How We Identify, Attract, and Win Our Best Clients | AAM High Webinar Recap

If you have ever felt like your marketing and business development teams are operating from completely different playbooks, this AAM Virtual Education session offered a practical look at how to bring them into closer alignment.

The AAM High Webinar, How We Identify, Attract, and Win Our Best Clients, featured Josh Woods, Director of Practice Growth, and Alex Salvo, Director of Business Development, of Lane Gorman Trubitt (LGT). They shared how their firm has worked over the past 16 months to improve collaboration between marketing and business development (BD) through cleaner data, stronger targeting, better reporting, and a more intentional approach to growth.

Here are my key takeaways from the session:

Start with Better Data, Not More Data

Before LGT could attract better clients, they had to confront a hard truth: their CRM had become a dumping ground for unvetted data. Years of conference badge scans, partner contacts, and unqualified leads had quietly eroded the quality of everything that followed, from email deliverability to list segmentation and targeting accuracy.

Josh described the cleanup process as tedious but non-negotiable. They set aggressive parameters, so if a contact had not been engaged in more than three years, they were removed. Partners were brought into the process, required fields were added, and a new standard was put in place: before anything goes into the CRM, they need to know why it is there and who that person is.

The handout shared during the session reinforces this approach. It recommends starting with a clean “last 12 months” dataset that includes client details, engagement information, lead sources, and outcomes. From there, each won client is scored on a 1–5 scale across factors such as profitability, growth potential, strategic fit, and relationship quality. The handout makes the principle clear: if it cannot be measured, it should not be part of the definition.

That foundational data work is what made everything else possible.

Personalize With a Purpose — Not Just With a Name

One of the more memorable moments of the session was when Alex described her first weeks at LGT, going out and asking business owners how they interacted with their CPA firms. The feedback was consistent: communication often was not relevant enough, was missing altogether, or felt like generic “happy holiday” notifications, rather than something more meaningful.

That insight changed LGT’s approach to outreach entirely. Instead of building campaigns around clicks and impressions, they began building them around conversations. The call to action shifted from driving traffic to the website to creating opportunities to connect.

They also shared that they stopped including Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL addresses in certain marketing sends as part of their effort to improve data quality and target the right audience more intentionally.

Another shift that stood out was how LGT now handles follow-up after CPE sessions, conferences, and association events. When partners attend those programs, the firm has a process for turning attendee lists into warmer, more personalized outreach. Instead of feeling like a cold introduction, the outreach is grounded in shared context, which makes it more relevant and more natural.

Collaboration Between Marketing and BD Isn’t a Nice-to-Have

Josh was clear about a cultural shift he had to drive at the firm: moving from a marketing-first, brand-awareness-heavy approach to a sales-first mindset where marketing functions as a strategic resource. That’s a harder internal sell than it sounds.

One thing that seemed especially helpful was when Alex started attending their weekly strategic marketing meetings. Once BD insights were brought into weekly marketing conversations, they were able to adjust messaging and campaigns based on what prospects and referral sources were actually saying in the market.

Alex put it well: “Your wins are my wins.” When marketing supports an event and BD can follow up in a targeted way afterwards, it creates a much stronger connection between activity and actual opportunity. The firm even created a pre-proposal brief process so that proposals could be personalized around what a prospect cares about, rather than leading with a generic service overview and hoping they don’t skip straight to the pricing page.

If you are a one-person marketing shop without a dedicated BD counterpart, Josh’s advice was to treat your partner group as your BD team. Their insights from client conversations are your market intelligence. Bring them in early and often.

Turning Insights Into Action (and Revenue)

The final part of the session focused on the area Josh said excited him most, and that enthusiasm came through clearly.

LGT made a meaningful shift from measuring vanity metrics such as impressions, clicks, and open rates to measuring what actually matters: opportunities created, pipeline generated, and cost per qualified opportunity. Josh explained that they built a lead scoring system so that when prospects engage with content by clicking an email, filling out a form, or responding to an ad, their score increases until they move from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified. At that point, they are handed off to BD for a real conversation.

One example they shared involved the “big beautiful bill” tax legislation. Instead of focusing on how many people clicked their educational email, they measured how many conversations it generated, and two of those conversations turned into new business opportunities. That kind of reporting creates a much clearer connection between marketing activity and business opportunity, which was one of the biggest themes of the session.

Their simple mantra for tracking it all was this: campaigns to conversations to conversions.

Moving Forward

What Josh and Alex demonstrated is that attracting better clients is not about doing more marketing. It is about doing more intentional marketing that is grounded in clean data, strong collaboration, and a clear definition of what success looks like.

As Josh said, “Revenue is what keeps the lights on. If done correctly, we are not overhead. Practice growth is the revenue engine.”

Overall, the session made the case that growth does not come from more activity alone. It comes from being more thoughtful about data, collaboration, targeting, and follow-up. Even for smaller firms or lean teams, the framework they shared felt practical and realistic.

The full session recording is available for AAM Members here. For additional webinar recordings, visit the AAM Member Portal.