This is the second in a two-part video series exploring sales and marketing strategies for accounting firms. This post specifically focuses the seller and expert strategy, and the business developer, and closer-doer strategy.
Watch the first video from this series:
Sales and Marketing Strategy for Accounting Firms Part 1
Video Transcription
Hi, I’m Lee Frederiksen. Today I wanna talk to you about sales and marketing strategy for accounting firms, and this is the second part of a two-part series. We’ve identified four primary sales and marketing strategies that a lot of firms use. Last time we talked about the seller-doer strategy and the traditional seller strategy. This time we wanna talk about the seller and expert strategy, and the business developer, and closer-doer strategy. Now, these are might not be strategies that you’re as familiar with.
Let’s talk first about the seller and expert. Here you have a dedicated capture specialist who works a sale, and you have an expert who’s working the sale in parallel. They’re getting to know the client. This is very common in the IT area. Sometimes if you might you’ve even heard the expression, “Sales Engineer.” Someone who’s providing the technical perspective and working with the seller. The big advantage of this is that prospects can really get to know the expert and the expertise of the firm during the sales process. That adds some real benefits.
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The downside of it is that it requires highly trained, highly compensated staff. So the seller is and also the expert, they’re pretty senior staff. Which gets us kind of to another model called, the business developer and the closer-doer. That’s a little bit convoluted name, but what it means is you have a sales oriented professional who helps, is involved in the sales process, helps facilitate it, but they aren’t responsible for all of it. The actual expert who’s gonna do the work is the person who actually closes the sale. The advantage there is the expert gets early involvement with a client. The other advantage is that because as a business developer, that helps take some of the burden off the expert and helps do keeps the sale moving. And helps to prevent that up and down cycle you get when it’s just a seller-doer who is responsible for everything. You get a good working relationship, and less information gets lost in the transfer between the sale and actually doing the work.
Now, big problem here is you required two people again. That’s the same issue we had with the other one, but these tend to not be. The business developer might not be as highly compensated because they’re not the independent salesperson, who’s doing the entire sales process by themselves. So that’s the big advantage there. So these are the four business models that we would recommend you look at for your accounting firm. And I think a lot of firms are gonna find that the seller and doer is very familiar, but that the business developer and closer-doer might be a good alternative for a lot of the larger or mid-size accounting firms. Thanks and good luck on making your decision.
Watch the first video from this series:
Sales and Marketing Strategy for Accounting Firms Part 1
