Episode #124 Fickle Leads in the World of Bookkeeping

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How bookkeeping businesses can obtain Fickle Leads

Summary keywords: Fickle leads, sales leads, bookkeeping business, business owner, small business growth, digital research, lead generation, sales follow-up process

Good morning, everyone. On this episode of The Bookkeepers Voice, I am going to be having a big discussion with you. And I'm quite excited about it because a lot of people have been asking questions. So as a client relationship manager, I get the privilege of speaking with all of you on a daily basis. And I get the option and opportunity really, of dreaming up new and exciting programmes, courses and templates that will make the world of bookkeeping easier for you. In this process, I've worked closely with our savvy community. And many of our members right now are in the midst of focusing on their lead generation, they have decided to ramp up their existing businesses, open second businesses, and just have an ability of increasing their overall business so that they can streamline themselves out of the business, which I know is a goal for a lot of bookkeepers right now in the industry. So I thought since we're in this new era of expand, experiencing new and exciting opportunities within the world of bookkeeping since COVID-19, thought it would be a really great idea to do a bit of a bonus episode to discuss how you can gain a bit more insight into the world of lead generation, and how it relates to bookkeeping businesses.

Lead generation strategy for small business growth

So I hope this is going to be an interesting concept for you to listen to today. I am a massive believer and fan of lead generation. So this is something that I'm really passionate about, and hopefully helps you get a bit of a better understanding on lead generation itself, and how it can help your business grow while also making it relatable to bookkeeping, because I know a lot of people when you do sales and lead generation work or mentoring, it isn't specific enough to bookkeeping. So today, because we're the bookkeepers voice, we're going to be talking everything in regards to the world of bookkeeping, and really making it helpful for you to make the most out of your business if you want to be growing it. So you don't want to be growing your business, you might still want to listen to this one. And I've got some kind of interesting info in here that you might just find interesting in general, but this one is going to be mainly mainly targeted towards bookkeepers who want to grow their business with the help of lead generation. So just a reminder, lead generation is a term that is used when considering your business's sales and marketing offer opportunities and activities. It is the process of creating client interest into your bookkeeping services, through building leads and ultimately closing deals to new clients. Now, this year 2021 is going to be an incredible year for doing lead generation in the world of bookkeeping. Now that small business owners have a better understanding of bookkeeping and how important it is to help a company grow and help it survive doing conditions such as COVID-19 that we've just experienced, consumers in general, but business owners are using now they're highly skilled comparison shopping tactics. To find bookkeeping businesses. This means that more than ever, bookkeeping businesses need to be online so clients can discover you with one click of the button. And don't worry guys, we all do it.

Digital research driven lead generation for bookkeeping business

So you have to start thinking that yes, your clients are going to be doing it too. It's all at a click of a button or a touch of a phone screen. I was a result of this new digital research driven lead generation process. It is harder than ever to create genuine client loyalty and to land the new clients in general. This can cause the bookkeeping a bookkeeping sales engagement and quoting process to take double the length of time because your potential clients are wanting to do a lot more research by themselves when they're also trying to run their busy businesses. This delay an action can create the concept of a fickle lead in your sales pipeline. Well, I just said a term right there deny what is a fickle lead Angie, I'm sure a lot of you are guessing. A typical lead is simply put a potential client, who is typically hard to connect with and takes a long time to make a decision. Here are some characteristics that can also happen with some physical leads, they have a demand in, they have a high demand in purchasing decisions that is driven preferably and usually melt this is usual not every time, but their preferred their pursuit of Having perceived value. This means that they value quality, convenience, good customer relationship, but also often expect a rock bottom price. Again, this isn't all physical leads. But this usually is quite a bit difficult leads. Even if you pick a lead isn't expecting a rock bottom price, they typically have the characteristic that they will take a long time to make a decision. But then once they make the decision and become available to you, they still expect quality convenience in a good relationship building opportunity. This creates a bit of a opportunity as well as a bit of a hindrance for us people in lead generation and in sales, which is really great, though, is that clients are able to typical clients who are originally fickle leads can turn into really fantastic clients later on once they're actual clients because they do reverse revere the good customer and client relationships. So they want it both ways. So they do typically become fantastic clients later on, they might just be a little bit difficult to actually pull the trigger to become a client with you. It's all really about gaining loyalty and actual acceptance of the fact that you are amazing in what you do.

