CFO Chronicles: The Secrets Behind Success

Get a Flood of Inbound Leads with Zero Cold Outreach

• James Donovan • Season 4 • Episode 61

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You’re not invisible. You’re just not on Google.

In this special workshop episode, you'll learn the exact strategy that's generated:

  • $125K of new revenue in 49 days (Shaun)
  • 113 inbound calls in 16 days (Shalini)
  • $83K in five months (Justin)

If you’re tired of referrals drying up or watching competitors win business that should be yours, this is your blueprint.

You’ll learn:

  • How to rank at the top of Google Maps
  • Why most Google Business Profiles never generate leads
  • A 7-day checklist to turn your listings into a lead magnet
  • How to get high-intent calls without blowing money on PPC

⚠️ 76% of people who search for a local service visit or contact that business within 24 hours. If you’re not there, someone else is.

📲 Want help setting this up or want us to do it for you?
Book a free strategy call at accountingleadsnow.com

➕ Connect with us on LinkedIn and follow the show for more tactical episodes like this.

Send us a text

Don’t miss out! Subscribe, rate, and review CFO Chronicles to help others discover these insights. Ready to transform your growth strategy? Connect with me on LinkedIn, and book your strategy call at accountingleadsnow.com to position yourself as the advisor clients truly need.

Ready to turn your firm into a lead-generating, profit-driving machine?
We help Bookkeepers, Accountants & Fractional CFOs generate consistent local leads, book perfect-fit appointments, and close premium clients, without cold outreach or ad guesswork.

Let’s map out your growth plan together → Book your free strategy call


SPEAKER_02:

