The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Streamlined Sales Process for Your Bookkeeping or Accounting Firm
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If I asked you what your sales process was for your firm, would you be able to outline the steps? If not, you’re totally not alone!
We’ve built a whole business around documenting processes, creating systems, and helping other firm owners save HOURS doing the same. But we’ve noticed that the sales process is one of the most overlooked — but it’s sooo important!
Your sales process is the one that indicates what happens when a lead comes into your pipeline and HOW you take them from a lead to a client. And if you truly want to remove yourself from the daily operations of your company, you’ll have to figure out how to hand off your sales process to a team member.
Luckily, that’s exactly what this blog is all about! We’re obsessed with creating efficient processes that can easily be delegated to team members, and your sales process is a major player. So let’s get into it where we share our real sales process and how to create one that works best for your firm!
What Is A Streamlined Sales Process?
As you grow your firm and start adding team members to the party, you’ll need to create streamlined processes that are super easy to delegate. The whole point of hiring team members is to take tasks off your plate, right?
But delegating and training your team members takes a little work on your part before you can fully remove yourself. So take the time to map out your sales process and document everything that’s involved in taking someone from a lead to a client!
Everyone has their own unique approach to attracting leads, dazzling them with your service, and closing the sale. It’s your job to capture as much of that process as possible so that someone else can do it on your behalf. Once you do that, you’re one step closer to handing off sales calls to a team member for good!
How To Streamline Your Current Sales Process
When you’re ready to start documenting your sales process and refining it to perfection, follow these steps:
Document your current sales process AS IS! Don’t add anything you’d like to do but haven’t implemented yet, because improvements can be made later on. Right now, you just need to know what you’re already doing in order to identify what’s working.
Find out your close rate on your current process. This could also be considered your conversion rate, and it’s a super important number! When you know your baseline conversion rate, it’s easier to tweak the process and measure your success.
Map our your process in Miro to get a high level overview of what needs to get done and all the moving parts involved.
Finalize the process with your sales team. If you don’t have someone on your team yet, hand it over to another bookkeeper that you trust to help you fill any gaps you might have missed.
Pop over to your favorite tech tools and start organizing your process. Put any tasks in your project management system, automate wherever you can, and create any assets that you may need.
Create SOPs for each step in the sales process and make each one accessible to your team. We love using Loom to document our SOP videos!
Train your team members on the finalized sales process! You can even take it a step further by having a team member watch recordings of previous sales calls so they can really absorb how you expect them to run.
Keep in mind that the ultimate goal of a solid sales call is to provide value and support to the prospect while you’re on the call. We’ve found that it’s the best way to make your service a no brainer and sign more clients. Shifting your mindset from, “I have to close this sale” to, “How can I give this person value?” is seriously a game changer!
Our Actual Sales Process For Closing Bookkeeping Clients
Everyone’s process is a little different, but this is a great place to start if you’re looking to refine your existing sales process without starting from scratch!
Prospect schedules a call
We use Calendly as our scheduling tool, and our booking link can be found on our website in a bunch of different places. That’s because we want to make it unbelievably easy for people to book appointments with us and reduce the steps they need to take! We love to pre-qualify our prospects with a form that asks them a bit about their business and what they’re looking for — including a question about if they’re comfortable with our minimum rate.
Store the info you capture from the lead
When someone fills out your lead capture form, enter the information in your CRM or wherever you keep people’s contact info. We use Notion for this, and we love the ability to organize client data in there! But only do this step if the prospect’s intake form indicates that they’re actually a good fit for your service.
Perform the sales call
Now it’s time to do the sales call! We HIGHLY recommend asking the prospect if you can record the call so you can use it for training and making improvements on future calls. If you’d like, have a team member tag along or even run the call for you so they can get valuable experience.
Get access to their books
If the call goes well, ask for access to the bookkeeping software right then and there so you can guide them through how to add you as a user if need be. That way, you don’t have to send them an email asking for access and wait for them to take action!
Perform the diagnostic review
Of course, this step is optional — so only do this if it’s something that you offer (and we also recommend you charge for it!). Once we have the data we need from the diagnostic review, we can move on to the next step in our sales process.
Prepare the proposal
With the information we learned about the current state of this prospect’s books, we create a custom proposal tailored to their specific needs. Usually, the first month’s rate costs more because it includes clean up or catch up fees. Then, we calculate the rate for monthly maintenance and include both in the proposal. We love Dubsado’s feature for creating proposals from a template so we can save precious time during that process!
Send the proposal
Draft an email (ideally from a template) that includes a link to the proposal and contract. We use Dubsado for this part of the process and we LOVE how easy it is to create and send links. In the email, we also include a Loom video of us explaining the details of the proposal, because we typically include a few different package options. It really helps add a personal touch and that extra level of personalization to our sales process! So in this video, we can share the differences between each package and which one we think will best help their business succeed.
Follow up with the prospect
If they haven’t responded in a few days, take the time to reach out again. Obviously, life happens and things fall to the back-burner. So don’t be afraid to hit them up with a friendly reminder that you’d love to start supporting them and that you’re open to hopping on another call if they need clarification on anything!
Start the onboarding process
Once they accept your proposal and sign your contract — it’s time to get to work! Send over your ACH authorization form and initiate the onboarding process for your brand new client. BTW, we use Plooto for ACH and Content Snare for gathering documents from clients!
The Easiest Way To Streamline Your Sales Process
When you want to create an efficient sales process for your firm, but you’d rather not start from scratch or you’d LOVE some guidance from a team of experts…
It’s time to get yourself in Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants where we teach you how to build out your processes using our proven methods and experiences!
The best thing you can do for your firm (if you’re ready to start building a team) is create solid, repeatable systems. And the sales process is just one part of your internal operations that needs to be as streamlined as possible to help you reach your big business goals.
Inside this group coaching program, we help firm owners establish systems to sustainably scale. We’ve built and run a successful six-figure firm, and now we’re sharing everything we’ve learned in a high-touch program. If you’re ready to take your firm to the next level, join us in Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants!