Gaining loyalty with your business fickle leads

So what I thought I would do today is discuss how you can capture your fickle leads, and gain loyalty to your fickle leads as well. When you're attempting to basically Woo, a fickle bead, or potential lead, you need to be focused on building loyalty with your business through the use of value added content. This will help you increase your perceived value of your services so that your fickle lead will want to strengthen their relationship with you. And it will make them basically love you and know that if they work with you, they're going to get incredible service and high quality just like what they're looking for all just recreating the loyalty through value added content. Now, you might be saying that's great, Angie, but how do we do that? You just said a lot of terms and used a lot of sales words, how do I actually make them create, like how to create loyalty with me through value added information? And again, what is value added information? Are you guys ready? It is all through your digital marketing, you can create loyalty and show value added content to them all through digital marketing. So this means that is distributing content that is actually helping them understand the world of bookkeeping, better through the use of blogs, newsletters, and social media. This can be done by offering your potential clients the opportunity to do their own research online, through looking at your website, looking at social media googling you, without you, them feeling the pressure of pushing go, it makes them feel more comfortable and confident in your services because they can go through, do things they want to do follow up at their own pace, and have a non hostile environment that they can research on their phone or on their laptop if they're out or sitting down at the computer at a time that they feel comfortable. By creating these newsletters, these blogs and these social media posts that are all about informing you. It makes it so that you can give them all the information that they need without you having to do all the work as well. You You create the content for everyone. And then everyone comes to you when they're ready.

How do you capture fickle leads?

So, next, I have created five tips of capturing this fickle leads. First thing you need to do is really find out how your ideal clients behave. This is understanding where they are online, what are they looking for? What are they doing? What are they? What kind of businesses? Are they? To do that you need to first really pinpoint your ideal clients? Who are they? Who do you love working with? What values they have? What are their touch points? What are their pain points? What are they struggling with right now, once you can understand their actual, who they are, you can then better understand how they are behaving, what their sales processes like, what do they want to be able to experience, people who are, let's say, who have clients that are tradies. And then people that have clients that are not for profit, are going to have very different kind of ways of reaching their clients. For example, some people might be 100% on Instagram, so all of your content should be pushed out Instagram, or your clients will 100% not be on social media in general, and will just want to be reading blogs that they find more official. It all depends on who your clients are. So first and foremost, figure out how your clients behave by understanding who your ideal clients are to make sure that the value added content you're sending out is actually reaching them. My second tip for capturing a fickle lead is making sure that you have a personal approach to your follow up process. Now this has to be done through the use of your CRM, which is a client relationship manager and or just your email marketing platform. Now by creating your follow up process I am talking about if they download a lead magnet or resource or sign up to read your blogs, you need to have a follow up process for them. Also make sure that if someone contacts you, you have a follow up process as well. Make sure you have three or five emails to follow up with them to get them to actually book in with you. If they have signing up as a newsletter. person, you need to also have a welcome series to welcome them to your business to help them feel a bit more comfortable with you learn a bit more about you and where they can go to find those value added content pieces to do their own research. It's really important that you do utilise either a CRM, this client relationship manager, or your email platform to schedule pre determined emails to save you time, this will create a really lovely first impression of you. And we'll help create building that relationship while giving them the option to review your value added content that they can look at at their own leisure. The third step is to then streamline and automate your stories streamline and optimise your follow up processes with call to actions. This is the keeping the ball in their court to contact you. This will may mean that you don't have to continue and follow up with them all the time. It's asking them well no telling them actually not asking, telling them that if they want to do this, they need to book in with you. They need to actually book in a time where you can call them they don't have to call you but you will call them at a specific time at a specific day to discuss their distances, bookkeeping needs. This will make sure that you can reduce your amount of missed calls and follow up calls so that you only make one call to get all the information you need, answer their questions, and then move them along your sales process to eventually make the quote crazy engagement document and then get the client. By creating these call to actions. You're going to be saving yourself so much time while also allowing them to have the power to do what they want. These call to actions don't always have to be to book in with you. It can be to join you on social media, join your social community. It can be sign up to your blog newsletter. It can be anything that relates To how your clients behave, it personalises it so that you are specifically making it easier for them to go through your next step of your client relationship experience. We do this all the time with Amy's off the hook bookkeeping and with Savi. And we do it specifically so that again, you guys have the power to do what you want to go through the process you want before contacting us, it's much less invasive. And again, it lets them have the power of making the decision. The final one, not the final, but the final real. getting everything ready step is creating a system that recognise and weeds out your finger leads as soon as possible. Now, this can only be done. Once again, once you know 100% who your ideal customer is, and your ideal client is. Now with bookkeeping businesses, this can actually be really, really easily done, once you go through and actually do our business plan process because you had your values and you can really research exactly what everything is all about. So you want to make sure that you really go through and do those foundation steps to creating your ideal client. The more you know about them, the easier you're going to be able to recognise if this person is going to take a long time to make any decision. And it makes it much easier for you. So definitely create a system you can even be a checklist of personality traits, value traits, action traits, how long does it take to get back to them, if it takes someone two weeks to get back to you, they're probably a thick lead, especially if they've asked you to get in touch with them. It's just one of those things, the sooner you can recognise that they are a fickle lead, the sooner you can put them into your fickle lead process and save yourself time and also allow them to do the shopping experience for getting a bookkeeper in their own process. My final tip for capturing the goal leads is implementing a follow up an automated follow up process that you don't actually have to do anything with. Now, this is the thing that we have been talking about a lot in our members savvy membership group. This is where a lot of our clients are at, they knew their ideal client, they know their buying behaviour. They know their follow up series and sequence that they want. They know their processes. But now they need to automate the follow up process for the fickle leads.