Welcome back to another episode of CFO Chronicles. I am so excited for this episode to be released. It's a little bit different from what we've typically done in the past. This one is a little bit longer. It is a recent webinar that we recorded showing a handful of firm owners how to dominate their local market using Google, using Google Business Profile and local service ads. Essentially showing up at on the top of Google when decision makers are looking for the services you offer. If you're not showing up, your competitors are and they're getting the business. So make sure to listen in to the entire episode. Let me know if this is the kind of stuff that you want to see a little bit more of, and we'll make sure we keep bringing what it is you're looking for. Enjoy, and we'll catch you in the next one. And today we're going to be talking about how to dominate your local market, the ultimate guide to winning clients with Google and local service ads. Local service ads is a platform that barely any accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firms are utilizing. And I can say wholeheartedly, it is hands down the easiest way to go out and attract new clients on a consistent basis right now. How many of you either show of hands or put in the chat, struggle with attracting new clients for your firm? Okay, a couple hands going up. Just gonna move this over. Cool. So what we're going to get into is how we're going to utilize Google, how we're going to use the organic and the paid side of things. This is not pay-per-click, and how we're going to attract new clients. Ideally, by this time next week, you'll have a new client on your roster. So, what sort of results can you expect from today? Yes, I'm not um designed to make presentations or slideshows so that it is pretty cheesy with some of the images. It's pretty bare bones, but we're going to get into some really important stuff. So let's just focus on the content, not how it actually looks. All right. So we have been running this strategy. We call it our local market domination strategy. One of our clients, Kevin Roberts, based out of um, he's in Kentucky. Within eight months, he was able to bring in 187 inbound calls, once turning this on. So he's averaging about 23 inbound calls per month. This is dating back um a couple months, but just to show how many inbound calls people are getting from utilizing these strategies that a lot of firms aren't using. So there's so much opportunity to take take um take over the competition. Have another client here, Shalini. She implemented the exact same strategy: 113 calls in 16 days. This is with people raising their hand who have very high intent for the services you are offering. Um, we also have Sonia, who after implementing this, she was able to close$4,000 of new deals in a matter of 14 days. This stuff works. We have Justin. Um, within a span of five months, he was able to generate$83,000 of new revenue. Again, this is all from inbound calls from people raising their hand saying, I need what you offer because he is showing up where people are looking. Sorry, I got my cat trying to jump up onto a standing desk here. It's it's chaos. Then we also have Sean. We were working with Sean for the span of six months. He was able to bring in 125 grand of new revenue in a short period of 49 days. This is all from being visible on Google organically and then positioning yourself at the very top with local service ads. I'm gonna show you exactly how you can set all this up by yourself. So the six things that we will be going over today is how to attract local clients. There's six key pieces to running this. So the first one, easiest way to get found locally online, so that more people are calling you instead of your competitors. The harsh reality is if you're not showing up at the top of the search, your competitors are and they're getting that revenue instead of you. We are also going to go over the hidden setup that makes or breaks your Google business profile. You set this up right, you will start to get calls coming in. There is some friction to set this up. That's why a lot of people stop. Once you get past that, you will get inbound calls, you will position yourself better than your competitors. The third thing, we're gonna turn a few good words into a lead machine. What that means is we're gonna help generate more reviews on your Google business profile. Reviews are build massive currency on Google. It also builds a lot of trust, which is going to attract new clients. Going to give you a template on how to send that out this afternoon so you can have new reviews on your Google business page before you log off for the weekend. We're also gonna fix the number one thing that's quietly killing your rankings. When Google doesn't trust you, your phone doesn't ring. It's that simple. So we're gonna get that fixed. Um, fifth thing, we're gonna show you how to get high-intent calls without burning through thousands of dollars in ad budget. I'm very curious to know, show of hands, or put a put a one in the chat. Who has either ran your own marketing campaign or worked with a company in the past and you spent thousands of dollars and you got no results from it? Josh? Josh can't be the only one. Okay, no worries. Josh, we're gonna sort that out for you today. Um, number six, the simple content trick that draws in local buyers so that you're top of mind, you're relevant, and prospects are choosing you over your competitors. I'm not asking everyone to be an influencer, but this is a really simple way to generate content on autopilot so you never have to think about it again. And you're providing value and you're showing up at the top of the uh top of the search. Uh, and the last thing, I want to make sure everyone leaves with extremely actionable steps. So hang around till the end. I'm gonna give you a seven-day checklist to jumpstart putting your local growth on autopilot. Again, you set this up, you go through the steps we're gonna talk about here this afternoon. I can guarantee you your firm will make more money. So, who am I and why should you even listen to me? I have a funny accent. I am from Eastern Canada. We're we're very trustworthy people, so that alone is why you should listen. Um, I've helped over 300 plus accounting, tax, and bookkeeping firms set up and dominate their local market. So I would like to toot my own horn and say, I kind of know what I'm talking about here. So again, I appreciate your time jumping on. My clients have generated thousands of leads and six to seven figures and new revenue using these exact strategies that we're going to lay out today. They've paid thousands of dollars for these on a monthly basis. I'm giving you the entire playbook. And then lastly, we're behind this the scenes of many firms ranking number one in CPA near me and various key phrases in multiple markets across the US. What that means, not in marketing terms, they show up when people look for the services in their area, not their competitors. So, why is this even important to talk about? Well, if you're not showing up at the top of Google, your competitor is. I used to have the word probably in here, but that's not even the case anymore. If if you search on an incognito browser, uh accounting, bookkeeping, tax firm near me, look inside the map and see who's showing up. If you're not there, those are the firms who are getting all those inbound calls, and those are the firms who are generating the revenue. 76% of people who search for a local service on their phone visit within 24 hours. Whether that's in person or to your website, almost three out of four people are making that visit. So if you're not showing up, you're you're losing so much potential revenue. This is costing your firms thousands of dollars a month by not being visible. And then the last thing 87% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, including service professionals like accountants, bookkeepers, tax preparers, etc. Think about the last time you went to go make a purchase and the reviews you were checking out. This is where you're going to convert or can take that stranger online who knows nothing about you and get them building trust in your firm. You do it for the own for your own things you look for. Your customers are doing, your potential customers are doing the exact same thing when they're researching your firm. So, first thing, easiest way to get found locally so that you're getting more calls instead of your competitors. Unfortunately, this is a lot of accounting firms out there. We're working with a ton of them, we speak to a ton of them on a weekly basis, we go to events, we we hear what's going on. So many of you are are you want to be kind of seen, you don't want to be seen. You have half your stuff online, you want customers, but you don't want to actually put yourself out there. So, easiest way, and we're gonna get into this in just a sec. This is the Google map. This is just a screenshot from where I am in Eastern Canada, but this is what I'm talking about. If you're not showing up in the top three, it doesn't matter if you're ranked fourth or 400. No one's clicking on page two, three, etc., and scrolling. A really lame joke that everyone refers to in the marketing world, the safest place to hide a dead body is on page two of Google. So get into the top three so you're actually getting people searching for your firm. I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that. So um step two is we're gonna set up your Google Business profile in seven quick and easy steps. So hopefully, everyone on this call, you already have a Google business profile and you already have it verified. This getting a Google business profile verified, you have that check mark. Um, also when you're managing it, but you do get a check mark when you're verifying the page. It is a really annoying and time-consuming task to jump through the hoops with Google. They'll make you do verificate video verification, they'll make you send in different pieces to show that you actually own that business. Work through that pain because it's worth it when you get to the other side. If you're not verified, you're not showing up in the map that we are looking back here. Once you do get your business profile verified, the best ways and the easiest way is to start climbing up the ranks so you actually show up in the top three above your competitor. The first thing is relevant and updated photos. Let people know a little bit about your firm. Upload a picture of where the office is. If you have a home office, take a picture of your workspace, put a picture of you and your team members. Even if you have, say, like a pet as a mascot in the business, upload a picture of the pet. People like to do business with who they know, like, and trust. The best way for that to happen is uploading pictures so they feel like they actually know you. And then anytime you have case studies or screenshots, uh, reviews or emails from clients that are kind of praising what you're doing, feel free to upload those as um as pictures, those screenshots. The more consistently you're updating things, the more Google is pushing you up the rank. Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, so I just wondered if you had a little advice for me. I moved about a month a year ago, and I have not been able to change my Google address, and so it's not verified. I work from home, I work in an RV, and I have a long driveway, and I've tried doing the video that you have to submit, and I get nowhere with it because by the time I've walked up my long driveway and into my RV, they're like, Nope, this isn't a real business.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay.

SPEAKER_04:

What can I do about that?

SPEAKER_02:

I will get back to you on that with because one of my team members, she's been like a wizard getting everyone verified who runs into those those um those problems with verification. There are workarounds for it. Um, we had another client who was running into the same thing because there's like you only have so much time, right, to run up the driveway to show proof of it. Right. Two minutes a week. Yeah, essentially, if you have extra documents to kind of if you can get on a live call, then you can walk through and and show that Google rep on the other end of the phone. Hey, this is where I'm at, it's just a long driveway. But um, let me let me get an answer for you and I'll loop back either at the end of this or um later today, just to give you a super actual step on how to do that.

SPEAKER_04:

Thanks a lot.

