CONNECTIONS | March - April 2021

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ALIGNING YOUR MARKETING & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES If you want to be a high-growth firm, you need to align your firm’s marketing and business development strategies. It’s common for these two areas to be misaligned with inefficient processes, and both wasting time creating content, including blogs, social media posts, email newsletters, case studies and videos, without clear goals. When these two areas of your firm are in alignment, they work together to drive sales and revenue, dramatically improve your marketing return on investment, and drive growth. So how can you make that happen? The key is to set clear revenue goals.

8 Steps to Aligning Your Marketing & Business Development Strategies Before diving into marketing and business development strategies, your firm needs

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ASCPA Connections

to have clear revenue goals. This gives your team something to aim for and helps you determine and communicate your priorities. As you start to set goals, you may realize something is not as big a priority as you thought or, conversely, realize that it’s an even higher priority than you initially thought.

Step 1: Understand where you are At Boomer Consulting, Inc., we like to say all progress starts with the truth. So, say you want to grow a new service. Where are you today? Maybe you’re starting from scratch with zero clients or have a small client base you’re hoping to grow. Is this area of your firm trending up or down? Everyone on the team needs to know where you are right now to make progress.

Step 2: Determine where you want to be in three years What is your long-term goal? Do you want to grow this service line to $2 million in three years? You might consider your three-, five-

or ten-year horizon, although most firms we work with tend to have an easier time visualizing three-year goals rather than a longer horizon.

Step 3: Determine where you need to be in one year To grow a $2 million service line in three years, where do you need to be in one year? For example, if your three-year vision is to have $2 million in revenue, your one-year goal might be to have $1 million in revenue from this service line. Keep in mind that your first stage of growth might move slowly while you learn what you need to do to engage new clients and keep existing clients coming back for more. Make sure your one-year goal reflects this.

Step 4: Breakdown one-year goal into quarterly goals A one-year goal doesn’t naturally transition into a strategy. To drill down into the day-today actions needed to reach your one-year


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