Business Development: CX Through a BD Lens

Authors: Gabe Tevrizian, CBM CPAs & Neil Barrow, RevOps Advisors

Customer experience (CX) is a critical factor in the success of accounting firms. A client-centric approach that prioritizes CX can enhance business development efforts, improve efficiency, boost win rates and foster long-term client relationships built on trust and clarity.

These experiences are delivered in stages: go-to-market, acquisition, onboarding, service and retention. These make up the lifecycle of client interactions and are important touch points for overall delivery of a great client experience.

Winning a client is just the beginning. To drive long-term success, the experience promised must be sustained through onboarding, service delivery and retention. A seamless, client-centered approach reassures prospects that their needs will be met well beyond the pitch, strengthening relationships and improving retention.

Go-to-Market (GTM)

GTM is your plan to sell your services to potential clients. Without getting bogged down on definitions or best practices for GTM, thinking through how your business development activities from your GTM can impact your client experience.

The key is to use your client data: who are our best clients? What industry are they in? Where did they come from? Why did they hire us? What problems are we solving for them?

Taking those past ideal client interactions and stories to craft better messaging to the market. This could mean at events, talking with prospective clients, conferences, social media, webinars – anywhere that you are engaging with the market.

This allows you to use these stories to create differentiation in the market, which will in turn, build a strong reputation as a firm that is easy to do business with.

Acquisition of Clients

Think of the acquisition of clients stage as your client journey – from lead or referral to engagement. During these conversations with potential clients, we need to use our stories from client experiences to ask better questions, instead of pitching our firm or services. An example of a client experience focused question:

‘Most of our clients choose us usually for three reasons: because they are unhappy with their current firm’s communication, they feel like they have either outgrown their firm or their firm has outgrown them, or they want an advisor to give them proactive advice. Are any of these on your radar?’

These questions allow us to know our ideal client’s pain and make proactive recommendations from the seat of: ‘we’ve seen this before and we get you’. If we can do those three things: ask better questions, already understand their pain and make specific recommendations – we can help them make a decision as to what solution, service or firm will be best for their business.

Onboarding of Clients

After we have used our client experience to generate new conversations with ideal clients that have led to them signing the engagement, now it’s time for onboarding. Balancing our internal processes with new client expectations comes down to clarity. How are we delivering the message of working with us?

Oftentimes, we work so hard and urgently to get new clients signed up, that we take a breather … .and that pause can create anxiety on the new client’s end. Our process for a smooth onboarding needs to consist of business development activities for the delivery team. Such as: delivering expectations and timelines, providing a ‘firm 101’ which helps with cross-selling, and clear, timely communication leads to clarity for the client.

When these are done well, they allow for a great client experience and enhanced business development outcomes.

Service of Clients

Now that clients are onboarding to the delivery teams, we can focus on account management. What this actually means is having clear communication and then to deliver on the expectations we have set. This is not just doing the work – this is being an actual advisor to the client.

What does this look like? Providing a business development focused client experience is proactively going to your best clients and trying to bring value to them outside of the work you are currently engaged to do.

A simple example that we could all benefit from would be picking up the phone (gasp!) and asking your client:

‘How’s 2025 going? Any big plans or projects that are coming up?’

Retention of Clients

Retaining clients is more than just checking in or delivering your services. It’s making sure that their expectations are met and your value is managed. To do this, we need to measure the success of the relationship. This could be the classic net promoter score questions: ‘how likely are you to refer us to someone you know?’

It’s most important that we continue the momentum with the client – the same urgency and excitement we showed during the GTM and acquisition stages, we need to show through our trusted advisor activities during onboarding, service, and retention.

We can utilize milestone meetings, meetings during key points in the service delivery to ask better business development questions. Some examples:

• ‘Are you going to be evaluating any of your vendors this year, like insurance, banking, or legal?
• ‘What did we not talk about today that we should have?’
• ‘How’s your accounting team performing…anything we should discuss there?’

This allows us to create new stories for our clients to then cycle back to the top of the process – GTM.

The Circular Nature of BD in CX

BD in CX is an ongoing process that encompasses all stages of the client journey. Each stage influences the next, creating a continuous loop that begins with go-to-market strategies and culminates in client retention. Every stage has BD activities you can do within them that will generate new and interesting conversations and value for your clients.

Conclusion

When BD and CX are fully aligned, the client journey feels intentional, responsive and value-driven. Firms that master this connection don’t just win more business—they build lasting partnerships that set them apart in a competitive market.