Marrying Quick Actions With Accountable Results

Accountants sometimes tell me that I know them better than they know themselves. Well, I should! I spent five years working inside the consulting division of a regional accounting firm, experiencing firsthand how accountants handle business development.

Many service professionals have at least two jobs. Aside from being accountants or lawyers, partners or managers, they also have the job of bringing new business into the firm. And unless someone happens to be a natural salesperson, that can create a problem.

Until 2007-2008, it was raining clients for CPA firms - law firms, as well. In fact, CPAs were getting so much work that large firms had to outsource some of it to contractors or smaller firms.

Since the recession, that's all changed. Now everyone is under pressure to bring in new business, tapping into skills they've never had to use. We have a whole generation of people, who came on board from the early 1990s on, who have never really been exposed to business development because they didn't have to be. The old guys, who were natural rainmakers, have the skills but didn't know how to transfer their skill set to others.

Traditional sales training doesn't bring the results they hope for, probably because traditional sales training wasn't designed for accountants and lawyers - it was designed for salespeople! And even when professionals try to apply what they've learned, there is no accountability system to make sure they follow through or track their success.

I've been a licensed facilitator of the Get Clients Now training program almost since its beginning in 1995. One of its key benefits is that it gets you into action right away. You're not learning cookie-cutter sales methods; you're coming up with practical strategies that suit your own business, and then you're implementing them right away. You actually have your basic business development plan written on the first day of training.

My accountability system for professional services firms has been gaining a lot of momentum, and it's clear that it's filling a huge need. Because of my experience and knowledge of CPA firms and law firms, more and more of my clients have been asking about how I could help them with business development.

I was curious - they were already doing training in sales and business development, so what was missing?

I recently re-took the Get Clients Now program again for myself, and that gave me a huge epiphany for my business. This is a great program, I thought, but something's missing.

Accountability!

That's what led to the marriage betwee
Get Clients Now and the Accountability Experts, Inc. accountability system, and we call our new program Get More Clients NOW and Forever.

The Get More Clients NOW and Forever program solves professional services firms' seemingly unsolvable business development problems now and forever.

Here's what makes this comprehensive sales, marketing and accountability program so unique:

• The I.M.P.A.C.T. system, which stands for Immediate, Measurable, Perpetual, Accountable, Coaching and Training. There are other systems out there that have some or most of these components, but none have it all - until now. From my many years of experience working with accounting and legal professionals, I've seen that in order to have sustainable, effective and successful business development in your firm, you must have all six of these pieces. It is the marrying of the Immediate piece (from Get Clients Now) with the Accountability piece (we call it our "secret sauce") that really makes it work.
• Un-sales training. Because the professionals we're working with inside CPA and law firms are lawyers and accountants, not professional salespeople, conventional sales strategies and techniques do not work for them. Most sales programs are taught by sales people. Do you want to be taught by a "salesy" type of person? In the Get More Clients NOW and Forever program you'll be taught by me, Alan M. Dobzinski, someone who understands sales and business development because I've been there and I'm still there - bringing in the clients - but I'm not a salesperson. That's why we call this un-sales training. This is results training, not sales training.
• Industry knowledge and experience. Aside from working inside a professional services firm for over five years, my client experience has been almost exclusively focused on CPAs and law firms, except where I've branched out to related industries such as banking, financial and insurance. I'm a Master Certified Coach, one of only 622 in the world. As for accountability, well, I wrote the book on it.
The reaction to this program has been beyond my wildest expectations. I thought 1+1 would equal 2 or maybe 3, but it seems that 1+1 = 11!