Holding Better Meetings

Learning how to hold better meetings is particularly powerful for firms who want to:

Better engage and support their existing clients
Improve client retention
Onboard new clients in a structured way that encourages a high-value relationship
Better promote all of their services
Develop meeting rhythms that maximise monthly recurring revenue

We’ve all been there. You have a client meeting to review the Annual Accounts coming up. You get swept up in the day and don’t spend time planning the meeting. That’s doing an injustice to your client as well as to your firm.

But before we even get into how to conduct better client meetings, here’s an important question for you.

How often do you meet with clients (whether that’s online or face to face)?

Put simply, more meetings equals more opportunities to help clients, and that means increased revenue for your firm.

MORE MEETINGS EQUALS MORE SALES

With that thought in mind, now is a good time to review both the frequency and the effectiveness of your existing meeting rhythms.

Every meeting should have a purpose

Every single time you meet with a client, the objectives of that meeting should be clear to both of you. This requires a clear meeting structure:

Client pre-work
Agenda
A delivery process for the meeting itself
Meeting minutes with actionable outcomes

The Five Essential Client Meetings

We believe there are five essential meetings you should deliver to better support your clients, while at the same time positioning and selling your Business Advisory services. These five meetings are:

1. The Proactive Accounting Meeting (PAM)

The PAM is your first meeting with a prospective client. Ideally, this should be a complimentary meeting that is jam packed with value. Objectives include:

To establish their business and personal goals
To discuss their problems and challenges
To establish how you can work with them to overcome those challenges
To position your services, both compliance and Business Advisory
To figure out if you’re the right fit for each other
To gather the information you’ll need before you formally engage your client

It’s important that you position the value of the Proactive Accounting Meeting well. Add this to your website and position the value of this meeting in your email and other communications.

2. The Complimentary Client Review (CCR)

The CCR is the most successful way for accounting firms to sell Business Advisory services to existing clients.

The CCR is an annual complimentary 60-minute meeting. This meeting is for existing clients rather than future clients. The objectives are similar to that of the PAM, in that you want to establish:

Their business goals and how they plan to achieve them
How their business goals tie in with their personal and lifestyle goals
Issues and challenges they're facing in the business, e.g., growth, profitability, cashflow, succession, etc.
How you can work with them to address these issues and challenges

As this meeting is designed for existing clients, the meeting process will encourage questions that go a little deeper to get to the heart of the issues. After all, you already have a trusted relationship and you’ve worked with them before.

The CCR is a very subtle sales process in which you ask questions within different categories, such as:

Service feedback
Tax obligations
Business and lifestyle goals
Long term goals
Organisation structure
Financial awareness
Cashflow management
Key drivers in the business
Core values and culture
Business systems
Succession planning
Asset protection

To take a peek at just one of our categories of CCR questions in our Delivery Notes, ‘Long Term Goals’, click here. To view our entire CCR delivery process, book a demo here, or take a trial of The Gap.

3. The Annual Accounts Review Meeting (AAR)

We don’t need to labour the point here. Most firms run this meeting every year for most clients. If you don’t, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to help clients, and arguably, your clients aren’t getting the support they deserve.

Yes, the key purpose of this meeting is to review the draft Annual Accounts and make sure clients understand their tax position. This meeting should also be structured to improve clients’ understanding of their reports, enable you to demonstrate the value you’ve provided to them in the past year, and identify opportunities to work together so that they achieve their business and personal goals.

If you don’t run an Annual Accounts Review meeting with, at the very least, your ‘A’ clients, it’s never too late to position the value in your online and in-person communications. Be bold! Guarantee the value from that meeting at the outset. If you don’t add the value – no fee!

4. The Monthly Momentum Call

This is a 15-minute meeting to ensure the client has read and understood their monthly Management Reports. Keeping this meeting phone or online based ensures the meeting time doesn’t stretch to an hour. The objectives are simple:

To ensure your client understands their Management Reports
To identify opportunities to improve results
To establish any actions the client should take in the next month, demonstrating the value of planning and accountability

It’s useful to have a process for how you’ll run the call. In the portal, we provide a Momentum Call Script you can use as a guideline.

5. The Accountability Coaching Meeting

The accountability or coaching meeting may be quarterly, monthly, or even weekly, depending on your clients’ situation and needs. For example, a mature business may be best suited to a quarterly meeting, whereas a start-up business may need a more frequent meeting rhythm.

