Referrals vs. AI: How Accounting Firms Win Clients in 2027

Welcome back to another episode of the Growth-Minded Accountant Podcast. My name is Lee Reams. I am the founder and CEO of CountingWorks. And today we're introducing something a little different.

We're calling it the Marketing Pulse. And The idea is pretty simple. There's an enormous amount happening right now in marketing, technology, AI, super intelligence, and more importantly, the way people choose tax and accounting firms. And frankly, there's a lot of noise out there.

If you're on social media, I mean, I don't even know how you decipher it anymore. There's so many talking heads, so many influencers telling you what to do. And the reality is, I think that there's so much noise that it makes it very difficult for tax and accounting firms to really understand what they should be doing, where the opportunities are and what they should be focusing on. So rather than bring in another presentation, just like with a topic that we're going to go through, we're going to talk about some of the latest research, some of the trends.

We're going to challenge a few long-held assumptions and talk about what actually matters if you're trying to grow your tax and accounting practice. Joining me is Rebekah Barton, our Chief Visibility Officer at AccountingWorks. Rebekah spends a lot of time, I know as soon as we're done here, she has a meeting with a client. She knows what's working.

She sees the clients that are doing very well. She sees the positioning statement, the branding that's working. She knows what's changing and she knows where tax and accounting firms are missing these opportunities. So I'm going to try to bring some research and a few opinions here.

But Rebekah, hopefully we agree on most things here. But at the end of the discussion, you'll walk away with a couple of things you can actually use in your practice. So let's get this started. And let's start with something that has been the foundation of tax and accounting firm growth forever, and that has been referrals.

So I think it's interesting to show how fast things are changing. I referenced and found some research that TaxDome did in twenty five it had found that fifty eight percent of business owners found their accounting firm through a referral right only seventeen percent cited online like google and another ten percent cited social media so that reinforces i think the old ways referrals drive growth right But I think there's something very interesting that has happened in the trends. And Rebekah, you obviously be able to speak to this, but things have changed dramatically. I mean, different data points from Bright Local, even ChatGPT itself, about fifty percent of consumers now are using AI tools to get recommendations for local businesses.

And you know why they're doing that? It's because ChatGPT knows everything about them and they actually trust that they're gonna get a better answer through these tools than they would doing all their research or perhaps even just from a normal referral. And even if they did get a referral, there's studies that show us a large percentage of clients will then do additional research on that business before they select them and that's the big change i think that's what a lot of accounting firms are missing so this isn't the death of referrals you know we're seeing a change in what happens after that referral so someone refers an accountant what does that prospect do next right they might google the firm they'll probably still read the reviews we found all our all our research and our performance of our clients those reviews are still king But then they might ask ChatGPT, is that accountant a good fit for me? So the question isn't whether referrals are still important.

Of course they are. The question is whether your digital presence reinforces that referral, makes them actually reach out to you, or causes you to lose that prospect before they even contacted you. So Rebekah, I'm going to start with you. Are we entering a world where a personal referral gets you considered?

but your online reputation, those things I was talking about, your website, your social, your AI visibility actually determines whether you actually win that accountant. We are very, very much. So yes, referrals still matter, right? It's still a good thing to have a lawyer refer your firm, to have an estate planner, even just someone within your niche talking to their colleagues, say, hey, you should contact this accounting firm.

That's a good thing. But what happens now is that people rarely take anyone at their word. They get on their AI, they get on Google, they use Gemini, they're using GPT, whatever it is to kind of reinforce that belief. So if your website doesn't match or your web presence, not just your website, your entire web footprint does not match the firm you're trying to build, you're unlikely to ultimately get that conversion.

So let's say, for example, that you have established a reputation online for providing low cost tax services. But maybe that's not actually what you want to do. Maybe your website says things like, you know, we offer reliable tax and accounting services in Chicago. Okay, great.

Doesn't really tell anyone anything. Maybe in reality, you want to build an advisory practice. If that's the case, everything about your web presence should be reinforcing that positioning. Your FAQ page should answer advisory related questions.

The copy on your homepage should be advisory for it. You should have service pages that specifically speak to advisory services. You should have blog posts that talk about advisory work, answer questions that people have about advisory. Your social posts should match all of that.

