The Five Things You Are Doing Wrong With Accountants

“You know how much I’ve billed this year from you guys?”

I don’t know, each of us said at the same time.

$120,000!

I couldn’t believe it.

“You’re actually my biggest referral source by a mile.”

I was surprised, I thought we were always asking him for business, it never crossed my mind that he was looking to us for business, not to mention that we were his #1 source!

“So let’s find some more business for both of us.” We said at almost the same time.

This was a conversation I had about a year ago with an Accountant. What was even weirder about this encounter, was that most of the business came from his own clients. I mean, we didn’t refer him many new clients, instead with our help he had simply billed his existing clients for some lucrative work.

Here is what he billed for:

1.      Corporate reorganizations (like when we recommended a client flip operating company shares into his holding company, for tax reasons).

2.      Estate Freezes with a Family Trust

3.      Corporately Owned Life and Critical Illness Insurance (along with the additional work that is required on the accounting side)

4.      Family Trusts to help with the sale of a business.

These are just some of the things this accountant billed for to bring him to $120,000 in new billings from our referral, but for the most part, they were people he was already working with.

In order for us to get paid for implementing a solution like a Life Insurance policy, it almost always means doing one of those 4 options above. This put us into a “win-win” situation with this accountant. By doing this, we have built what I would call is a real working partnership, not a relationship, a partnership.

Let me explain what this looks like:

A true partnership is one where the accountant will provide a steady stream of high-quality, pre-qualified wealthy referrals.

A true partnership is one where we are the highly preferred referral source, and is usually the only recipient of the referral.

Steady stream means they will be consistently referring you business. This is really important!

High-quality and wealthy means the clients will be wealthy people who will need the solutions that we can offer.

And, finally pre-qualified means they are coming from a trusted source, in this case, direct referrals from the Accountant, someone who is already trusted by the client.

While the relationship with the Accountant took a while to develop, the partnership moved quickly. When the Accountant started to make some serious money from our partnership the business exploded for both parties. However, if you look at what we did to develop this partnership, it is almost the opposite to how most Financial Advisors go about trying to develop Centers of Influence from Professionals like Accountants and Lawyers.

Here are 5 of the most common approaches that Financial Advisors use to get business from Centers of Influence. If you are doing these things, keep doing them, but I just think we need to take our value proposition further.

• Communicating Your Money Management Process

This is the number one thing that most Advisors do, and while it is important for Professionals to understand your approach; they’ve heard this story and it bores them. Where is the value?

• "Staying in front of the Professional"

This is another very common activity. Advisors who take this approach go to every networking event and make sure they are shaking hands and getting their face in front of the Professionals. They take these Professionals to special events all in the hope that they will build both a Professional and Personal relationship. The hope is that they can use this relationship to get a referral or two. Oftentimes, the referrals are of low quality and inconsistent.

• The Financial Advisor updates the Professional on new ideas, strategies or products.

Whenever a new idea comes out, the Advisor will make sure everyone in their network is aware of the idea. The hope is that when the Professional hears of the new idea, a lightbulb in their head will go off and will recommend it to a client. This does work from time to time but is yet again inconsistent.

• The Financial Advisor generates fees for the Professional

The most common way is to refer new business to the Professional in the hopes that they will repay the favor. This is yet again, another common tactic and does work from time to time. The problem is, you do not have enough clients to consistently refer to these Professionals.

• The Financial Advisor will set up a formal partnership with the Professional

While this approach can be very profitable if set up correctly, it rarely works out as well as the Financial Advisor would hope. This type of relationship is predicated on a Professional consistently looking for people to refer to the Financial Advisor. Unfortunately, they tend to do a poor job in this category, as they are busy doing their work. However, this type of relationship if set up correctly and managed well can result in a significant amount of business. However, they are rarely managed well and thus do not lead to a consistent stream of high-quality referrals.

From the beginning we identified that this Accountant wanted to make more money and was willing to work with a partner that would make that happen. This is not always the case, some Accountants are fine where they are, if you meet someone like that, just say "NEXT"! We wanted to be that partner and we built out a plan to make it happen.

There is so much more I’d like to say about this topic, including how we went about building this partnership, but I will save for a future article. But here’s what I’ll say right now – our partnership, one where the Accountant had billed $120,000 from our work together – is working today because we are finding opportunities for them, which also happen to be opportunities for us. We don’t sit on the sidelines, we actively work the partnership to continue to find new opportunities every single quarter. We are effectively wholesaling the Accountant to open up new opportunities.

My question to you:

If you are working on Centers of Influence, what are you doing to drive value for them? How are you helping them grow their business? If you figure that out, you will be well on your way to developing a strong and enduring partnership.

Andrew McKeown is an Insurance Consultant at a leading Canadian Insurance Company. He writes about sales and insurance ideas.

Check out his online course at: www.advisorsvoice.ca

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If you would like to reach me directly, email me at andrew.mckeown@londonlife.com