Three Key Elements to Cross-Serving Your Clients

At the risk of sounding harsh I’m going to lay an honest truth out for you: your clients and prospects, don’t want your services. As matter of fact, they couldn’t care less about your services. While that may be disheartening to professionals who are not only passionate about what they do but also eager to create opportunities to grow, it is in fact the truth. An audit isn’t and never will be at the top of any executive’s wish list. They aren’t seeking new methods of accounting because they find it interesting.

Clients and prospects are, however, desperate for solutions to their pressing business challenges. They stay awake at night thinking about them—contemplating their next move, lamenting over opportunities they’re not sure how to seize, fretting over their changing competitive landscapes, wondering how they will finance their expansion.

These are your clients’ and your prospects’ needs. And therein lies a disconnect for many firms looking to increase client loyalty and attract new clients.

Professionals think about what they do for clients in terms of services. They bring ideas to clients in the form of services they can provide to help clients. In fact, many professionals talk about “being proactive” as a differentiator in the way they serve clients, and they define proactively serving clients as bringing them new service ideas. Even if these services are based on the client’s situation, or what in your professional opinion you know the client should be focused on, until you are able to connect that service to a business need with which the decision maker identifies it’s a service, but not a solution to anything.

Rather than cross-selling, maybe we should think of this as cross-serving. Here’s what cross serving looks like:

1. Understanding what your client cares about

In order to understand what clients care about we need to ask questions. Cultivate a curiosity to learn whatever you can about your clients. Think about, and even write down, the questions you would like to ask. Construct those questions as open-ended – meaning questions that require more than a one-word response. Don’t limit your questions to the engagement, or area you care about. Instead ask question that encourage them to share what’s on their mind: “What accomplishments made you most proud this year?” “How did you feel about your year?” “What are your goals for this coming year?” These don’t need to be limited to financial or even professional areas. Let you clients just talk. And do not jump into trying to solve the first thing you hear. The first priority is just to understand what’s important to your clients.

2. Articulating how what you do connects to those things your clients care about

This opens professionals to a whole world of creative possibilities for helping clients. Conversations with clients about how you apply your experience and expertise to help them address their business challenges, perhaps in ways they haven’t considered, helps deepen the relationship, builds trust and supports the firm’s topline growth.

If I’m your client, and you come to me with a service – that’s your agenda. When you come to me with a solution – that’s my agenda. Truly client-driven firms build processes and tools to interact with clients, and to bring up ideas based on their professional experience and expertise. What does cross solving look like?

3. Remembering to help capitalize on opportunities – not just identify problems

CPAs are really good at identifying problems – material weaknesses, errors, etc. – and get pretty excited about helping clients solve them. And in your profession this is critical and something your clients count on. However, I encourage you to actively pursue the idea of opportunistic thinking. Most entrepreneurs, owners and business leaders are motivated by opportunities vs threats. Solving “problems” tends to appeal to folks who are motivated by threats. And yes, some of your clients fall into that category. But to be a true advisor for clients you need to pay attention to finding creative opportunities to strive for in addition to issues to solve.

Cross-serving clients not only fosters greater loyalty and topline growth, it’s a more full-filling and rewarding way to practice your profession. Win-win, don’t you think? To learn skills, tools and processes to tap into this opportunity, take a look at our professional development courses, or contact us today at info@thewhetstonegroup.com to find out about our coaching services and how we can help you.