At the end of each financial year, as if processing all your lodgements on time is not stressful enough in its own right, you may have, in the past, struggled with your yearly re-engagement process. If you are still creating your proposals in Word and manually emailing the documents to clients, probably have a firm understanding of the unique difficulties that can come with re-engagement.
If you use an older quoting platform, then you know that creating individual letters and sending them out is time-consuming. Let's face it - sending re-engagement letters can feel like a big waste of time and effort.
Why dedicate time to re-engaging when I can spend that time doing work which is actually going to bring money into your practice?
Before diving into the steps in re-engagement, let's look at why you need to re-engage your clients:
So how do you manage your re-engagements while you've got all your End of Financial Yet (EOFY) lodgements with which to contend?
Re-engagement is often either something that (depending on your inclinations)
Here are few simple steps that can help:
On the other end of the client life cycle, you know that automating your initial client on-boarding and engagement process is surely beneficial. But using this same technology to re-engage your clients on a yearly basis sustains the relationship by making sure that no client slips through the cracks during what could become a "time of transition" – if you let it.
Since selling is increasingly a part of the accountant's job, taking the steps above will help your practice stay profitable, moving always onward and upward!
Leveraging yearly re-engagement to up-sell is important for those progressive firms looking to go beyond basic compliance work and start advising their clients more actively. By taking a consultative approach to how you handle your client relationships, you will soon find your profits skyrocketing as a result of not only more clients, but also more income per client.
One other overlooked advantage of a yearly rollover is the ability to increase your fees across the board. It happens to all industries and accounting is no exception. It's the perfect time to level any practice-wide fee increases professionally and tactfully. Imagine what you could do with that extra 3% increase across all your services each year?
Maybe a trip to Tahiti? Or a new car in your driveway? Maybe some much-needed rest and relaxation?