SPEAKER_02:

Just remind me at the end, please. Okay, perfect. Um, so yeah, uploading relevant photos, super important. The second thing, consistently getting more reviews. The average firm in the US has 10 reviews on Google. Absolutely pathetic number. I can almost guarantee you, without even knowing anything about your firms, all of you have more than 10 people you're working with now or have worked with in the past who you're able to send out a message to and say, Hey, would you leave me a review? And I'm going to give you an exact template that you can send out. So by the time this is done, or by the time you leave for the weekend, you'll have a new review on Google. And I would love to hear the feedback after that actually starts happening. The more reviews you have, Google starts to recognize you as a trusted authority and your potential customers looking, they're choosing the firm that has more reviews. Think about if you're reaching out to a plumber or an HVAC company. You're not choosing the company that has one or no reviews over the one that has 30 or 40 reviews. So reviews, super, super important. Number three, the correct address. So many firms get this wrong. You need to use your Google business profile as your source of truth to have the correct business address. And from there, then you start updating the Facebook business page. You start updating where you're listed on Better Business Bureau on your website. But you need to have the correct address on Google and then have all of your other platforms with the exact same address. It's sending links all across the internet, and that's how Google is saying this is a trusted source. It's the right address. The fourth thing, have your correct hours. There's been so many businesses I've called wanting to spend money at because they say they're they're open because of their hours on Google, and they're not. Just take the time to put the correct address or sorry, the correct hours in. Choose the days that you're open or closed on holidays. You can set all that up in the back end of your Google business profile. It takes a couple minutes, but it's going to serve you massive benefit in the long run. The sixth thing, or sorry, the fifth thing is updating your company description, but make it keyword specific to what you offer. If you need help, jump in ChatGPT, prompt it to say, I'm writing a description for my Google Business profile. Make this optimized and relevant to who I work with, where I work with them, and the industries I serve. Think about what people are searching for online. Best accountant in Boston for medical facilities. Well, if that's you, put that in your description. The more of those keywords you have, when people are looking for the services you offer, you're gonna get pulled up instead of your competitors because you have all of those keywords listed. The sixth thing is your updates, also known as blog posts. These are super important. And I'm gonna be brutally honest, no one is going to read them on your Google Business profile, but it doesn't matter. You get up to 1,500 character limits, uh, sorry, 1500 character limit, and use this to speak about again what it is you offer, the industries you serve, and who in the services that you're providing to them in the location. From there, make it SEO optimized. Again, put that inside of Chat GPT, ask to clean through it, make sure you're removing all of the M dashes so it doesn't look like everything else that ChatGPT is spitting out, and then upload these on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Um sec here. Okay. Um, and then the last thing, link all of your social media accounts. Again, make Google Business Profile your main source of truth. Get your phone number correct, your address, make sure all that's that's correct, and then start linking your social media platforms and go and make sure all that information is synced on those other channels. This does require some work. I didn't say it was gonna be, you know, take two seconds to do, but you put in the legwork, this will be so beneficial for your firm. So, third thing that we're gonna speak about is how to get more reviews because more reviews equal more money. Think about any service that you have wanted to either you've bought a product online or you went to go hire a service online, you're looking at the reviews. You want to know what was someone else's experience with this company before I pay them money. Your potential customers and clients are no different. This is how you're going to build that trust and authority online where people have no idea who you are. So, to get more reviews, um, what's super important, even though this firm here has 28 reviews, they're not responding to their reviews. It is so important to respond to every single review that comes in. This is massive for your SEO, your search engine optimization, which essentially means Google is going to show you higher than your competitors. Your you will be visible. The reason this is so important is because one, you can ask your customers or your clients to leave keywords in those reviews, and then you double down and you leave that inside of your responses. So, a sample response to what some of these reviews would look like. Bob, thank you for the kind review and for trusting us to be your go-to accounting bookkeeping tax firm. Talk about what it is you do when it comes to your taxes and monthly accounting for your doctor's office in Boston. Again, people are searching best bookkeeper in Boston for doctor offices. Put that in your review so that when the next time people are looking for that, it's pulling up your page because you have that listed in the review you get from your customer and inside of your response, and it's in your business description and it's inside of your articles. This is how you're going to climb the ranks so you're visible instead of your competitors. So I want to make sure everyone gets more reviews. Please take a um sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. Best way to get reviews on your Google Business profile. When you go to click on reviews, you can grab the review link or just download the QR code. From there, what you're gonna do is pick three to five of your best clients. Three to five people who you're getting, they're super happy with. Either they just came on board, they've been with you forever, you've never asked them for a review. Maybe you've asked them for one in a long time and they they didn't take any action. Then we're gonna email those clients. I'm gonna give you exactly what to say. Feel free to take a screenshot of this. It will be in the the um resources at the end, but it's super simple. Hey Bob, thanks again for trusting us with your tax, uh, your tax bookkeeping, accounting work. It means a lot. If you feel we've added value, would you mind leaving us a quick Google review? Put the link, put the QR code. I like the link, it makes it uh there's a whole lot less friction. They can just click directly on it. It's bringing them right in. People won't do a lot of things you ask them. So the more friction you can take out of that, the easier it is. And you say, Thanks so much. I am beyond confident you email this out to your existing client base, you will have more reviews before you get back into the office on Monday. Um, and then when all those reviews start coming in, respond to them, especially negative reviews. What we're gonna do here, obviously, when you're picking your three, five best clients, hopefully, no negative reviews are coming in. If you do get negative reviews, super, super important you respond because it's not an ongoing thread. However, you get the chance to get the final word in that response. So you can tell your side of the story for whatever that review is. You can report them to Google, you could have multiple people report them. They're not always gonna get taken down, but at the very least, if someone's scrolling through and they see a one-star negative review, someone's going off the handle. Why not tell your side of things? Showing you're at least trying to de-escalate the situation and get on the solution side of that problem. So hopefully, all of that makes sense for everyone. And again, we're talking about the service, the niche, and the location. These are the three kind of key aspects you want inside of all of those review requests that you're sending out, and then inside of your responses. Any questions on the review front? Is that helpful? Perfect, couple, couple head nods there. Cool. So um, fourth thing we'll get into why Google doesn't trust you and how to fix it. A big home alone fan, so I need to throw in Kevin McAllister. Um, most important thing is referred to as your nap, which is just your name, address, and phone number. We spoke about this a little bit earlier, but this just must be identical across all platforms. You really need to use Google Business Profile as your primary source of truth, and then have your other, wherever your other profiles are online for your business, make sure it matches what's on your Google Business profile. It's absolutely, absolutely critical. Um, we have a we yeah, we have a client, he works in the HVAC space, so there's no problem sharing this story. He won't be out, you won't be on this uh this recording or see it. Um, when we started working with this HVAC client, the reason I bring this up is because I want to show you how important having the correct information is. When he when he came on with us, we started doing an audit of his Google business profile, an audit of his website. Started making optimizations on his Google business page. He noticed there's an address and there's a phone number. We went onto his website. He had two numbers on his website. One of them was literally highlighted and bold red, and then he had another number at the bottom. So we asked him, Hey, what what where does this number go? Who's responding to this? This do you ever miss any phone calls? He said, I don't even know who where that number is. That that's not part of our business. It's