Educating Clients on Tax Planning

This involves educating taxpayers on the opportunities they have available to personally save tax. This step involves no selling at all, and is strictly focused on client education.

The benefits of educating your clients include:

• Extra fees/revenue – if we can clearly show them the tax savings that apply to them, or possibly apply, then a percentage will simply demand that we implement the tax strategies for them.
• Demonstrates that you are knowledgeable and up to date with industry changes, benefits, and tax saving options. It will provide concrete evidence that you are an ‘expert’ and therefore the ‘choice’ service provider in the industry. This will build your client retention and referrals to help grow your business.
• Show that you take the extra step to keep clients informed of benefits.

To educate clients your need to do two things:

1. Show them the benefits
   In one form or another, almost all of our actions as individuals are driven by what’s in it for us. Taxpayers are no different, and all they care about is what’s in it for them – what benefit, advantage, gain or money they will receive. Consequently, the focus when educating taxpayers has to be the benefits (tax savings for them), not the process. We get solar panels on our roof to save money on electricity (the benefit), and have minimal interest in the process (how they convert sunlight into electricity).
2. Apply repetition
   As consumers, advertising or marketing clutter is all around us, and we are exposed to large volumes of advertising messages on a daily basis. We have gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 a day today. This phenomenon results from a marketplace that is overcrowded with products leading to huge competition for customers. This is evident in the accounting industry, which has over 650 different products/services being marketed/sold to accounting practices to help them generate revenue, cut costs, improve productivity, market themselves, etc