Marketing Your CAS Practice | 5 Simple, Frequently Overlooked Principles

Is your client advisory services (CAS) practice your firm’s best-kept secret? It shouldn’t be. CAS, also known as outsourced accounting or advisory in firms, is one of the most powerful tools your clients can activate – and a real engine for firm growth.

So why don’t more clients and firm professionals embrace CAS? Usually, the answer is simple: they don’t understand it – how it works, what it delivers, or how it fits alongside other firm services. Until that changes, they won’t seek it out.

Here are five marketing principles to follow to scale your firm’s CAS practice.

1. Develop your bench of internal influencers

One of the most effective marketing channels is the one most firms overlook: conversations between clients and firm professionals. One good CAS conversation can be worth hundreds of digital ad impressions. But they don’t happen if non-CAS partners don’t know what to say. “If you can get a handful of partners to understand CAS and buy in, the message starts spreading,” says Terri Mayfield, Director at Forvis Mazars LLP in Springfield, MO. “From there, you get a few quick wins, people start talking about it more, and their eyes are opened.”

At Forvis Mazars, the firm hosts a regular call open to everyone, with breakout sessions on what CAS does and how it connects to other service lines. “At minimum, our professionals learn what to listen for in client conversations,” says Mayfield. “Even if they’re not ready to lead the conversation themselves, they know who to bring in.”

Give them tools to turn that listening into action: a one-page playbook with an elevator pitch, common pain points, FAQs, and a clear handoff to the CAS team. Your clients don’t care what you do – they care about what you can do for them. Internal teams are your CAS marketing MVPs; cross-sell from other service lines is the single easiest way to grow the practice.

2. Focus on a niche

“In the early days of our CAS practice, we spread ourselves too thin,” says Eleanor Litwack, Partner, Outsourced Accounting & Advisory Services at Washington, DC-based GRF, “too many industries requiring too many different software solutions.” Effective CAS practices run on a handful of technologies that scale across clients – hard to pull off when every engagement starts with a new system and a new industry. “We decided to rein it in,” says Litwack, “focus on the verticals where we have real strength, and achieve scale that way.”

Identify the verticals where you have a real competitive edge and can be the go-to firm. Specialization makes every downstream call easier – website copy, SEO, conferences, sales messaging.

3. Incentivize referral behavior

Want firm professionals actively starting CAS conversations? Incentivize the behavior. “People like bonuses,” says Litwack. “At GRF, non-partners get an established percentage for bringing in a new client or selling additional services to an existing client. Partner comp works differently – it rolls up into their overall BD goals.” Depending on your plan, this may mean adjusting how partners and non-partners are paid.

Then amplify with low-cost extras: tag referral sources in your CRM, thank advocates with a gifting platform like Caroo.com, offer CPE credit for internal CAS sessions, and celebrate referrals publicly. Recognition often outpulls cash.

4. Identify client pain points as the opportunity to intro CAS services 

In a client meeting, a partner hears that the client has lost a key member of the accounting team.

During tax season, a client delivers a particularly messy, complicated stack of reporting documents that will require significant rework by the firm.

These are the minor, routine moments that should trigger CAS conversations. Your CAS team spots them instantly; other partners – who hear them more  – often don’t. A simple list of “classic” CAS triggers, shared and discussed firmwide, fixes that.

Other triggers worth listing: capacity-busting growth, a controller leaving, new funding or M&A, recurring cash-flow stress, regulatory change, slipping close cycles. Pair the list with persona-based outreach so the right message lands at the right moment.

5. Illustrate the CAS impact

CAS runs on sophisticated technology that is also highly visual. When clients see the tools in action, the tools make the case themselves. For example, GRF leaders like to show the Sage Intacct dashboard. “You can see scorecards, current headcount, fundraising totals – and then you can dig deeper into the underlying data in the dashboard,” says Litwack. “I can’t tell you how many people sign on after seeing that. It’s not about our firm or our tools – it’s about them.”

That’s outcome-based marketing. Don’t say “we manage cash flow”; say “you’ll have the funds to operate, invest, and grow.” As Rehmann CMO Holly Shier puts it, a strong value proposition is the foundation for everything else.

Additional CAS resources for marketing – and much more

Ready to put these ideas to work?

• Download CPA.com and the Association for Accounting Marketing’s (AAM) free toolkit.  Inside, you’ll find guides on defining your CAS practice, building a value proposition, creating buyer personas, sizing up competitors, and turning performance metrics into a sales strategy.
• Find out how your firms stack up against respondents to the CPA.com and AICPA PCPS CAS Benchmark Survey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Kim leads CPA.com’s CAS professional services and practice development programs, helping firms build and grow optimized CAS practices through consulting, development, and training. She brings more than 30 years of public accounting experience, including 13 years at Wipfli, LLP, where she led their CAS practice and most recently headed the Broker Dealer & Advisor Network segment within Wealth & Asset Management.