like, okay, that's a major concern why it's bolded and highlighted on your website. So we phoned it, it was going to a competitor in his area. Our client was running ads before bringing us in, sending people to his website, and it was prompting people to call another business. How that number got there, we have no idea. Whether it was an old number he had, someone else bought it afterwards. Um, if it was a maybe a marketing company went in, they put it, they didn't change it, whatever it was. The point is, you need to stay on top of this because you're working so hard to bring in new business, and you could be sending it elsewhere. You could be, if someone's phoning the number that's no longer in service, they're not gonna give you a whole lot of other chances to try to get in touch with you. They're moving on to the next business in line. So just make sure all this stuff is accurate, it will go a long way as you climb the ranks, and again, you're getting more visibility than your competitors. Um, so how do you fix this after a big ramble of what not to do if you're a HVAC business in the Carolinas? Well, the first thing you're gonna do is update your Google business profile to your main source of truth. Spoken about this a couple times, bit of a broken record at this point. Second thing you're gonna do is you're gonna take one hour to audit your online presence. What is showing on your Facebook business page? What's showing on your uh LinkedIn business page, yellow pages, better business bureau, QuickBooks Pro, um, your website. It doesn't matter. Wherever you think you may be listed, do a search of your business to see what is coming up in those citations, essentially the links that you're gonna find on Google when you search for yourself. Just make sure all this information is accurate. There's a couple ways to do this. You can do it um a little painfully, just manually going through. Once it's done, just build a process around it, hand it off to a team member, do it once a quarter, just make sure everything's correct. For whatever reason, sometimes these things do change. It is technology, platforms change, just make sure it's up to date. Maybe you've updated a phone number where you're bringing everything in, whatever it is, just make sure it's up to date. Or there's a couple tools out there. I haven't used Moz Local or White Spark, but there are some reputable platforms that can help out with this. Our team does help with all the citation matching and making sure that takes place as well. But at the bare bones, just make sure you spend the time to go and make sure all this stuff is accurate because from a consumer side of things, you want to work with someone, you call them, the numbers out of service, you're moving on to the next person. And that's what your potential customers are doing as well. So, um, any questions with the name, address, phone, and how to fix that? No? Cool. All right, well, we're just gonna keep on rolling here then. Um, so let's talk about how to never worry about burning your hard-earned dollars when it comes to paid advertising. All of the stuff we just spoke about is great, it's organic, it works, it takes time. That's just the way it is. I wish I could tell you it was super exciting, and when you fix those things tomorrow, your phone is going to ring. It's not. But if you stay consistent and make sure your stuff's accurate, you're publishing those articles, you're uploading photos, you will start to climb the ranks. This will take a couple months, but it will make an improvement. However, local service ads, this is the stuff I get super excited about because barely any accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firms are using this platform. It's been around for a while. It's primarily run by home service companies, but no one in the accounting space is using it yet. There's a wide open opportunity to take advantage of this. This is how you will start getting phone calls the second this gets approved. Quick caveat: this does take a couple weeks to get approved, just like your Google Business Profile. Again, I'll walk through all the steps that are required for this, but this is the stuff that will get your phone ringing right away. This is the platform, if you recall back to the start, where all of our clients have got those incredible results from because they're getting super, super high intent calls through local service ads. It's a pay-per-call platform. So, what that means, pay-per-call, it's different from if you've ever run ads on Facebook or YouTube or Instagram or call it meta for Facebook and Instagram. Difference with this, you only get billed when someone physically calls into your company and they're asking about any of the categories here that you have checked off. If someone calls in for this particular client and is asking for payroll services, Google out Google's algorithm is not going to bill them because they know this company is not offering payroll. So you're only getting, you're only paying for qualified calls. And you're getting people who've taken the time to search on Google payroll company near me or accounting supporter, uh best bookkeeper near me. They are already aware they have a pain, which is 90% of the sales process. You don't even have to convince them because they came to you saying, Hey, I have a problem that I'm looking to get solved. Now I'm speaking to you. So much easier in your sales process than reaching out to thousands of people on LinkedIn, than running ads on Facebook, hoping to get in front of the right person who potentially has a problem. This is a way to just sit back and wait for that phone to ring with gold on the other side of the line. So inside of local service ads, it is under the tax specialist category. When you go into Google, you type in local service ads, walk through setting up the account, it's really easy. I'm not going to bore you with that on here. Um, tax specialist is the category right now in the accounting world. So you do need to have one of the following: either CPA license, enrolled agent license, uh PTIN, or I think it's a tax attorney license. If you have one of those, you're good to go. If you don't have it, local service ads, um, it's just one of the verifications they do look for. Even if you don't plan on providing taxes, I believe it's very easy to get a P TIN relatively quick. We've had some clients do that, and then we just keep on these the normal services they're offering. This is just again a verific uh verification method, so you're eligible for this platform. So, what that looks like, if you were, I'm sure, I mean, you can all test it out on your on your browser, um, but just put in you know tax planning near me or bookkeeping near me, you'll see here this is what local service ads looks like. It all Always shows up at the very top of Google. Then you get your pay-per-click ads. This is where people have spent thousands of dollars and they wonder why Google doesn't work for them. They've wasted a lot of money. Um, then underneath, a little bit further here, is where the map would show up. The map is what we were speaking about earlier, how you're going to show up organically in the rankings. That takes more time. Local service ads is a way to just jump to the top of the line and say, hey Google, I'm ready to pay for inbound calls. Put me right at the top. Someone clicks on get phone number, that phone call is coming directly through to you. Now the Google Home is going off because I keep saying Google so much. So now we're going to talk about how to win with local service ads, also known as LSA. So you've jumped in, you've set up your local service ads account, you've put in the verification that's required, you're ready to go. You're ready to start getting phone calls. You're showing up at the top in your local market. Yes, this is run in your local market. Ideally, it's within like a two to three hour driving radius of who you can service. That all depends on how populated your area is, how competitive it is. But again, there's so few firms using this platform that it's it's so easy to just get to the top right away. Um, we haven't, again, an HVAC client in North Carolina. He doesn't have the same luxury. There's every firm in HVAC is using local service ads. So it's significantly more competitive. No one's using it in the accounting space. So this is a gold mine that people are not taking advantage of right now. So, best way to win with local service ads, every single day when a phone call comes in, you need to report that back to Google inside their ranking system as soon as possible. If Google's not hearing from you, they're going to assume you're getting enough calls, they're going to slowly drop your visibility. So other people running the ads will get that visibility. So you need to do this every single day. You need to pre-qualify the leads as quick as possible to avoid wasting time and being charged for bad leads. My recommendation: hire a dedicated concierge appointment setter to take all of those inbound calls. You're all very busy running your firm, working on higher leverage tasks. You don't need to be bogged down by answering the phone all day long. Have someone qualify those calls and weed out people who are just looking for free advice. People actually need your service. There's a ton of different service offerings out there. You can get an appointment setup for$2,500 a month, their sole job. Just answer the phone to only push through qualified sales opportunities for you. Third thing, uh, review your campaign on a weekly basis. How much are you spending? What's your cost per lead or cost per call? And then from there, what is your conversion? How many of those appointments are you booking? Are you converting into dollars in the bank account? So just staying on top of that. And then again, as I mentioned, the license is required, CPA, enrolled agent, PTIN, or tax attorney license. Once you have that, you're ready to rock and roll with local service ads. Any questions off the top on the the initial parts of local service ads?

