Accounting Marketing and Business Development, the Case for Collaboration: Key Takeaways from AAM Summit 2021

When looking at the key factors of a high-growth accounting firm, marketing and business development play an integral part. At the 2021 AAM Summit Chris Perrino, Principal of Business Development at Barnes Dennig discussed the importance that accounting marketing and business development collaboration provide to accounting firm growth. He provides six ways to leverage the collaboration of marketing and business development teams for your accounting firm.

Accounting Marketing and Business Development Collaboration Equation: 1+1=3

Your accounting firm’s growth hinges on “marketing math.” When marketing and business development are working in concert, 1+1=3. Creating a mindset of “we’re all in this together” is key to having a successful union. If your firm does not have a defined business development team, your rainmaking partners are the team.

When working together, both teams offer each other complementary skills and perspectives. Collaborating creates the benefit of a third perspective for your firm to gain market intelligence and competitive intelligence. When your accounting firm wins, your marketing and business development teams are doing their jobs of working in unison. Having a shared vision and goal of advancing the firm will help in the success of the team’s collaborative efforts.

Target Markets and Lead Generation

Marketing and business development collaboration can help improve the targeting of your accounting firm’s ideal prospects. By working collaboratively, the ability to define and redefine your firm’s target markets becomes much easier. This will help produce and amplify lead generation opportunities for your firm.

Firm Events

There is a lot of value in marketing and business development collaborating on topics for seminars, webinars, and other events hosted by your accounting firm. By collaborating you will be able to attract more ideal prospects and A-level clients to attend your events. This union will ensure your firm has events that cover well-honed topics with excellent speakers that will position your firm as a credible thought leader.

Voice of the Prospect is Heard

The business development team usually has more contact with CFOs, CEOs, controllers, and more. Through these interactions, they are acting as a focus group on what your prospects are interested in and want to know more about. Business development’s collaboration with marketing will help inform the tone and content for your website copy, the subject matter of social media posts, and develop your content marketing topics.

Foot in the Door

One of the most difficult jobs that is becoming tougher is convincing prospects to meet. Collaboration between marketing and business development will help your accounting firm create more value for prospects by developing tools that can help them. Some tools that could be valuable to a prospect include proprietary research, webinar summaries, whitepapers, tax updates, and how accounting standards impact your prospect’s world.

Making Collaboration Happen

Collaboration between marketing and business development at your accounting firm is built on respect for each team and relationship development. Embrace the philosophy of working together as a team to grow the firm through similar goals. Be deliberate in connecting with each other. Consider setting up standing meetings for 15-30 minutes one to two times per week. Look for opportunities to connect daily to see what the other team thinks about various projects you are working on. Be sure to always advocate for each other. It is important to provide helpful and honest feedback, and approach each conversation with an open mind.

To learn more on marketing and sales integration you can access the full recording for this and other sessions from the 2021 AAM Summit through the AAM Store.