You can even break down the blog posts into social posts to have a really cohesive kind of positioning statement. So you want the referrals that you want to receive from both AI and human interaction to match what you're saying online. That is how, one, you're going to get the types of people that you actually want to work with. And two, people who are not the right fit are going to be able to self-select and say, hey, this firm isn't necessarily a good fit for me.

They provide something other than what I'm looking for. Yeah, I see it all the time. I think the generalists will usually just attract spam. You know, people trying to sell them something versus someone who found them because they had a specialty, right?

They work with QSBS stock consulting. You know, I have an example of just the same method. and research, but the way I went around something, I asked for referrals. My daughter plays water polo.

She's a senior in high school. She's going to play in college next year. I want to start working on next year. What is the college level going to be?

What does she need to be? Stronger, a little faster, quicker twitch in the pool, right? So I started asking parents, hey, do you have any recommendations for trainers? And I got a bunch of generic referrals or trainers that were local, but none of them said, I work with aquatic athletes, right?

So I'm like, okay, well, let's go to Google. Still the same. It was hard for me to find something that I really was looking for. I was looking for someone actually could help her with her swim stroke as much as her strength, but do exact exercises to get the end results.

I went to ChatGBT. ChatGBT knows my daughter because we helped with her recovery. recruiting profiles. I just said, hey, this is what I'm looking for.

It found me three specialists in the aquatics industry within a ten, fifteen mile radius. I mean, and one that was absolutely perfect. They did exactly what I was looking for. Aquatic strength training and swim training for speed.

And they trained Olympic athletes. Right. They trained college athletes. I'm like, I would have never had that end result if I had continued through that referral only mindset.

Or even where I was with Google, I'd have been spending hours and hours. So these things are changing. So are referrals still the best way for tax and accounting firms grow? Or are we misunderstanding what actually happens?

So when we go to this branding positioning you mentioned, how does that matter in the context of being recommended by? So again, I have a referral from a buddy. I have another restaurant owner that referred me to a CPA firm that deals with restaurants. How do I now feed ChatGBT exactly?

You gave a few examples, but why is that so important to these engines? And what are the outside trust signals that they are looking for to decide who they recommend, your firm versus the ten other firms in the area? Yeah. So these engines use your web footprint, everything about you on the Internet to understand what your firm does, who you are as a professional, what kind of personality your firm has.

Right. And so all of those things are going to come together. So if the only thing you're telling the Internet is we provide tax and accounting services in Chicago, you're going to fall to the bottom of the barrel. It's going to just be a big layer.

of a bunch of generalists whose websites all say basically the same thing because chat gpt or any ai engine doesn't really know how to pull you out from that big group because you're all saying effectively the same thing online so what you want to do is differentiate yourself differentiate yourself cohesively so you want to answer you know i would say use ai to help you right ask ai where your gaps are in your content if you want to attract restaurant owners in chicago or whatever city it happens to be and then fill in the gaps with your blog content with your service pages and then run some tests see if you're getting recommended when you search for things like prompt it. Say, who can help me with my restaurant taxes in Chicago? I'm confused. I don't understand what's happening.

And see if you're recommended. So you can run your own tests, really, to see where these gaps are, what kind of content you need to fill in. And then the more you do that, the more authority you're going to build within your desired niche or demographic. I want to go back to that tax dome survey because there's a couple little nuggets out of that I think were good as well.

They said that twenty five percent of respondents were willing to pay more for specialized accounting. Again, this is in twenty five. I think this has gone to another level. Another thing that I thought was interesting is larger clients with revenue above one million dollars were twice as likely to hire a niche accountant versus a generalist.

And eighty five percent, I think this is the biggest deal, agreed that saving money through tax strategies justified higher fees. So I think one thing that I want to press you on is Overall, I see most tax and accounting firms, I believe they have a branding problem. They have no position. They are the generalists.

So where should they start to differentiate themselves? Because sometimes that is very uncomfortable for a tax and accounting firm. There's lots of partners. There's a lot of viewpoints.

They are risk adverse. But why do so many tax and accounting firms look and sound exactly alike? And why are they then lost? You know, and then what should they be doing differently to start getting recommended in this new reality?

So there is a lot of noise and I think, and there's a lot of noise internally in these firms. And I think that's a really important thing you just hit on Lee is that sometimes you can't just go make a huge change to all of your positioning because there's red tape and there are protocols and there are processes that you have to go through. So I would advise starting small. Don't bite off more than you can chew.