SPEAKER_03:

What's a cost per lead metric that you see in the accounting space?

SPEAKER_02:

Excellent question. The average from what we've seen, and we've run this for kind of all pockets of the US now, average you could look at would be about$100 cost per call. It does sound more expensive if you're thinking about running a pay-per-click campaign where you might spend a couple dollars for a click. If you're running a Facebook campaign where maybe it's a$20 or$40 lead, massive difference with this is you're actually on the phone with someone who has an immediate need who searched for you versus someone who maybe saw an ad on Facebook that doesn't actually have a need. They're just clicking through, maybe they just want some information, you're paying for that, or someone who's clicked onto your website and then you're hoping they go through a form, then you still got to call them, you still gotta make sure they show up. You more or less are getting an appointment right out of the gate for$100. And if you're offering um even tax returns at a couple hundred bucks per return, makes a lot of sense. And again, in those 12 categories you offer, if if you are doing tax prep, I would just make sure that the math makes sense so that you're you're charging more than$100 for tax return if you're paying roughly$100 for that call to come in. But if you have your bookkeeping starting at$600 a month, you're doing tax planning for$10 or$12,000 for the year, you have monthly accounting services for a couple grand a month, it it's an absolute no-brainer. You pay$100 and you have a 10x opportunity to sell them a service when they have a need. Is that helpful? Perfect. So inside of local service ads, the ways to keep staying relevant so that Google continues to make sure they're showing you instead of your competitor. We like to refer to this as the three Rs. That's radius, reviews, and responsiveness. So radius inside the local service ad platform, you'll choose exactly where you want your ad displayed. So here for this client in Texas, if they were to get a call for whatever reason in Frisco, Google will not bill them for that call, or likely won't bill them for that call because it's outside of their serviceable area. So again, you're only getting qualified calls based off of the services you've selected you want to get phone calls for, the area you want to get them, and the hours that you're available. That's the other piece. Um, Facebook, you can have your ad, you can choose when your ads are running, but make sure if you're running local service ads, you only choose the hour you set up so the hours are when you're in the office, or your appointment set or whoever's able to take those calls is available. Because if you start missing phone calls, Google's just gonna think, all right, you're super busy. We're gonna make sure someone else is getting these calls. I'm jumping ahead with that. Goes into the responsiveness. Reviews, more consistent reviews, are better than someone who just has a ton of reviews from the past that they haven't got a new one in two years. So don't let a firm in your area who maybe has 50 reviews and you have 10, but if they haven't got a new one in two years and you're consistently getting them on a weekly basis or a bi-weekly basis or a monthly basis, that to Google is more important than reviews from a couple years ago. And I'll add in because I forgot to mention this earlier. When you go to send out your review request, three to five is fine in one batch. But if you haven't got any reviews in a while, do not email your entire client list all in one shot. And then you're gonna get all these reviews overnight. Google will look at that and go, this is all spam. You haven't had a review in six months. Now you have 20 in the span of an hour. That's fake. We're not gonna post them. And it's really hard to go back to your clients and say, Hey, can you leave us another review? Because yours yours didn't stick. So, my suggestion just use a drip sequence or manually drip out like two, two to three requests a day every other day, and you'll have reviews just dripping in on a more consistent basis. So that's the first two. And then again, responsiveness. If you're running local service ads, just make sure you're answering the phone. If you're not answering the phone, Google is going to just assume, hey, you're busy enough. We're gonna make sure someone else gets there who needs to take the business. So that's super important. Uh, the sixth thing that we'll go over, or sorry, any any questions on that piece with local service ads? How how to make it work, how to make sure you're getting the phone consistently ringing, and how to bring in really qualified buyers.

