Accountants drag their feet when it comes to CRM

Rod Voyce ! How dare you suggest we accountants know nothing about CRM . I and several colleagues regularly advise clients who want to get into this , I certainly shall not be advising them to use Logical Office. As far as my own practice is concerned I choose not to use impersonal software, preferring instead to make telephone and face to face contact in addition to email. We have a choice, and most accountants prefer the polite and personal option.

CRM is there to manage the entire life cycle of each individual client form lead – prospect - client - advocate. This should be considered by each practice as to how they wish to interact/respond and inform clients. CRM is not something out of a box, the tools to achieve this should be flexible enough to cope with multiple scenarios that use defined business logic in order to assist in building, developing and supporting the client relationship, this should allow both parties to benefit.

Most Accountants don't have a clue about software applications full stop, never mind CRM.

Why should they? It's not their area of expertise.

Unfortunately, they are not aware of their ignorance when they give poor, ill-informed guidance to their clients which is far more harmful than junk-emails.

You can make brilliant use of a CRM system without even sending a single email. Use CRM to know your most profitable clients, discover the quickest conversions to find your lowest hanging fruit regarding new prospects, analyse your internal staff productivity, the list goes on. You use it to know your client base better, so that you can provide them with timely information as to when their next tax deadline is due, and other communication that is definitely beneficial rather than unwanted. Perhaps a client phones up to notify you of a change of address. With a good CRM in place, you know where to update the data, you know when they moved, why, and which of your staff took the message. We have moved 3 times over the last 2 years and without fail, all of the accountants we have dealt with have not been able to store our new address reliably. Disappointing.

It's interesting reading the professional feedback. Where Simon says: 'there has been a surge in demand for email marketing tools. "That's all they want, noting more sophisticated. They just want to cross-sell and communicate more easily and cheaply."

I have to smile. They are seeing things through their own eyes instead of that of the client. I was running email/snail mail newsletters 15 years ago...haven't we moved on?

The last comments: '"Accountants don't have a clue about CRM," he noted. "They have a core of regulatory work, so they are ring-fenced from the realities of recession that others face."; made me wince. Ring fenced? In what way? If your client is having a tough time then your fees will be impacted. Thinking otherwise is unrealistic.

I'd encourage accountants to rethink their entire strategy around CRM. After all, an email blast says nothing about 'managing a relationship' does it?

"And on the technical side, adding a secondary CRM application such as ACT!, Goldmine or Salesforce.com would introduce yet another database to be reconciled with all the other client information held by firms"

Nice to see that this is gradually becoming a thing of the past, but it's a slow process getting people on board! We've just had a very successful couple of weeks bringing more accounting practices aboard Pearl - one will retain IRIS for their internal management, but the other is bringing their internal client management into the Pearl Practice Manager console, as well as migrating their entire MYOB client base across to Pearl.

We've not really planned to hit the practice management market but it appears that what we're offering is a superb option for the smaller practice (less than 30 staff). SAAS practice management ready and rolling.