Do something like segment your client list. Very easy, something everyone should be doing anyway and very few people do. Maybe start one newsletter a month that goes out to a particular faction of your clients. It could be restaurant owners.

It could be if you work with Shopify stores or e-commerce, you could send a specialized newsletter to those people. This doesn't mean that you're not sending a general newsletter to everyone else. It just means that you're segmenting those people out and providing them with high value content. Could be blog posts, could be social posts that have to do specifically with their industry.

Something else you can do is instead of just saying we offer tax planning, create a specialized page explaining how maybe you help business owners who work with your firm prepare for the next tax season with a mid-year planning session. that's a service offering that differentiates you perhaps from other firms in your area so you don't have to go all in on pigeonholing yourself into only working with one industry what you do need to do is figure out something you do really well whether it's dealing with e-commerce clients or providing these mid-year planning conversations and lean into that so find a service you offer that's unique find a niche that you have and start doing content creating copy that talks to those people. That's a great starting point and it's kind of a way to dip a toe into positioning yourself without having to completely change everything you've ever done as a firm. Yeah, we're talking a lot about being recommended and finding new prospects, but we've kind of neglected your own existing client base.

And I'm just sharing what we're doing and what technology offerings that we're providing to our clients. So we've set up, we've been doing, I recall, marketing on autopilot for our clients for a long time. We're able to tag certain groups and then get very targeted messaging from So we recently created the opportunity now to create what I'm going to call automations that automatically would look for certain advisory or soft advisory opportunities. And every Monday tell me out of my bookkeeping clients, You know, show me the anomalies that perhaps I should reach out to the client for a specific type of soft advisory.

So maybe their headcount increase for people or cash flow, the bank balance went way down or the bank balance went way up. So there's new signals, obviously, that our technology surfaces to you and every and we have a daily what we call a daily briefing so you know if you did that automation say every monday tell me which clients i should reach out and then it will tell you exactly who they are what the issue is what the opportunity is and they'll have a button say send proposal send a quick out you know outreach email so those are ways that things have changed that's some kind of the trends that are happening where you can really grow through your existing client base and i think that's really important which comes into kind of this idea of marketing spend. So, you know, we hear it often. I don't need marketing.

I'm so busy, blah, blah, blah. The high growth firms. So Hinge and the Association of Accounting Marketing did a survey of, I think, a hundred or so like midsize firms, small to midsize. And the report found a couple of things I thought were very interesting.

So high growth firms achieved a revenue growth rate of thirty eight point five percent. I don't know if you're growing at that rate, but hopefully you are. But high growth firms grew seven times faster than the no growth, quote unquote, I don't need marketing comparison group, right? And what was interesting here is the high growth firms, the ones growing at thirty eight point five percent spent approximately twice as much on marketing.

So these are observational, but Rebekah, you see it in our own clients, right? Those that just throw up a site, don't want to do any personalization, don't want a brand, don't want to do any playbooks or outbound stuff. They're just sitting there, right? They're just kind of reactionary.

They're a compliance business. They're not into kind of what a modern firm would look like. But research would show us that high growth firms invest more in marketing. So I don't think the answer is just to double your marketing budget.

But I think it is like, how do you take advantage of some of these new technologies to rethink or maybe let the technology do this on its own. So it's not a heavy lift for you. And maybe that is something smaller, you know, boutique firms should start looking at. So, you know, what would you say is the best way to spend time if you're a smaller firm to attract new clients instead of developing, you know, if they're not just developing their relationships, where would you spend your time right now attracting new clients?

So I think you have to niche down first, right? Whether it's niching down into your city, a demographic, whatever it is. Lee, like you just said, a general firm is not really just throwing money at generalized marketing is not the answer here. And that's not what I want people to do.

If you're going to increase your spend on marketing, do it in a way that makes sense do it by trying to attract niche clients do it by you know maybe you create a youtube channel where you are answering the top one hundred questions that people within your niche let's just stick with restaurants since we've used that a lot today But you can use an AI system to come up with the top one hundred inquiries that restaurant owners are asking in your city. Answer each of those questions in a thirty to sixty second video on your YouTube channel and start promoting the ones that are getting some organic traffic. That is an incredible way to start reaching your target audience. And you can put as much money behind them as you want to reach as many restaurant owners as possible in your region.