SPEAKER_03:

So, do you recommend maybe have a different phone number than your main line just to make sure that like it goes to an appointment center that won't affect any of your uh Google profile, it just can be set to the local service ads. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02:

So, local service ads will actually they they predetermine that phone number, and then in the settings of your local service ads account, you choose where you want that to forward to. Okay. So on the local service ad itself, um I won't go all the way back, but um on the local service ad itself where it says, you know, click here to get phone number, the QR code shows up. That's a predetermined number uh local service ads chooses. You choose where you want that to go to. So yeah, that's where you can make sure you always have someone answering that line. And then you keep your your your regular business number on your Google business profile. Okay. Any other questions on local service ads before we move on?

SPEAKER_00:

Hey James, question for you. So uh what if we can set it up in a way for a firm or a business to have an AI answering service or an AI appointment setter to pick it up, but will that flag anything with Google?

SPEAKER_02:

It won't flag anything with Google, as far as I know. What I can tell you is we've tested this for clients in the past just a couple months ago, and it was really quick and obvious that people phoning in didn't want to speak to an AI bot, even regardless of how great that AI can sound. Ultimately, I mean, we've all been there, right? You phone somewhere, you're trying to get through to someone, and the bot just doesn't. It's not, I don't find voice AI is quite there yet where we want it to be, and it will be in a couple months or next year, and it's getting close. But if you can afford to have someone sit and answer that phone call, or if you don't mind kind of being taken off task all day long, yeah, by all means um answer those calls. But I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't put an AI bot on it right away unless you had it really clean and really dialed, because you will get people asking different questions. So it's it's hard to train that bot to know exactly how to how to filter that call out. The other thing, local service ads, you have about a 30-second window where you're potentially not getting billed for that inbound call. And with AI bots, there's generally a little bit of a delay. So even if someone phones in and you have taxes as a category selected on your local service ads, maybe you're only doing that for businesses. So my suggestion is when you answer the phone, hey, is this for personal or business? If someone says personal right away and you're not doing anything that's personal related, hey, sorry, we're only taking on business, um, business accounts right now. So we're gonna politely end the call. An AI bot might not be able to do that quick enough. So you're you may end up getting billed for that call, and there's not an opportunity for you. So you spent that money without potentially being able to make some.

SPEAKER_00:

Awesome. Thanks for that.

SPEAKER_02:

Perfect. All right, so we'll jump into the content piece. Um, because I want to make sure we have some time for some questions here at the end as well. So, last thing, so we were speaking about creating articles, and I want to make sure this is super actionable and you're not banging your head against the wall thinking I got to be an influencer now, and I got to create all this content, and you're you're spending all this time trying to do that because that's not where you're making the most bang in your business. So, the easiest way to do all this is to use our best friend, ChatGPT. And when you go to write these articles, you can create a custom GPT and play around with the prompts, but essentially tell it you are a world-class marketing expert. Your goal is to consistently write SEO optimized articles, um, capping at 1,500 characters. And we're always going to focus on the services we offer. This is where we're based out of. Any questions you have for me, ask it back so I can give you all the info you need. But prompt ChatGPT to be your leading expert, be your marketing advisor, and then when you go to create your content, just put it in. So now when this comes out, we're focused on tax planning in Massachusetts. So when someone in Massachusetts is searching, you know, tax planning near me, Shanley's popping up because this is inside of all of her articles, it's inside of her reviews, it's inside of her business description. Same thing with um with our client here. If you're jumping in, again, Ohio tax laws, construction, we're focusing on the location, the service, and the industry. But use Chat GPT as your friend. Just make sure you kind of skim through it after you remove all those long hyphens, also known as M-dashes. You you pull out all the unnecessary emojis, make it look like a human wrote it. But ultimately, when you're in there, you could even say, create me two months or three months or four months worth of articles. Make sure we're touching on all the important dates and relevant times throughout the year that our clients at a tax firm should be aware of. All that will get pumped out for you, and then just schedule it inside of Google Business Profile. So then now you don't have to worry about your content. It's all set and it's gonna go out automatically for you over the next handful of months or over the next handful of weeks. So just kind of bulk bulking all that into one batch. So hopefully that was helpful for everyone. Um, I do want to now give you a seven-day action plan to dominate your local market. So if you want to go ahead and scan that QR code, it'll give you essentially everything we just spoke about in a very actionable, digestible manner. But day one, you're gonna create and claim your Google business profile. Super easy. Day two, you're just gonna set up your Google business profile correctly: the name, address, phone number, start uploading some pictures, make sure all that stuff there is relevant. Day three, you're gonna get your uh three to five Google reviews from happy clients. I would love, I love people to take action really quick. Hopefully, some of you already sent out an email request. Hopefully, you have some new reviews by the time you get back into the office on Monday. If you do, please let me know. I love to celebrate these wins. But third day, you're gonna get three to five Google reviews from happy clients. Day four, you're gonna audit and fix listings. So your name, address, phone number, make sure it's consistent across all of your platforms online. And then day five, we're gonna create local content with those articles. So jumping into Chat GPT, prompting it to be the expert in that space. You don't need to be the expert when it comes to writing SEO articles, but you can tell ChatGBT that they're the expert and they'll help write that for you. Day six, you're gonna set up your local service ads account, and then day seven, you're gonna hire that dedicated appointment setter and build your lead nurturing system. Any questions with all of that? No? Okay, let's keep rolling. So, I would love to show you what this could be worth for your firm and do a quick live demo. We've built out a calculator to show you exactly what this could look like. Do I have one volunteer from the audience who's happy to share some of the numbers within their firm?

