Editor's Note: This is the first in a two-part series from Laura Redmond, founder of Redmond Accounting, on developing a web store for your firm's fixed fee services.
Performing client accounting work requires time and resources to carefully apply one’s knowledge and experience and tools to the task at hand to deliver quality service. I was prepared for this. Running a firm that delivers client accounting services is another matter entirely.
Eleven years in, it has been nothing short of a learning experience. Looking back, the first years were about delivering good service, using whatever tool the client had selected.
Then we began to gain expertise in specific tools and defined our processes. As we grew and team collaboration became critical to our success, we built Aero Workflow to manage our service delivery. Aero allows us to profit from our knowledge capital. To this day, Aero is the core of our firm and and other "Firms of the Future" via Intuit’s App Store.
With service delivery tightly organized, the sales cycle felt like a game of Whack-a-Mole. It has repeatedly reared it’s ugly head as the most difficult process in our organization. We did not have the budget for a salesperson.
We have learned so much about all aspects of accounting practices from our peers who share their stories freely and openly, that we are compelled to share this so that we can test it together as an industry.
And honestly, we found it difficult to imagine this person capable of explaining the work, without being able to perform it. We tried this. If the person could perform this type of work, then they would invariably be pulled into performing client work. And none of us with assigned client work had time for sales – a vicious cycle.
For the first six years of our firm’s existence, we billed hourly. We sold our time. Over the years, we attended industry conferences and learned about value billing and fixed fee pricing.
We were fired up about the idea – but how do we do it? Thus began the journey.
Our motto became “circle slash receivables.” In 2011, we switched our existing clients to fixed fee service plans automatically paid on the first of each month. We created a beautiful proposal that showcased our cloud-accounting services and their set monthly fee. Our existing clients agreed to the change, happy about a set amount they could budget and glad to lose any concern of an unexpectedly large invoice on any given month.
New prospects were compared to existing businesses to find a similar service-set, as a way of determining a ballpark proposal to start with. We would copy the last proposal document created for a similar prospect and spend quite a bit of time changing the names and details of the services to meet the new prospect’s needs – and then spend hours and hours trying to calculate a fair and reasonable fee to present to the prospect-at-hand.
While it was better than it had been before, we did not enjoy nor feel confident in our sales process.
Enter Web Tools
Then we built a couple of web tools: a Needs Assessment and a Quote Maker. Clients would fill out the Needs Assessment web form with all sorts of details that we requested and submit it to us.
We used that information in our Quote Maker to select appropriate services and pricing from a master menu and pull it onto a quote for the prospect. This was the beginning of our attempt to automate our sales process.
Problem was, each prospect’s business was different and there were so many variables that it was difficult to create only three options. It still took us several hours to decide on the right maximum number of transactions and scheduled frequencies to include in each of three packages to pull onto the quote.
But a great improvement was that at the push of a button, our beautiful custom proposal would generate with the prospect’s proper information along with each of the three different service plan options from which the prospect could select a best fit for their business.
Then began the back and forth.
Our initial proposal to a prospect would trigger some clarification or additional information...and more detailed communication would ensue. Prospects then would inevitably want a hybrid using parts of each plan. We’d often go back to the drawing board and issue several versions until we all agreed upon a final plan. While it was better than it had been before, we still did not enjoy nor feel confident in our sales process.
We found that we were often too busy to reply to incoming leads as soon as we should have, because we didn’t have time for the sales process or because it was so difficult to navigate. Everyone knows this is a no-no, and that felt like failure.
Here are some of the main difficulties we grappled with, because of the time they take to relay and the amount of information that needs to be communicated to a prospect:
- Conveying the value, look and feel of the cloud-accounting services we provide so that prospects understand the game-changing efficiencies and benefits of the scalable infrastructure we would be providing them
- Clarifying exactly which services we offer – yes we can pay your bills, no we don’t do tax or file your paper in your filing cabinet at your office.
- Effectively communicating how our services work so the prospect has very clear expectations for firm vs client responsibilities – yes we can pay your bills, but you are responsible for routing bills to us, clicking a button to approve them, and having funds available to pay them.
- Determining price... haggling... negotiating...
- Closing sales that result in profitable work
- Clarity on exactly what services & frequency were purchased to avoid scope creep
Last year we left QuickBooks Connect, Intuit’s annual conference, and embarked on a mission to find some solutions to these problems.
Last year we left QuickBooks Connect, Intuit’s annual conference, and embarked on a mission to find some solutions to these problems. The goal was to create a sales system that could:
- Give prospects better access to service descriptions and pricing...instead of waiting for one of us to finish our client work and return their call or during off-hours when a small business may finally find the time to search for an accounting solution.
- Give prospects the ability to build their own service plans so that they had more control over which services to select that were appropriate for their business and control over adding or removing services from the plan to view the difference in price
- Help the client understand up front what was and was not included in the package of services they chose, what the process looks like from the client’s perspective, and who was responsible for each part of the process
- Communicate the value and terms of outsourced cloud accounting services
- Safeguard the firm’s profitability and champion the cause of value pricing and fixed fees for a stronger and better service provider
This is a work in progress and we still are in the early days. We have learned so much about all aspects of accounting practices from our peers who share their stories freely and openly, that we are compelled to share this so that we can test it together as an industry. We built a web store for client accounting services.
In our next installment, we will show you how.
Laura Redmond is a financial controller and IT manager turned cloud accounting advocate and app designer. She is a QuickBooks Online power user, Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and member of the Intuit Trainer/Writer Network. She also is co-author of Intuit’s award-winning QuickBooks Online training and certification programs for accounting professionals, as well as a regular speaker at national accounting technology conferences.
In addition, Laura is founder of Redmond Accounting Inc., a boutique cloud accounting and consulting firm in Silicon Valley that was awarded Intuit's "2015 Top 20 Firm of the Future" and a Top 10 ProAdvisor for "Leading QuickBooks Online Practice." Redmond Accounting's workflow is centered on QuickBooks Online and its eco-system of apps.
Laura co-created the Aero Workflow app used by accounting firms to manage service delivery by staff performing recurring tasks for multiple clients. The Aero Library includes step-by-step instructions and procedures for many of today’s most popular apps in the QBO eco-system.