How an Internal Firm-wide Trade Show Knocked the Cover Off of the New Business Ball

Is ‘Flipping the Funnel’ an Appropriate Marketing Strategy for your Accounting or Consulting Firm?

I recently read a really intriguing LinkedIn post by Lauren Wilson, Founder of Chicagoland  Marketing and Marcomm  Group who posed the question, “Should we be spending much more time on client "retention and extension" & less on new from new?”

She referenced a blog post in Marketing Sherpa that presented an interview and discussion with Joseph Jaffe and his book “Flip the Funnel”.

Jaffe’s phrase "flipping the funnel" essentially means spending fewer resources on acquiring new customers and spending more on acknowledging and retaining current customers. These satisfied customers, in turn, can be empowered to share their brand experience with peers and become a new customer acquisition channel. 

Pretty interesting premise, eh? As a side note, inbound marketing works really well in this type of  strategy, particularly in terms of using blog posts to showcase thought leadership, and using offers based around content (i.e., “Get this whitepaper...) to identify clients that have issues or pains that you may not be aware of.

An Idea as Old as Dirt

The idea of mining your current client base for new business is, frankly, as old as dirt, and a brief internet search will give you days’ worth of reading on the how’s, what’s and why’s of client mining, cross selling and client retention.

In this era of content marketing every single client of the firm, and the top management of those clients should be getting an e-newsletter, and be subscribed to your blog. If they aren’t, then this is a fundamental piece of marketing infrastructure that needs priority attention.

So if this all makes sense, then why aren’t CPA, consulting and other professional services firms knocking the ball out of the park when it comes to client mining?

My take: I think that it’s a combination of the partners and senior managers at the firm (1) not knowing enough about the entire scope of products and services the firm offers, and (2) reluctance to cross sell based upon a perceived fear that bringing other parts of the firm to their client’s doorsteps is risky for their relationship with that client.

Try a Firm Trade Show

I’d like to share a marketing tactic that I developed that had a dramatic impact on creating internal firm awareness for products and services, as well as direct sales. An added bonus: it was a lot of fun to do and engaged everyone in the firm.

The tactic: an internal trade show, where every team in the company was responsible for creating a trade show booth, supportive materials, follow up sales plans, and measurements of results. Each team was given a budget for booth materials, and the top three booths – as voted by the staff – won prizes. To ensure that each booth got visitors, we used a simple card/sticker program and required a minimum of ten stickers (i.e. booth visits), which then made the person eligible for a grand prize drawing.

The event lasted a morning, and was followed up by a luncheon where prizes were awarded.

The creativity shown by each and every team was amazing, even to the point where coming into the office a few days before the event, the Construction Team  got one of their clients to suspend a sign from a 40 foot crane parked at the entrance that encouraged  people to visit their booth. Is that cool or what?

But while it was fun,  the event had a serious marketing objective – build product awareness internally and get dialogue initiated to get team leaders “quarterbacking” the introduction of services to their clients. The net result was the sales of over $100,000 in new business to existing clients.

Whether or not flipping the funnel is an appropriate marketing strategy for your accounting, consulting or other professional services firm, cross selling is an objective that shouldn’t get lost amidst all of the current emphasis on inbound and content marketing.  A minimal investment in a internal trade show could have a huge upside ROI – and an out of the box way to make your staff aware of the scope of solutions your firm can bring to existing clients … and prospects!