SPEAKER_03:

I can share mine.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, perfect. I was kind of I was just about to kick you out of the crowd, anyways, Josh. So this is great.

SPEAKER_03:

That's alright.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, okay. So, um if you're not comfortable sharing exact numbers, just for the sake of the exercise, if you are awesome, this would be super valuable for you. I'm also gonna drop this in the chat so everyone can grab it if they want to use it on their own. Okay, I'll I'll make I'm gonna try to get this link to everyone. Okay, so Josh, um, where are you at right now on a monthly revenue basis with your firm?

SPEAKER_03:

So we have monthly recurring revenue would be fifteen grand. Overall, from a firm level, we average about fifty grand. We do a lot of tax prep and tax planning. But for monthly people who pay us monthly that I know is coming in is about 15 grand.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, cool. Let's let's just go with 15 grand for the sake of this exercise. Um, what would be a goal monthly recurring revenue you'd be looking to get to and in how many months? Uh 25 grand. Okay. How long do you would you be hoping to take to achieve that goal?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, um, I mean, obviously months would be great, but uh, you know, six? Six or even twelve, right? Six is fine.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, we'll do six. Um cool. Average client value who pays you guys on a month.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, it's probably a little under that. So let's maybe say eight hundred.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. Perfect. And roughly, do you have an idea of what your what your closing rate or looks like?

SPEAKER_03:

We're around 50%. Okay. You know, some of the referrals and stuff are much greater, some of the blank generic stuff are much higher.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah. Referrals, uh, I mean, those are the best, right? Because they're coming, they're ready to go. Someone else has already said this company's amazing. 50%, that's awesome. I would I would say it's a very conservative number when it comes to local service ads as well from leads from the internet. I you could probably even put this up to 60 or 70 just because of the level of intent, but just for for being super conservative and the point of this, let's say 50. So those are your numbers. We look at cost per lead at roughly 100. If you were working with another firm like us, we're roughly about 1600, 1700 a month. Um, there's there's different packages we have, but we'll just use this for the sake of this exercise. Generally, how long do your clients typically stay with you?

SPEAKER_03:

You know, new clients will occasionally show up and they'll leave the fastest. Like they mean the like like anything, like they want really fast results, or hey, I haven't used an account and never, so I have 4,000 questions, and we can't always I can't answer 4,000 questions always, you know what I mean, as fast as they'd like. So, but after a client's been with us for six months, we don't have anybody leave. We haven't had anybody leave yet. So I don't uh you know, I mean, that's that's kind of it. So I would say on average, the clients probably three years. Okay, maybe conservatively. You know, the some of the new clients will show up, maybe are expecting, you know, maybe expecting more than what they get. I mean, we're I think we're pretty um, I mean, I think we're pretty, you know, hey, we we we do what we say we're gonna do, we charge what we're gonna say we're gonna charge, we deliver what we're gonna deliver, but forever reason, some of those new clients, I think some of them are just maybe millennials or not used to paying an accountant or professional. And so forever reason, some of those new clients don't stay as long as I'd like. Um, but if people stay past that six-month mark, they usually stay for a long time.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, perfect. Yeah, there's a lot of education that goes into that as well at times, right? People are they don't look at accounting like the true investment that it is within the business, so that that does come on the firm owners. We need to educate them that this is an investment, right?

SPEAKER_03:

Well, and I mean I have someone leave, I saved them$30,000 with a couple tax planning ideas, and they left to go with someone in the networking group. Yeah, like, oh well, I can't do any better, I can't do any better than that.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, okay, cool. So these numbers look relatively accurate then. So from here, just to give you an idea, if you're looking to add an extra 10 grand of recurring revenue, if we're basing this off of the$800 ticket per month, 50% close rate,$100 cost per lead. If you're working with a firm or not, we can come back and manipulate these numbers, uh, change them around, and everyone can use this calculator that I've shared in the chat to use them yourself. You're only looking at bringing an extra sixteen hundred bucks of new recurring revenue on a monthly basis. So you're really you only need six leads a month in order to make that happen. So, all in all, monthly ad spend, you're looking at about 600 bucks a month. Total investment,$2,200. Monthly ROI is a little bit low on the front end, but you can see over time, six months,$13,000 invested,$120K of new revenue, bottom line, just need six new leads a month that you're closing at that existing rate to add that extra that conservative 10k of new MRR. So I encourage everyone to use this calculator, play around with the numbers. If we say jumped up here, and we said this even jumped to say 60%, how much this changes. Now we're looking at 13k investment. Um, we only need five leads a month, right? In order to hit that mark. So I just just to give an idea of how much do I need to be investing to achieve the goals I've set out. Josh, you mentioned kind of right sizing expectations with your own clients who come in. Same idea here. We've just had a lot of people come in in the past and they're like, hey, I want to make a million dollars and I got 500 bucks to spend. That's amazing. It's great to have dreams. So this is just to help right size all those expectations.

