You spent months learning the package. The partners sat through the training, the firm paid the licence, and everyone came back ready to grow the advisory line.
Then the meetings happened, and the clients didn’t bite. A polite “we’ll think about it.” A quote that went quiet. The sense that you were pushing something they didn’t want. So, the package sits half-used, the investment isn’t paying off, and the growth you were promised hasn’t come.
The obvious answer is that your people can’t sell. So, you consider sales training, or wonder whether you bought the wrong package, or conclude that accountants just aren’t natural closers. Every one of those makes it worse – because none of them is the problem.
The problem is that you started with a product.
A package is a solution looking for a client. It arrives fully formed, and the accountant’s job becomes fitting the client to it – which is selling, and trusted advisers are terrible at selling because selling is the opposite of what earned the trust.
Your doctor doesn’t run a special on appendectomies this month. The moment you push a product, you stop being the adviser and start being the vendor, and the client feels the switch even if they can’t name it.
Here’s what starting from the problem looks like instead.
Years ago, in my accounting practice days, I’d just handed a client his year-end figures – a textile importer. Friday afternoon, work done, he offered me a glass of wine. Winding down, he threw out a half-question: should I keep importing from China? He’d been chewing on it for three years.
I could have gone to the numbers – costings, margins. That was my safe ground for me, as I knew almost nothing about importing garments. But that would have been me reaching for something I was familiar with rather than really answering his question. So, instead I just asked him to lay out every reason not to, and then every reason to, and we mapped the lot. Then I asked which few of them really carried the decision. He named them, argued with himself a little, and partway through burst out: this is brilliant, I see what you are saying.
I wasn’t saying anything, I’d told him nothing. I knew less about his business than he did. All I’d done was give him a better way to think about it – and out of that hour came real work: cashflow forecasts, costings, the things the decision now obviously needed. I didn’t sell any of it. I asked, “would you like me to do those?” and he jumped at it. There was no fee resistance because I wasn’t selling a service – I was finishing off a problem I’d just helped him progress. He’d been stuck for over three years. It took a little over an hour. And he solved it, not me. I provided and led the process for him to solve it.
That’s the whole difference. The package starts with what you want to sell. The conversation starts with what’s actually keeping the client awake – and the work that follows isn’t sold, it’s asked for, because by then it’s the obvious next step. It costs no non-chargeable months, no licence, no training. The accountant already has the meetings booked. The only thing that changes is the conversation inside them.
You’ve got client meetings in the diary over the next month. Let’s talk about the conversations you’re going to have in them.