionals to full-time
marketing positions (involving much more than selling) for a year or so as a way of persuading them
to make a commitment to selling and marketing.

They can also encourage selling by making the reception of certain financial and status rewards
dependent on whether selling has been done effectively. Firms can give bonuses, raises, promotions,
new offices, and other rewards to those who bring in and help retain valued clients and patients. Of
course, these rewards should not be offered just for selling, since excellent performance of other
professional duties must also be rewarded.

Many firms have developed weighted-sum formulas to judge the performance of professionals. The
businesses give credit for billable hours that a person has sold (for a year or two after the client has
been brought in) and for billable hours worked. They then assign weights based on the desirability of
each client, the value the firm places on selling versus performing professional tasks, and other
factors.

Making more doers into sellers cannot be accomplished without risk. Improving the selling skills of
professionals raises the possibility that some will leave the firm and take part of their following with
them. In addition, competition for clients or patients among a firm’s professionals might create ill
will and reduce cooperation. Finally, there is the risk that too much time will be devoted to selling.
This issue is addressed in the next section.

7. Allocating Time for Marketing

Convincing and training professionals to sell is one matter. Determining the amount of time each
professional should devote to selling and marketing is a different, but related, matter. Officials must
decide how much of the highly profitable time of junior people—which can normally be billed out at
much higher multiples of their cost to the firm than the time of senior people—can be spared for
marketing. Officials must also decide how much to limit the hours spent on marketing by senior
members, who often have opportunities to make speeches, serve on prestigious committees, dine
with important contacts, or take other actions that can support the marketing effort. If too many
opportunities are pursued, then other important tasks, such as maintaining or improving the quality
of services, may be neglected.

The president of a marketing consulting firm describes the problem facing senior members in this
way, “There’s never an end to chasing. You’re always torn between working and replacing. You must
maintain a delicate balance.” Finding the appropriate balance for both senior and junior
professionals is a trial-and-error process for most firms. Those that use formulas to evaluate
performance normally experiment with different weighting schemes to see which ones allow
sufficient but affordable amounts of time to be spent on marketing. Other organizations may want
to try various time-allocation guidelines or policy statements.
No matter what time-allocation scheme a firm finally selects, it can improve the productivity of
professionals who are doing marketing. One approach is to hire specialists to do the bulk of the
marketing analysis and planning. These marketers can also help professionals perform their
necessary selling tasks by regularly sending “tickler” lists to them that contain recommendations
about which prospects need to be called, which clients need to be entertained, which referral
sources need to be interviewed, and so on.

The support people can furnish professionals with recommended scripts or statements to be used in
discussions with clients or patients. For example, one large East Coast engineering firm provides all
its engineers with a stack of small printed cards that contain a list of statements and questions that
can be used when telephoning prospective clients (on one side) or old clients (on the other side).

Unfortunately, many professional service organizations have had difficulty finding and retaining
effective marketing support people. The ideal candidates have both credentials in the relevant
profession and a marketing background. Moreover, lawyers, architects, engineers, physicians, and
other professionals who have MBAs or similar backgrounds—though growing in number—are hard
to find. Thus, it may be necessary to hire people with management marketing backgrounds and then
try to help them develop a knowledge of the needs of staff and clients.

The organization must take care to avoid putting these marketing people in what they perceive to be
dead-end positions. They should be put on the ladder to partner or principal even though they lack
professional credentials.

Besides using marketing support experts, professional firms can mix service provision and marketing
and mix pleasure seeking and marketing. Firms don’t lose billable time in using these approaches;
rather, they increase billings. The former approach involves taking advantage of opportunities to sell
one’s services while actually providing other services. This can often be done in a subtle manner,
such as when accounting firms use tax experts on audit teams to give them an opportunity to discuss
their more specialized services with clients. Firms can also use this type of cross-selling of services to
a degree through the recommendations made by professionals in final reports or closing
presentations.

The old technique of mixing pleasure seeking and marketing still has value in today’s more
sophisticated marketing environment. Firms can accomplish much by having professionals spend
some of their leisure time socializing with prospective and existing clients, patients, or referral
sources at restaurants, country clubs, political groups, civic organizations, churches, alumni
gatherings, and trade association meetings.

Dealing effectively with the problems cited here will not be easy for most professional service
organizations. To be successful in a competitive environment, firms will usually have to make a large
commitment of resources to hiring marketing talent, conducting market research, educating clients
or patients, training staff members, and developing promotional materials.