So that would just be one example. But I mean, a hundred videos is basically a year of content. And all you have to do is record, you know, one every few days for a minute or two. Rebekah, that's a lot of work.

It feels like it. So I would counter you and the example I gave is then what if I just started working on my existing client base and use technology like we've created here at CountingWorks to automatically look through all the contexts and recommend, hey, these are your opportunities and you can hyper focus. So the one area that I see the biggest issue is the client database and the lack of tagging, segmenting, whatever you want to call it, but just Real quickly, kind of explain why that's so important and why then personal messaging that technology and AI allows us to do is so much more effective than perhaps trying to make all these silly YouTube videos when you don't want to get in front of the camera in the first place. I know, that makes sense.

Jump into that. critically important to tag and segment. I just kind of touched on it a minute ago when I noted that it's one of the easiest things you can do and very few people are doing it. So what you can do once you tag and segment, like in our system specifically, you can send playbooks to people, which are blogs, social posts, emails, basically an entire funnel that you can create, many of which are already in the system.

That's one way to do it. But even just in any system that's using automated marketing, you can tag people and then that helps you understand, okay, I want to send, let's say, an email on this date to everyone in this industry or everyone with this tag. Maybe it's a reminder about a particular deadline. Maybe it's, an upsell campaign that you want to send.

Maybe you tag everyone who's nearing retirement age and at a certain time of year, you start sending them various pieces of content that have to do with retirement planning and you try to upsell them into a new package. Maybe it is, hey, this particular client had a large increase in income last year on their taxes. We want to start nurturing them to get them into a tax planning program rather than just a annual tax prep client. there's all sorts of things you can do within your existing client database by using tagging and segmentation and this is a way to really personalize the marketing that people receive which is something people love in this day and age we all get personalized messaging everywhere and we've kind of come to expect it right i think In every facet of our lives, we log into a website and it says, hi, with your name, right?

We go to a hotel. Hi, you know, whatever your last name is, family on the TV, like everybody's used to this hyper personalized marketing. So if you start receiving that from your accountant, it fosters trust. It makes you more likely to spend extra money to go to a higher package.

So that's a great way to really start harnessing the power of your existing client list. Yeah, the luxury hospitality industry already does it. So you go to any high end five star, you're greeted that way. Hey, Mr.

Reams, how are you? Staff will stop and greet you. Some will have like a stop their work, whatever. What it is, is it's just recognizing you and the value you bring and the respect I have.

And it builds more trust and it helps people. Pay more for that experience, right? And that's kind of what we're going at. So I think technology and kind of this whole AI native future is really important.

So there was a development I want to talk about a little bit. It's a little bit of marketing pulse, but more about kind of what I consider the AI native software stacks versus the traditional legacy practice management and even legacy website platforms that are out there. Some bigger names that have lots of users, but they're really... kind of outdated at this point.

So we at County Works, we redid our platform from the ground up. We did everything AI native and the results and the power is amazing. So we've made it much more what I'm going to call conversational, where you can just talk to our tool and it gives you, you know, it will figure out the outcomes. It will automate the work that it can automate.

It brings you in as a human in the loop. And I find it very interesting. So the big development here was Taxdome came out or is coming out with their new AI platform. I'm not totally sure exactly what it looks like, what it's doing, but they also did a big pricing change.

And I think that's a thing that I've seen a lot and it's more pricing per active clients. And we did some analysis. Our average client has about, our average subscriber has about five hundred and fifty clients in our ecosystem. If you put it into TaxDome and you added AI and their concierge services and everything, I figured out it was almost fourteen thousand dollars a year.

Obviously, that's more than what we charge for clients. But I think it's important to understand, though, what an AI native platform does and why TaxDome thinks they can charge that much is the value and the work, the labor component of what the technology allows. Now, you can one hundred percent charge. to reduce headcount or get more productivity out of the team that you have now.

And this is where I was saying smaller boutique firms have the ability now to do things that they never could. They can target clients they couldn't before. How do they do that? Having a geo plan, I want to get recommended for these specific verticals.

