How to Acquire New Customers Without PPC: LinkedIn Strategies for Accountant Services
I’ve hired my accountant after he reached me out via Linkedin (hey Richard). I loved his message so we’ve booked a call and I’m more than happy to work with him. Before that we’ve been thinking working with a large accountant company that have been advised by the registering agent. We considered to find an alternative but honestly speaking I knew that googling won’t give us the full picture and a good choice.
So I decided to write this guide to help other small firms to find the perfect customers. Just like me :)
If you’re a small accountant firm, finding new customers can be tough. The competition is fierce, and paid search can be costly. So how can you find new customers without breaking the bank? LinkedIn is a great place to start.
The first step is to define you Ideal Customer Portrait (ICP). This is a process of creating a detailed profile of your customer. The easiest way to do that is to analyse your current customers and write down common features like business type, location, revenue, headcount, who is decision maker and why did they choose you. Once you have defined your ICP, you can begin to search for them on LinkedIn.
Step One.
To make your life easier I would recommend you to have a Sales Navigator License. With Sales Navigator, you can easily find and message decision-makers at your target companies. It’s not cheap but if you do the math with timing it will pay off very soon.
Step Two.
Go to Sales Navigator and create a list of your ICP with no more than 1000 leads in it. Be more specific if you exceed the number.
Pro tip#1 Save all your searches and give them appropriate names. For ex. Canberra Law Firms, 10–50 headcount, founders and co-founders
Pro tip#2 Start from 2nd Degree connections first. this strategy will show you more conversion
Pro tip#3 Once a month go back to your Saved Searches and add to your campaigns new leads
Step Three.
Install Evaboot and extract your list of ICP. You can skip this step but at the end of the day you will have to”of unrelevant leads and you will spend hours to clean them out,” the algorithms of Sales Navigator are not perfect, and they will include in your list many other leads that you do not need.”n’t want to contact.
Evaboot has a great tutorials and support so I won’t stop here with the detailed guide. The only thing you should to remember is to download only qualified leads.
Step Four.
You have your lead list now it’s time to reach them out.
You can do it manually or use any of LinkedIn automatisation tool. Remark here: using such a tool is a grey area as LinkedIn rules say you can’t use any tool to automate the actions. But the reality is that while outreaching your leads you need to do many repetitive and boring actions and if you don’t won’t to hire someone to manage that, the tool is a great option. But still if you are a fan of rules you can proceed it manually.
If you decided to take advantage of automatisation you can easily find this kind of software. I’ve tried almost every of them and maybe some day I will post a comprehensive article about it but in short → there is no ideal one but the best one is Waalaxy. The biggest pros of it → you will need to keep your LinkedIn opened to make it work for you.
Waalaxy has a great tutorials and support as well (as you may notice I’m a fan of a good support) and there is no need to stop in details.
Step Five.
Upload your list from step three to Waalaxy or other tool. Advise: don’t forget to give all the lists appropriate names.
Step Six.
Create your campaign. You will need to decide how many steps you will have and the copy of messages.
I would recommend you to have a request + 3 messages. Not much but enough to catch attention.
Your messages should be short, respectful and not too much boring.
Recommendations:
- Don’t try to cut a deal right away. Start a discussion. Make your point in a few words.
- Longer texts should be broken down into shorter, more precise messages. Space between paragraphs might help make your message clearer.
- Tell your sales value in one sentence.
- Use data or use cases to back up your sayings.
Step Seven.
Launch the campaign.
Pro tip#4 Make sure that your messages and invitation are sent in recipients time zones. It can be adjusted in settings.
Pro tip#5 Make sure your LinkedIn account is looking great. Indeed, when you send someone a connection request, this is the first thing they’ll notice.
Pro tip#6 If you get banned by LinkedIn because of suspicious actions don’t panic and send them your ID. After that they will unban you
Pro tip#7 If someone reply you try to message him back as soon as it possible. Speed really matters.
Pro tip#8 Prepare replies frequently asked questions. You need to know upfront how to lead the communication. Ideally you need to have a communication flow as shown that will help you not wasting time composing messages.
And that’s it.
With a little effort, you can get five to ten new warm leads every month for around $200.
The results can be better as you will have a chance to reach 1000 new potential customers per months and this is a huge number.
I hope you find this tips helpful and feel free to post your questions in comments.