You'll provide a sounding board to discuss ideas prior to implementation and identify and help solve the client’s burning issues. You'll also help your client keep their Business Plan alive by resetting their quarterly goals and actions.

Why Pre-Work is Essential

Pre-work should be completed by everyone attending any one of the above meetings. This ensures attendees are engaged in the process and have some understanding of what they want to achieve from the meeting.

Pre-work also allows you, as facilitator, to prepare for the session, identify any misalignment between business owners, and prevents the session from becoming a ‘meeting of discovery’. Pre-work adds depth and clarity to any meeting, as everyone knows the purpose of the meeting, the issues that need to be addressed, and therefore the desired outcomes.

If pre-work has not been submitted at least 48 hours before the session, contact your client and reschedule the meeting. That’s an effective lesson in accountability!

Your Agenda

All meetings need a clear agenda to refer to at the beginning, during, and after the meeting to ensure objectives are met. If the client starts to go off track, seeking specific advice, use the agenda to bring them back to the purpose of the meeting and gain conceptual agreement to schedule an additional meeting to discuss and address the issue. In Gap content, agendas are clearly defined within a service's Delivery Notes.

Your Delivery Process

Use Delivery Notes* to guide the conversation. They provide estimated timings for meeting segments, questions you’ll likely ask, and reports and information you’ll need to bring to the meeting to ensure the outcomes are achieved.

Delivery notes will help you:

Ask questions to engage attendees in the process.
Identify what your client is looking to achieve and why.
Clarify the actions needed to be taken, by whom, and by when.
Reinforce their objectives, outcomes, and the value gained from the meeting.
BAMFAM - Book A Meeting From A Meeting - to keep them accountable for the actions they say they’ll take (and to add to your recurring revenues streams).

Meeting Minutes

Meeting Minutes should be completed during each meeting and should be visible to attendees throughout the session so they can contribute to actions and completion dates. Check in frequently to ensure they’re an accurate reflection of what has been discussed and agreed to ‘in session’. Record any additional services required with a due date and the fee quoted. Meeting Minutes should be emailed to the client immediately following the meeting. You’re their accountability framework.

Getting Sales Outcomes From Your Client Meetings

You don’t want to come across as a product pusher. You want to come across as someone who cares and genuinely wants to help their clients succeed. When you’re positioning Business Advisory services, it doesn’t work to tell them what to do. They may have tried some of these things before and failed. To sell Business Advisory services, ironically you need to take off your ‘Advisor’ hat and put on your ‘Coach’ hat. You need to ask and not tell.

For example, the Complimentary Client Review is a subtle sales process that unlocks business potential. You’re simply helping your clients get the three freedoms – Time, Mind and Financial Freedom.

Start by asking simple questions about how successful the business has been at delivering to the owners what they want (more time away, less worry and stress, or more profit or cash). Keep asking thoughtful questions about how the current position could be improved. You’ll recognise the point of client engagement. That’s when you stop asking and start answering, because now, it’s your client who is asking the questions.

This is a very powerful mindset for accountants to grasp. As advisors, we’re used to telling, NOT asking! Check out our ‘Ask don’t tell Video’ here for a great example of how to pursue a line of questioning to get the outcome you need. The key is to Stop listening to reply – listen to understand.

If you’re fascinated with the word ‘sales’ (or if you’re afraid it) have a read of our detailed ‘Selling for Accountants’ resource.

Gaining Conceptual Agreement

If the outcome of a meeting is a proposal for services, you must gain conceptual agreement before sending a proposal. This ensures your client or prospect understands:

The objectives of the work you’re doing to do (the problems the service will solve).
How you’ll measure the success of the work (the noticeable changes to their business).
The value the service will deliver, e.g. a $10,000 cashflow improvement (financial freedom), ability to reduce hours from 60 to 40 per week (time freedom), or peace of mind that the tax position will withstand scrutiny (mind freedom).
The options for how you can deliver this value, e.g., Business Plan only or Business Plan with coaching.
When and how you’ll deliver the service.
How much it will cost.

Sending a proposal without first gaining conceptual agreement will likely result in a lower acceptance rate.

And finally, a word on scope stretch. More client meetings is the goal - more scope stretch isn’t! Don’t give away your value at meetings. Stop, pause, and price that extra job. Read our Guide to Minimising Scope Stretch.