Over half of the accountants polled in a recent survey of accountants in public practice, who were asked “How do you identify prospects?” replied that the majority of their business leads came from Cold Calling on prospects.
With Cold Calling defined as making an unannounced personal visit, or an unsolicited telephone call to a business suspected of being a potential client, the majority of accountants in public practice state that they continue to use this time tested method of building their practices despite efforts by so-called “experts” in marketing to teach networking and word-of-mouth marketing techniques.
“How do you identify prospects?” was the followup poll to an earlier poll asking accountants “What is your hardest marketing challenge?” In that previous survey, the respondents universally stated that their primary challenge was identifying prospects.
The recent poll disclosed that while approximately one-third of the respondents claimed their primary source of prospects was through networking and referrals, in reality, only a small proportion of the prospects actually called the accountant, leaving it to the accountant to make the first contact with the prospect. This perhaps explained why the majority of respondents identified their source of leads as coming from their cold calling efforts, they were in fact following up on leads they had been given through their networking and referral activities.
The results of this poll, while not scientific, seem to identify a pattern almost contrary to the generally accepted theory that accountants build their practices through networking and referrals. But, as the analysis and commentary shows, the reality may be far from the perception delivered through a cursory glance at the polls results.
“In actuality, this shows that good, old fashioned, hard work, is what is necessary for building professional practices,” say accountants, who read the results of the poll. “While it’s what accountants have been doing for years, they’ve been keeping it secret, because they think it will make them look less than professional.”
Since the early 1970′s and the easing of advertising restrictions on accountants, marketing and practice building habits of accountants have evolved from the referral only model that lasted from the 1920′s through the 1960′s to the aggressive cold calling tactics that developed in the 1970′s and culminated in the 1980′s, until the image of the aggressive marketing tactics became perceived as less than professional in the 1990′s, continuing on into the twenty-first century.
However, as the results of this poll show, when asked in an anonymous setting, accountants admit that they continue to include the time tested technique of cold calling in their arsenal of marketing techniques. A technique that practitioners have been using since restrictions on advertising by professionals was eased over forty years ago.