Accountants and bookkeepers
A client is not a sale, it is a subscription that runs for seven years. Very little accountancy marketing is priced as though that were true.
You are an accountancy or bookkeeping practice. Clients pay monthly or annually, they stay a long time when they are well matched, and January decides a large part of your year.
Enquiries arrive, some become clients, and you have never worked out what you can afford to pay for one because nobody has calculated what one is actually worth.
What we keep finding
Four things that hold practices back.
Lifetime value is never calculated
Practices know their monthly fee and not their average client tenure, so they cannot say what a client is worth. Without that number, every conversation about marketing budget is a conversation about how nervous everybody feels.
All clients are treated as equally desirable
A sole trader on a £30 monthly fee and a limited company on £400 take similar amounts of marketing effort and are worth wildly different amounts. Advertising that does not distinguish them buys whichever is cheaper.
The January rush is the whole marketing plan
Demand spikes around deadlines and practices respond by advertising into the spike, when the competition is highest and the clients are most rushed. The clients acquired calmly in July stay longer.
Churn is not measured, so growth looks better than it is
A practice adding 40 clients and losing 35 is not growing, it is running to stand still. Without a churn number the acquisition figure is meaningless and the marketing gets praised for it anyway.
The arithmetic
Why the value number changes everything.
These are illustrative rather than from a client, and they are the sum that most practices have never done. A modest monthly fee, an ordinary tenure, and a budget decision that looks completely different once they are multiplied.
- average monthly fee
£180
average monthly fee
illustrative
- average tenure
5.2 yrs
average tenure
illustrative
- what one client is worth
£11,232
what one client is worth
the sum
The practice already holds every number needed to run this properly. It is almost always in the billing system and almost never in the marketing conversation.
What we measure here
The numbers a practice actually runs on.
- Enquiry, meeting held, client onboarded, as separate events
- Recurring fee value attached to each new client, not a flat conversion
- Client tenure and churn measured, then used to set what acquisition may cost
- Client type segmented, so the practice can advertise for the ones it wants more of
- Seasonal plan that deliberately spends outside the deadline crush
- Referral and introducer channels measured as channels, because they usually are the best ones
- Onboarding time measured, since a slow start is the most common reason a good client leaves early
Questions people ask
The questions we hear most.
We do not really want more clients, we want better ones.
Then this is exactly the right work and the advertising is a smaller part of it than you would think. Knowing which client profile stays longest and pays best, and pointing everything at that profile, is most of the job. It sometimes means turning enquiries away, and we will say so.
Can you pull the numbers out of Xero or our practice software?
Usually, at an aggregate level, which is all that is needed. Fee values and tenure by client, with no client names or financial detail leaving your control. We would rather have a rough number from a summary than a perfect one from an integration project.
Is there anything in the AI side for us?
Yes, and it is often more valuable than the advertising. Onboarding, chasing clients for records and answering routine questions can all be automated with a person checking the output. That is real capacity, and capacity is what limits most practices rather than demand.
Most of our growth is word of mouth.
Then the first job is making that measurable, and the second is making it deliberate. Practices in this position are usually one small process away from doubling the referral rate, and it costs nothing in media.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
We showed Google which callers actually booked a ride, and it went and found more of them.
A different sector, included for one reason: it is the clearest thing we own that shows what happens when the advertising is finally told what a customer is worth.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click in their market
$2.10
average cost per click in their market
Where to start
The two services we usually begin with.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Find out which of your adverts bring paying customers.
Tell us about the business and the report you have stopped believing. Within a working day we will tell you what it is really saying and what it would take to fix.