Selling and Upselling Advisory Services in 3 Steps Here’s how to meet your advisory revenue goals in 2022... This article is
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ast year, Spotlight Reporting surveyed 600+ accountants from firms around the world, asking for their insights on current and upcoming trends in the accounting industry. The resulting Global Advisory Trends Report is well worth reading, but one of the biggest insights we uncovered was that almost 40% of accountants surveyed would like 50%-70% of future revenue to come from advisory services.
Gurpreet Lidder, Senior Account Manager, Spotlight Reporting Gurpreet has a decade of sales experience, predominantly within the SaaS space. He’s on a mission to empower accounting firms with solutions that create better business outcomes. Since joining Spotlight Reporting, he has helped 450+ accountants across the UK and South Africa achieve their advisory goals.
services efficiently and effectively. But while this approach works well—you’re charging for value, increasing the potential ROI per client, and the client understands exactly what they get each month—it’s still really important to be flexible.
1) Organise your client base
By grouping businesses together Client needs can change as their and tracking services offered, businesses grow or contract, or you’ll start to identify service when economic conditions throw gaps where you could be adding a spanner in the works. If a client more value. Don’t assume that if approaches you for a one-off a particular client isn’t asking for service, it’s far better to build it a service, they don’t want it—they into the monthly subscription, might not be aware of instead of hitting what you can really do the client with a Don’t assume for them. It’s up to lump-sum fee. clients don’t want you to be proactive! Furthermore, the advisory—they don’t At the end of tiers you design know what you can the day, the best may also not be really do for them strategy here is to the perfect fit for focus on what your every client on your clients need, and offer books. If this is the case, them the services that will help the best approach is to discuss them reach their goals. options with the client, get a real understanding of what they’re 2) Package your services after, and then build a monthly service structure that works for The best and most practical way them and for you. They’ll really to organise your services is to appreciate you going above and build monthly packages, rather beyond. than offering one-off sessions—a bit like a subscription model. 3) Sell the package
First, conduct a portfolio review and categorise your clients in a way that makes sense for your firm. Some questions you can ask yourself include:
Designing tiered packages according to client size and need is definitely advantageous. They’ll be a good baseline that will allow you to tweak and scale
Currently, only 12.5% of respondents are currently making that level of advisory revenue. This movement towards greater advisory revenue is something I’m seeing on the ground as well: advisory services are on the rise, and offering more services to more clients is definitely something practices are looking at this year. With that in mind, here are a few steps you can actively take to sell/ upsell advisory services to your base.
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• What industry do your clients belong to? • How big is their business? • What are their goals? • What services do you already offer them? • What services could you offer them?
@spotlightrep
Once you know what you want to offer clients, the next step is to sell those services. Selling can feel more natural for some than others, but it’s all just a matter of
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