It's really easy to create that playbook, to create that content and messaging. And I think it's really important to people to understand what I'm seeing is you've got the legacy platforms that are just throwing AI on top of it. I don't think that's the future. Rethink the way you do everything.

AI can do things so much faster and smarter. And even here at AccountingWorks, Rebekah, we're talking about like a Kanban board and how workflows should work. Everyone's got to get out of the old mindset. Well, this is the way it used to work.

because it's so much better if you go AI native. So I think it's important to understand that AI is changing the equation. And obviously we, AccountingWorks, made a decision a few years ago to rebuild around AI rather than simply adding it to our traditional system. So the question I have for you is, When you look at accounting firms that we work with, are they starting to question the value of their technology?

And they have eight different products and it took thirty days to train them. And they don't use it because not everyone does. Or if someone leaves and they know the software, then we're stuck as a practice versus a system that knows every single client and it's not in someone's head. So kind of explain what you're seeing and hearing as our clients are starting to get to that aha moment.

Like, oh, my God, I cannot believe we can do this. They're getting there. We have some people in the interest of full transparency who are not there yet. They want to use the systems they've always used because they're comfortable with them.

But we are seeing an uptick in people who are excited about AI native platforms, about our platform specifically, because that's what we're working in. showing them just all the things that our Mac system can do, how playbooks work, how they have an ability now to really market to their clients in a completely different way than they ever could before without having to do all the heavy lifting themselves. They're not having to create spreadsheets and charts and you know, bar graphs. The system is figuring out these things for them and alerting them proactively, which is really exciting.

And I think as this world kind of continues and people continue to see this shift in other parts of their lives, even in how they search for restaurants and hair salons and all these other things, they will start to use it more and more. in the workplace and as a firm owner so we're definitely seeing people get more excited new clients are excited new clients come to us because they see what we can do legacy clients who are moving over into the ai native platform sometimes they're a bit more reticent right but that's to be expected but i think the people who are finding us now are thrilled about what we can And they're very excited when they get on board. They have a lot of questions. They're doing multiple trainings with our team to fully understand the system.

And it's very exciting. I think it's great. I'm excited for the firms. I love seeing that light bulb kind of come on and seeing people recognize all that they can do now and all that they can do, you know, moving forward.

Yeah, I think the takeaway is, I'm not just talking about us, this isn't a sales pitch. It is that technology needs to do more than just organizing your work from Kanban column to column. It needs to be able to eliminate unnecessary work and be able to automate a lot of things that you as a human were doing before. And I think that's the direction that you should be looking here in the future.

You know, let's let's go kind of what is one of the challenges that I see right with digital marketing is that by the time everyone figures it out, you know, one set of rules, something changes. I'll give you an example. Reddit was highly used a few months ago and all of a sudden the systems have updated and it's not as referenced as it was. You know, Google makes an update.

AI introduces a new model or a new capability. Consumer behavior is shifting quickly, especially because of all that noise that's out there. People are not trusting, you know, what they're reading online anymore, right? Conspiracy theories, right?

So, you know, and I think for smaller firms, knowing what not to worry about is almost as important as knowing what to focus on. So what's one development you've seen recently that you think tax and accounting firms really need to pay attention to now? And what's one trend that's getting too much attention in your eye? So things are changing fast.

Like you just said, Reddit is something I would definitely focus on because it was something that was being referenced heavily within chat GPT in particular and now has kind of started to funnel off a little bit. People aren't getting recommendations from that system as much. One thing that I tell people a lot, and I brought up YouTube a few minutes ago, YouTube is huge. These systems love YouTube.

It has been a very steady reference point for LLMs since basically their inception. YouTube is a great place to start establishing authority because there is a lot of noise on YouTube that's incorrect. So coming on and being able to be a trusted authority in your space, whatever that space is within the tax and accounting field, is a great place to kind of start establishing yourself. We've had some clients who have actually created YouTube channels recently, and they're loving it.

They're having a great time. They're getting views. They're getting, you know, qualified leads, people who are actually interested in what they're doing. So that's something I would like to encourage more people to do.

And the same with not being afraid to get on TikTok and Instagram. Video is only getting bigger. TikTok, you're killing me right now. I know, I know, I know.

But it's good to be a trusted source on these platforms because they are places where there's a lot of misinformation. So if you can come on as an experienced professional and provide real information with a good hook, you have a lot of opportunity. Yeah, I think what you just added is a great way to kind of segue. Each audience is in a different medium.

