10 minute read
As an accountant or bookkeeper, finding new clients is crucial for growing your practice. LinkedIn has emerged as a powerful platform for professionals to connect with potential clients, but many struggle to use it effectively. This guide will show you how to optimize your LinkedIn profile, develop a consistent outreach strategy, and convert connections into paying clients. Whether you’re looking for bookkeeping leads, tax clients, or high-value advisory services opportunities, these LinkedIn strategies can help you generate a steady stream of qualified accounting leads each week.
LinkedIn is NOT magical. This means if you don’t have foundational things with your business prepared before you start LinkedIn marketing, you will not succeed. By “foundational things,” we’re referring to the idea you know who you need to be talking to (your ideal clients), what you need to say to them (your messaging), and what your offer is (your pricing and packaging).
Without these foundations in place, you won’t know who to target on LinkedIn, nor will you know what to say to the client once you get an appointment. LinkedIn is only one part of your process.
That’s the crazy thing about client acquisition, you could have almost every single thing right, but if even one thing is wrong in the client acquisition process, it can ruin sales. For example, if your pricing is wrong, or you don’t know how to close a deal, or your messaging is slightly off, all the things you’re doing right won’t matter.
However, when you have ALL the parts of your sales process working, LinkedIn CAN become magical. It will give you more qualified appointments than you’ve ever experienced before. So, if you’re an accountant and would like to generate extra appointments with business owners who are ready to pay for high value advisory services, pay attention. This blog will cover how LinkedIn is the best tool you have in your arsenal to get accounting clients!
How many appointments have you had so far this week or this month? Marketing is 80% math, 20% art. Just 10 appointments per week, and its compounding effect, can completely change your accounting firm. Let us show you how:
Let’s say you get 10 appointments each week on LinkedIn, and 7 of these appointments show up. You have a 20% close rate selling on average a $5,000 tax plan (more on this later).
7 appointments per week, closing 20% = 1.4 tax plans a week!
That’s 67.2 tax plans per year, multiply that by $5,000 and your accounting firm has over $335,000 in additional annual revenue. This is before you even upsell those clients on implementation, preparation, quarterlies, CFO, or financial services.
In short, the potential is huge if you know how to do things right—and that’s where we come in. We want to show you the massive potential LinkedIn has to get accounting clients for your firm!
You make a connection request on LinkedIn with a potential client. This client goes to your profile and sees a crisp, clean photo. They see your company and a headline that speaks to them about their problems or desires. Then, they go ahead and connect with you right away before you even message them!
Or, instead of sending a connection request, you can simply view their profile. This notifies them that you viewed your profile, and they might check out who you are. We recommend using a software to automate some of this process.
About 20% of the appointments that our accountants get on LinkedIn come from viewing profiles, and about 80% of the appointments come from connection requests.
This is extremely powerful and can potentially get you 5 to 7 (or more) appointments a week very consistently.
You’ve got to have a nice photo on your profile, which means you look professional. This is different compared to other social networks where you can be in a t-shirt and have a picture with your dog. Dress like you would at the office so you appear like a professional accountant to anyone you market to. Your headshot doesn’t have to be perfect, it just can’t be bad.
With your headline, you want it to be focused on the client, don’t have it be focused on you. “I offer bookkeeping services. I offer controller services.” No one cares about you. What are you doing for the clients? Specifically, what could somebody get?
What are you going to be doing that’s going to help them make more money? Fundamentally, with the messaging you do on your LinkedIn profile, you’re trying to tell people you can actually help their business—you’re not just going to hit the books like a parakeet pecking the keyboard.
A bad headline would be…“I’m an owner at PM Tax Services.”
A good headline would be…“I help personal injury attorneys save $25,000 to $75,000 in taxes even if they’re working with a CPA.”
Make a headline that’s focused on the client!
Scan client returns. Uncover savings. Export a professional tax plan. All in minutes.
The next thing that many accountants mess up is having a logical work history on LinkedIn. If you have a weird work history, just clear it out. Put your current firm on there—you don’t need to put anything else. You don’t need to show what you did in 1997.
Anything over five years ago, it really doesn’t matter. Ten years ago, the iPhone was still a new thing, and some accountants are still talking about what they did when we only had CDs or even cassette tapes. No one cares about what you were doing, those jobs are likely obsolete anyway, right?
So, turn off all the work history, because most people only care about what you do right now anyways. Just put your current position!
Add a company summary. The company summary is big because it’s near where the headline is. Remember to keep the copy short and tight, people don’t want to read a wall of text!
The client, when looking at your LinkedIn profile, gets interested by your headline, then they read the full company summary below, and that’s where you really talk in more detail from your headline. We’ll use attorneys here for example purposes, but the same principles go for any niche that you work with:
“Yes, I could save you $25,000 to $75,000 on taxes if you’re an attorney.”
Then you can go into some key points on the process that you use to work with attorneys:
“One the key things that are relevant to attorneys from a tax perspective…”
Or:
“I open trust accounts for attorneys by...”
This is where you can sell your services to them and get the potential client highly interested in messaging or connecting with you!
We’ve only scratched the surface on how powerful LinkedIn can be as a tool to get appointments. You will be able to find many leads that you can sell high-level advisory services to such as tax planning, CFO services and financial coaching.
There are specific processes that we teach accountants to maximize the potential of this platform, including:
See how Corvee allows your firm to break free of the tax prep cycle and begin making the profits you deserve.
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