Converting Enquiries for Accountants

Most requests I get about lead generation for accountants are requests for more enquiries. More website traffic. More people filling in the contact form.

One of the first questions I ask is this. What happened to the last twenty enquiries you received?

Most firms cannot answer it. They know a few became clients. They know a few were not a good fit. They do not know about the rest.

I am not expecting anyone to recall twenty enquiries from memory. That would be an unreasonable thing to ask. The problem is that when a firm goes to look the information up, it usually is not recorded anywhere. It is spread across an inbox, a phone, and two people who each remember a different part of it.

If you cannot say what happened to twenty enquiries, twenty more will not help you. You will have forty enquiries you cannot account for.

This article is about the part of the process that sits between an enquiry arriving and a client signing. Three things fix it: giving one person responsibility, using a system you will keep updated, and writing down what prospects tell you.

What an enquiry experiences at most firms

Here is a sequence that happens often. I am describing it in detail because the detail is where the damage occurs.

A business owner has been unhappy with their accountant for about a year. The main complaint is usually communication. They do not hear back. They do not understand what they are being told. They find out about problems too late to do anything.

They read your website. It says you are proactive and that you explain things in plain English. They fill in your contact form at 9pm on a Sunday.

Nobody replies on Monday or Tuesday. On Wednesday they get an email asking for their turnover, their current fees, and details of their existing arrangements.

They are busy. The email is now a task on their list. They do not reply.

Nothing else happens. Inside your firm this looks like a lead that went cold, and cold leads get explained as a marketing problem. The reasoning goes: if that person had been serious, they would have replied.

The person was serious. They spent a year being ignored by an accountant, and their first experience of you was three days of silence followed by a request for homework.

Give one person responsibility for enquiries

In most firms, no single person is responsible for what happens between an enquiry arriving and a client signing.

The enquiry arrives in a shared inbox. It gets forwarded to a partner who is already busy. Marketing assumes the partner has it. The partner assumes someone has chased it. Nobody has.

This is not a skills problem. It is an ownership problem, and it is fixed by naming one person.

That person needs five things.

Their name written against the task, so it is clear to everyone in the firm who is doing it.
Permission to book meetings without asking a partner first.
Enough information to answer a straightforward first question about your services and your fees.
A stated response time. I recommend four working hours. If that is not possible for you, choose a number you can meet and write it down.
A regular review of the numbers with whoever runs the firm. How many enquiries came in, how many were contacted inside the response time, how many became clients. This is the part firms skip, and skipping it tells the person the job is optional.

If the person who does your marketing also does this, that is an advantage. Once someone is responsible for converting enquiries, they stop wanting more of them and start wanting better ones.

If your firm is too small for that and it has to be you, the answer is the same. Write your own name against it and set your own response time.

Treat it as a function within your business rather than a task you personally have to do. Written down as a function, with a defined response time and a defined record, it can be handed to someone else when you are ready. Held in your head as a task, it cannot.

Build a system you will keep updated

By system I mean a record of every enquiry and its current status. That is all. It does not need to be software.

Your practice management software is not the right place for this. It is built to handle clients, jobs and deadlines, which means it starts at the point someone has already signed. An enquiry that never became a client has nowhere to sit in it, and those are the records you need most.

A CRM is customer relationship management software. It is a database of the people who have contacted you and what has happened with each of them. Buying one is also the most common way this project fails, because a firm buys the software, fills it in for six weeks, and stops.

Start with a spreadsheet. Move to software once you have proved you will keep it updated for three months.

Record four things about every enquiry:

Name and business
Where they came from, for example Google, a referral, LinkedIn, or an event
Which stage they are at
The date you next need to contact them

Use five stages:

Enquiry received
Meeting booked
Meeting held
Proposal sent
Decision made, won or lost

The stages exist so you can see where people stop. Each stopping point has a different cause and a different fix.

If enquiries stop at stage one, nobody is responding fast enough.

If they stop at stage two, your meetings are being booked too far in the future, or you are not confirming them.

If they stop at stage four, your proposal is the problem. It may be unclear, slow, or priced without explanation.

None of those problems get better if you increase your website traffic.

Look at the spreadsheet once a week for fifteen minutes. Weekly, not monthly. A month is long enough for someone who contacted you to sign with a different firm.

Write down what prospects say

When you speak to a prospect, take notice of how they explain their problem. The words they use. What their situation actually is. Record those words rather than your summary of what they meant.

There is something worth keeping in every one of these conversations, including the ones that go nowhere. A prospect who decides not to work with you has still told you how people in their position describe the problem you solve.

Most of these conversations happen online now, so a transcript already exists as soon as you turn recording on. Tell the person you are recording, and keep the file.

I use Fathom Notetaker, which joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls and produces a transcript and summary after each one. Vinyl is built specifically for accounting and bookkeeping firms. It joins the same call platforms and also records in-person meetings through its phone app, which covers the situation where you are sitting across a table from someone.

If you are meeting face to face without a tool, write notes during the conversation and finish them before you do anything else.

Then pull three things out of it:

What they said was wrong with their current accountant
The task or situation they said they were worried about
Any question they asked that your website should already have answered

Put those three in the notes column of the same spreadsheet. The full transcript can sit wherever you keep files, but the three lines need to be somewhere you will actually look at them.

Two things become possible after about thirty enquiries.

The first is that you can see which objection is costing you work. If four people in a row asked whether they would still deal with you personally after being handed to the team, you now know that question needs answering on your website and in your proposal, before anyone has to ask it.

The second is that you can write marketing copy using sentences your prospects have actually said. That is more effective than copy written from your own description of the service, and it is the difference between guessing what your audience thinks and knowing it.

What to do this week

Find your last twenty enquiries. Email, phone notes, contact form submissions, wherever they are.
Write each one into a spreadsheet with the five stages above and mark where each stopped.
Count how many became clients. That number divided by twenty is your conversion rate.
Name the person responsible for enquiries from now on, and agree a response time with them.
Put a fifteen minute review in the calendar for the same time every week.

You will usually find at least two enquiries in that twenty that were never followed up and could still be contacted now.

If you want to know whether your firm’s gap sits in strategy, execution, performance or mindset, the Marketing Maturity Score will tell you in about five minutes.