The importance of an email sales follow-up process

What I wanted to do today is kind of give you a almost picture of exactly what this should look like is let's say you have this contact and you know immediately that they are asked to complete, you put them into you put them through the process. Typically your five step follow up emails first to go through as a sales follow up. And then considering how they are acting, you put them in difficulties in this pickle leads follow up process, you then can choose whether you want them to be followed up with a weekly email, a bi weekly email or a monthly email. Typically with fickle leads, they do respond better if it is a monthly email or quarterly email. That way you're not being too in the face and you don't seem like a spam or a hassle. You are a bookkeeper you are not spam, you are contacting them because they have specifically asked you to do so. So you want to make sure that however often you do contact them, it isn't too overwhelming or annoying to make them still want to engage with you. So typically, my suggestion is that you email them your follow up email ethical leads emails every month. This way, you still have that presence every single month. But it's not to the point that it's annoying. And in these emails, it's actually really easy to create your follow up process, especially if you do blogs. Because what you can do is create an RSS feed which automatically takes your blog posts and makes it into an email and sends it out to your clients automatically without you having to do anything. You set it up once the system up once and then you're good to go ongoing or what you can do as well. And this is actually what we do at off the hook is we create specifically created emails and based on Have a block. And then the call to action is to then go and look at the blog, read the blog, and at the end of the blog is the call to action to contact us or engage in our services. Either way works perfectly, you can get them setting up to look exactly the same. The only reason why we do it is we specifically want certain blogs to come up at certain times of the year. And to be perfectly honest, I sat down one day, I wrote the 12 emails, and then I've scheduled them, it's very easy can be done very quickly. But it creates the ongoing information, value added contact, that we aren't selling anything we aren't telling them to book in with us, we are just simply sending them value added content that will help them run their business successfully. Until they will go Okay, I've gotten this email again, I need to book in with this person. Because if I'm getting this great of service without being their client, how amazing is it going to change my business in my life by actually being their clients. So it really just creates the actual process of creating that follow up where you don't need to do anything, you sit down for an hour to write the 12 blogs, sorry, an hour to write the idioms and the emails. And then they just automatically go out or you make it even easier and just create an RSS feed, that automatically does it for you. And you never have to worry about it again. There's so many different options that you can do. But basically, you need to make sure you have some kind of follow up process for physical leads. That doesn't involve you calling them every month, or every week or every two weeks. Because you just leaving a message calling leaving a message and sending them another email is going to waste your time make sure you can actually get organised so you can automate it, and allow them to come to you when they're ready. Typically, this is the response that they want. And this is the way that with the digital age a lot of your clients are wanting to do anyways. So by recognising and planning for your fickle leads, you will be able to streamline and automate your sales process to give you more time to grow your client base, while also doing the rest of your ongoing bookkeeping responsibilities for your existing clients. Remember, we want to automate your follow up process for your lead generation in sales of getting new clients because you still have your existing clients that you have to do all their work. So anything you do in regards to sales, you want to make sure you can streamline and save yourself time as much as possible, which is why really implementing this fickle leads process is so beneficial.

Tips for capturing leads for bookkeepers

Now, I want to just go through and really say what my top five capturing a single lead tip is for bookkeepers. First, you need to know how your ideal clients behave what their buying process is, you need to create your personalised follow up process. You then need to streamline and optimise the process with solid call to actions to keep the ball in their court to contact you when they're ready. And then you need to create a system where you can recognise and weed out a fickle lead as soon as possible to save you time. Then finally, you need to implement your automation process so that you don't have to continually do things ongoing and your computer systems can do it for you. Because it sounds so easy when I say it like that, doesn't it. For more tips about fake leads, make sure you do check out our blog that has been specifically created for this episode on our website. And also check out our DIY opportunity for our websites that we offer. This will help you get started and get online while not having to pay the big Ticket Ticket prices for having a really well and functional website to learn more about fickle leads as well. Make sure you do check out our savvy membership to get ongoing support for myself and the rest of the team. All the links for the DIY website. Because getting leads always start with a website and for joining our savvy membership are all going to be in our podcast news. See, simply just have to go to there. And then you can check out everything about the savvy membership. Now in this membership, you do get to get ongoing Facebook Lives. And actually you get to watch the physically the actual podcast that I do every week. And you get it actually before everyone else. So although this episode is airing today, fun fact, I actually recorded it weeks ago, because all of our savvy members were working on it, then. So becoming savvy member, you do get to actually help create the content that we release, but you get the content when you need it instead of having to wait for everything to air, which is kind of fun. But make sure you go through, I am going to have the blog with all of this information, all of the tips written down. And the real definition of fickle leads to help you I know this is a concept, a new concept for a lot of bookkeepers. And it's a completely new realm for you. So we are going to be spending a lot of time on the blog. So if you are in the midst of creating some lead generation, simply just go into the blog, listen to this podcast, and then read the blog so that you can create notes and really understand this process and make the most out of your lead generation for 2021. I hope you guys have a great rest of your day and you learned a little bit more about fickle leads. And until next time, stay safe, sane and savvy. Bye, guys.