SPEAKER_03:

So I would ask, you know, so I've tried a couple different things. How long do you give different marketing or different agencies an opportunity before you're like, hey, you know, I'm not quite seeing the return that I'm like, I I you know, I always either set up and there's learning and there's some of that stuff, but at some point you're like, the results are the results, right? Like, yeah, I you gotta see results, or I don't want to continue to pay.

SPEAKER_02:

I would say, I mean, with local service ads, we've had clients get tremendous results within 30 days. Um, ultimately, it does come down to their ability to sell. And and we can certainly loop back to some more questions after. I'm gonna hang around here for a little bit. But generally, depending on what the strategy is, if it's paid ads, 90 days is definitely enough time to know at least, are we on the right path, or is this just kind of a sinkhole for money? If you're doing SEO, six to nine months kind of minimum to start to see some real traction taking place. But paid ads, you'll know, you'll know pretty quick is this working or not. And training the algorithm, all this is true, and I know a lot of people hate to hear that, but it is a real thing. It's just like going to the gym and hiring a personal trainer, it's amazing. But if you hire a personal trainer and don't go to the gym, you can't get mad at them in a month when you don't have the six pack. It just you need to put in the time, you need to put in the reps. So appreciate you playing playing along and sharing your numbers there, Josh. Is this was this helpful for you?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, no, I absolutely okay. So, what since since we're talking about me, what one question I always have is so like the Facebook ads affect the the Google, and you know what I mean? Like they affect all the SEO, everything you do affects something, right? And no one knows the SEO magic algorithm, right? So what I struggle with is if hey, you're we're trying to do something direct, right? Direct towards business owners, but we get so many calls from today. Someone's just called, hey, how do I enter my 1095A in my tax turn I'm doing on triple tags? Well, we're not gonna tell you, right? We're not gonna do stuff for free and take liability for no compensation. So we try to do stuff more targeted, but we still get all those individual tax questions that we just can't take on, you know. I mean, because they're lower margin and just don't don't we're not able to use their expertise. So I always am like, well, hey, it's it's unfair to say what's working and what's not if we're targeting and we're not getting those targeting results. And I kind of feel like the same thing with local service ads. You click tax, well, is it business tax, individual tax? Are you gonna get everybody's tax questions? Yeah, you know, how do you gonna have your your your where you focus? Yeah, say these are what we want.

SPEAKER_02:

Great question. So, in in the articles itself, what you're producing in your Google Business Profile articles and putting those on your blog, focus on business taxes. Over time, you will it will wean out other people at the end of the day. It is all search based, so you can't 100% filter that out. But having someone who can answer the phone and is trained to know to ask the right questions hey, is this for personal or business? Uh, it's personal. Oh, no problem. Well, we're actually not taking on any personal inquiries right now, and then so you just politely end the call. But if they're so there's a couple different safety nets you can put in place, sure.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, so what we've done too is because we're getting so many random calls and stuff, we make a client application form. Yep. So we just say, hey, you know, based on based on where our firm is, we just want to make sure based on our capacity of our firm, we just want to make sure we're good fit together. Can we email you uh a client application to make sure that your needs match up with our offering? Yeah, but I don't know if I want to pay a hundred dollars to send a bunch of those per, right? Those are just organic calls.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Again, with with any paid marketing, you you're going to get you're gonna pay for some leads that don't end up working out. You can't close 100% of them, but you're getting people with super high intent at the very top who are clicking on that to phone in, and it is based off what you're looking for. If you don't want any of those personal tax coming in, I would just suggest not turning on tax prep to begin with. If someone's calling in, they're looking for accounting, because it's a relatively vague setup on the categories, it's just a matter of having that person who's answering the phone being trained to ask the right questions, and then on the back end have a different form where you're asking everything that they're looking for. And then ultimately when you meet with them, you can start uncovering, oh, they might actually be a good fit for tax planning, or oh, they need this done and this, they just didn't know it. So there are there are some ways to protect yourself so you're not burning your money. Makes sense. Cool. Um, all right. So everyone, I appreciate you hanging around for so long here. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of CFO Chronicles, the secrets behind success. I hope you found value in today's conversation. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. If you enjoyed today's discussion, please rate and review the show. It helps others discover the insights we share here. Second, if you're ready to take your business to the next level and attract the high-end clients you deserve, head over to accountingleadsnow.com or click the link in the show notes to book your strategy call. It's time to position yourself as the advisor your clients need. And don't forget, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to stay up to date on what's happening in the world of accounting and financial growth. We've got exciting topics coming up, so stay tuned for the next episode of CFO Chronicles. Until then, keep pushing forward. Your growth is just one strategic move away.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for listening to CFO Chronicles, the secrets behind success. We hope today's episode provided valuable strategies to help you attract more high-paying clients. Be sure to subscribe, follow, and share with fellow professionals, connect with us on LinkedIn, and leave a review or comment to join the conversation. Your feedback helps us bring you the best insights in finance and marketing.