You’ll rarely find a CPA who absolutely loves the act of selling their services. Few of us got into accounting because we like sales. If that was what we were all about, we’d have taken that route in our undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Instead, we’re people who love and are far more comfortable with digging through financial data to help companies make the right decisions. The process of trying to persuade someone to patronize our services can come with a big “ick” factor.

Of course, we’re not the only ones who feel that way about selling. Anyone who’s spent enough time in a decision-making role at a company knows exactly how gross selling can be. Your LinkedIn messages are probably a graveyard piled high with “connect + pitch” attempts salespeople have given you over the years.

The problem is not with sales, though. It’s with how people do it. As a CPA, you need to sell your services. There’s no getting around that. While perfecting your inbound marketing process will typically make these conversations a lot easier to have, outbound sales are still going to be part of the game, especially if your firm is getting off the ground.

To make sales conversations more effective and comfortable for everyone involved, you should switch your paradigm away from sales as a transaction to sales as a collaboration and building relationships.

First, remove the aggression around sales by seeing it as a relationship-building collaboration.

Sales has a bit of a reputation for being aggressive. Nikki Rausch, author of “The Selling Staircase: Mastering the Art of Relationship Selling,” explained this in one of the best ways we’ve ever heard:

“You've been on the receiving end of sales being done to you in a really horrible, aggressive, pushy way.”

And there it is. The reason why you have a negative association with selling your own services as a CPA is because of how you’ve been treated by salespeople in the past. And that’s understandable. It’s like your passion for sales has died a death of a thousand cuts. Over time, your perspective on what selling is or what it could be has been reduced by the worst possible strategies that sellers often default to, particularly with outbound sales.

However, selling, when done right, should be more of a collaboration where you are building a relationship and a solution together with a client. For example, the same thing you’re ultimately going to do with your clients after the sale is exactly what you should be doing with them before the sale.

Next, change how you approach selling conversations.

With the understanding that selling isn’t about doing something to someone but collaborating with someone and building something together, your entire conversational paradigm should shift. This will also change:

• Which leads you choose to engage with the sales process
• The type of conversations you have with them

Let’s look at how relationship selling changes each of these.

With relationship selling, you only communicate with leads who’ve clearly expressed a need.

One of the most common mistakes businesses make in outbound sales is trying to talk to the wrong people and casting too wide of a net. You could call this the shotgun approach. Not only is it wasteful of your time, but it wastes almost everyone’s time.

Refer back to the graveyard of sales pitches in your LinkedIn DMs. The vast majority of those are probably shotgun sales pitches. Your email inbox is probably full of these, too. As I said in a recent episode of the Modern CPA Success Show featuring Nikki Rausch, I get messages from people I've never heard of and they'll ask, “Do you want to sell the firm?” Clearly they know nothing about me because I don't own the firm, so I can't sell the firm.

Talk about an embarrassing misfire for the seller and a frustrating waste of time for the individual targeted! But this is why relationship selling changes who you target.

Instead of shooting blind, relationship selling means you’re primarily focusing either on warm leads or leads who are clearly showing interest or a need for the type of services you provide. Doing so results in you communicating with an audience that’s far more likely to be receptive to the engagement.

And again, this is assuming your outreach to them is collaborative and not transactional. Even warm leads or leads who are showing a clear interest or need to be approached the right way.

Relationship selling impacts how you communicate during outreach and sales calls.

Because relationship selling is about building something together, it changes the way you communicate with potential clients.

That communication can be framed within these three questions:

• Does the person I'm in conversation with have a need or a want?
• Do I have a solution that would meet that need or want?
• Do I have their permission to offer that solution to them so they can decide yes or no about working together?

Do you see how that’s different from the shotgun, transactional approach to selling? The transactional approach is both invasive and presumptuous. It assumes the person wants what you have without ever asking. It assumes your solution is the best fit for what they need without having that conversation first. And it assumes they want you to pitch your services, regardless of what they might think.

That approach is why people on the receiving end often feel aggressively off-put by sales.

Relationship selling takes the exact opposite approach, and that even starts with the initial outreach email. Instead of telling people why they need your services (often without verifying that they do), relationship selling is structured around creating curiosity through conversation.

Nikki Rausch explains that process this way:

“One of the things that people often don't even think to do in an email is ask a question. People treat email like, ‘It's just my job to word vomit on you, so I'm just going talk at you in email.’ But that's not interesting to a reader, especially a reader who doesn't have any knowledge of you. You need to ask questions that allow for their brain to want to answer.”

It may sound simple, but it’s incredibly counter-cultural, at least as far as sales culture goes. The same principle that applies to building relationships in life applies to building relationships within sales.

Author and executive coach Robbie Abed underscores this in a 2023 blog post on building relationships:

“Want someone to talk? Be interested in them. And the best way to be interested in someone is to show that you're curious about them.”

That’s the most fundamental part of relationship selling. Ask questions to build curiosity and interest. Get the client to talk about what they need so you can find alignment and collaborate on a solution to their problem. Ideally, that solution is you. But if it’s not, you walk away from that conversation with a contact who better understands your product and may even refer someone else they know to you based on that positive interaction they had with you.

We’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg on this topic. I recommend checking out all of Episode 100 of our Modern CPA Success Show, where we talk with Nikki Rausch on the ever-important topic of Selling for Accountants.