Certain people are watching YouTube. Certain people are on Instagram. Some still are on Facebook. Certain generations on TikTok.

Others like to get an email newsletter. Others want to go to a webinar or see a Zoom meeting, right? So you've got to figure out your target audience, what your ideal client profile looks like, and then create your funnels, your marketing funnels in your delivery of your content through to that channel and just go all in on it. So I think that is great.

So today we covered a lot. We covered referrals, what's changed, how recommendation engines are now going through AI. If you get traditional referrals, they're still asking. And guess what?

You may not be getting as many phone calls anymore. It might be that cricket. All I'm getting is spam. That usually means you're probably not positioned very well.

You're not differentiated. You don't have strong stories on your site to make someone or a chat GPT decide to recommend you. I think a lot of this is very practical, but most people listening have a practice to run, Rebekah. I'm saying you're asking them to do a lot.

If you were a small tax accounting firm and you gave them one thing to do this week, what would it be? Assess your homepage. I think it's a very simple, easy thing to do and it can make a huge difference. It doesn't have to take more than five or ten minutes.

Go to your homepage, ask yourself, who does my firm serve? What problems do we solve and where do we do it? This is in chat, GVT, you're saying? Yes.

Whatever your AI system of choice is. If the system cannot successfully answer those questions by looking at your homepage, you need to go back to the drawing board and redo your homepage copy. Start there. And then as you have time, as you start to see those results, Do more.

Right. But never bite off more than you can chew. I'm constantly telling people this doesn't have to be an overwhelming situation. You can start small.

You can take little pieces and do this little bit today, this little bit next week, this little bit in a month. All of those baby steps really do add up and they start to build that authority over time. This isn't something where I want people to feel. I think overwhelmed people stop.

So we don't want people to stop making these efforts. We want people to understand that they can use automation to help them. They don't have to take this on all by themselves. They can use AI as labor.

And also they can start with a tiny little chunk of their overall branding and positioning and then build from there. I'm gonna give two. Reviews, reviews, reviews. Just like the old SEO, it's the new geo.

Reviews and stories in their words from verticals or niches or specialties that you do. The reviewer will often will put words in there that ChatGPT will connect with people looking for those types of services. It backs up, there is your authority. We mentioned it before, I would segment my client base.

I would go as small as I can. We actually have a tool. We call them skills. We have a skill library that can do anything.

They can write a blog. It can write a blog for a tag group of clients specifically for only ten clients, or it could send an email to just those ten clients personalized to them because of their nonprofit status or their athlete. You specialize in high school athletic clubs. So that's all of the accounting you do.

That's such an easy one. And now we can go discover those people. It could create content for them. It's a very, you know, no one running those clubs wants to care about accounting, nor do they have time to do that.

But we have tools that will actually help you tag your database and segment it based on the context we have. We have a kind of an ability to add context from other sources or LinkedIn databases that we have. And we can really build out your client profiles. And I think it's really effective.

So two things, get more referrals, segment your client base and get after it and then start looking for those soft advisory opportunities for each client. So I think that's a good way to wrap up the first marketing pulse. Hopefully there's a little different, hopefully a little more conversational approach. Rebekah, I think we hit a few things.

Again, I just like little takeaways. But the modern firm and AI native stuff is happening. I could sit here and scream about it, how incredible. Every dev meeting I have, so I'm on them every Tuesday.

I have a visionary one every Thursday. But the stuff that we're able to do and AI can do for an accounting firm, especially a small one, is extraordinary and it doesn't make take much lift you just got to trust it and start again it's human in a loop you start trusting it can do incredible things to your practice even if you wanted to grow just from your current existing client base really creating stronger client relationships and building long-term value i think that is what i'd be doing I'd be putting a mode around my client base i'd make sure that ai tools that want to take me out of the equation, never get an opportunity. So Rebekah, thanks for joining. We'll be watching research, the trends and more, and we'll try to do these periodically.

But again, thank you everyone for listening to the Growth Minded Accountant. Until next time, keep growing. Please, if you're not a subscriber, subscribe. If you know people that you're not competing with, tell them about our podcast.

We'd love to get more listeners. I think we're over nine thousand now. So thank you again.

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