Building a client profile for accountants

At the Access Group, we support accounting firms of all sizes in Australia and New Zealand, helping them select the best accounting practice management software to fulfil their needs.

This article explores why defining a client profile is vital for accounting practices looking to stand out above the competition, the benefits of customer profiling, tips for building your rich customer profile, and an explanation of how they can help your bottom line.

What is a client profile?

A client profile represents your target market or "perfect client". It may be a few paragraphs long, but even a rough sketch is enough to start.

The methods of customer profiling tap into a classification of market research known as psychographics, which uses psychological and cognitive attributes to build a picture of your ideal clients.

The psychographics you should include within a best practice customer profile are:

Their customer pain points,
Their needs and wants,
Their interests and values, and
The solutions that you, the accountant, can provide them with.

Usually, we give our client profile a name to humanise your accounting clients and improve the quality of your conversations with potential clients.

With a client profile in place, you'll better understand your clients' financial needs and make any necessary changes to tailor your services, marketing messages, and advice to meet their specific needs.

Remember to read our marketing for accountants' guide, where we tell you everything you need to know about marketing strategies for your firm's current and prospective clients.

Why is a client profile important?

We highlighted in our CPD-eligible webinar your blueprint to running a successful accounting practice: only 1 in every five practices has a wholly defined client profile.

This key takeaway was uncovered as part of our comprehensive study series with Accountants Daily's research arm, Agile Market Intelligence, where we surveyed over 1,200 accounting practices to capture best practices, benchmarks and emerging trends across the industry.

The study deemed a practice with a well-defined client profile as 1.5x more likely to exceed their revenue targets when compared to those without defined client profiles.

As part of the expert panel, David Francis, General Manager of Access Accountants, highlighted the importance of a customer profile for accounting practices.

"A client profile is ultimately a personalised service, meaning the more we know about our ideal client, the better job we will do in keeping clients happy.

A defined profile is the opposite of one-size-fits-all. This has a few layers, such as which industry we are working in, the individual's age, and location. That kind of data is super important, and the psychographics are equally important.

I've seen this best represented with a firm that had posters on the walls of their personas and evolved customer profiles into personas. It was a photo of Susan, the business owner and some details about her goals, what makes her happy, what annoys her, etcetera. Then Mike, the finance person, Alicia, the manager, etcetera, which is a perfect way of visualising the humans that, ultimately, we're doing all this for."

What are the benefits of an accounting client profile?

With a fully established target market profile, your practice can reap the following benefits:

Personalisation: A client profile will help accountants understand the thoughts and feelings of the people who meet their niche, and they can use this information to tailor their services to meet each client's specific needs and goals.
A better understanding of your clients: Accountants need to understand a client's financial situation thoroughly. This information is crucial for the accuracy of your advice and for making more informed decisions about your clients.
Levelling up your relationships: A client profile ensures that you communicate with clients how they are most comfortable and responsive and impress newcomers to your practice during the client onboarding phase.
Client retention and word-of-mouth marketing: Customers who feel their accounting service providers understand their unique situation and needs are likelier to stay loyal and recommend your practice to others, leading to word-of-mouth business growth.
Making necessary tweaks to your accounting services: With your new client personas, you can change your services to meet their expectations halfway. This can help to avoid misunderstandings and dissatisfaction.
Maximising the profitability of your practice: A client persona will enhance and smooth your client connections. Being better equipped to solve your clients' problems can build your brand image and thus maximise your accounting firm's revenue opportunities.

How to write a client profile for accountants

Here are four easy steps to follow and create a comprehensive client profile for accountants:

Step 1: Gather existing data about your actual clients

Your existing client data is the first step to building a client persona for your accounting practice based on real insights. This exercise ensures that your accounting client profile is an accurate representation of your perfect client or target market rather than a work of fiction.

So, where do you start? Customer data sources, such as your accounting practice management software or a client list, can be an excellent place to find critical information.

Additional sources that may bring your client personas to life include analytics from your social media channels, your website, or surveys you may have conducted.

Step 2: Describe your ideal client's needs and their pain points

The next stage in the client profiling process is essential to define how your firm's objectives align with your ideal client's desires.

Pain points are just as vital to sketch out properly during this step. Removing obstacles for your clients helps you to win their overall loyalty.

With client pain points all mapped out, you'll have a clear picture of the problems your new clients are trying to solve when they reach out to your practice for accounting services, and you can use this information to adopt a more laser-focused, solutions-orientated mindset.

Step 3: Map out a client journey for your practice

Now that you've established your client's needs and pain points, you can use this information to tell a story around the ideal client experience.

Set aside time to imagine the best possible experience for your customer persona. How would your accounting services improve your client's financial situation?

Step 4: Bringing our client persona to life

Now that we have collated our client data and mapped it against psychographics, it's time to give your client some basic information based on demographics:

A name and representative photograph
Their occupation
Their location
Income level

Once you have this information, you can tell a realistic backstory about your individual client. Writing a bio detailing the personal characteristics of your new client profile will give you greater insight.

Here is an example of an ideal customer profile from this exercise:

James, 45, is a small business owner with an IT business in North-West Sydney. He turns over $3.2 million yearly and wants to grow his business but needs to figure out where to start. He's seeking expert financial and business advice to take him on this trajectory.

Once you undergo this exercise of creating your new client profile, you can now use this process to begin breaking down your target audience into different sub-groups or segments. There's no ideal number of client segments, but start with a small handful that broadly covers most of your client base so things can be simple.

Personalise your experience with client management software

Client management software gives you a valuable client-centric solution with valuable customer profile data to get to know and deepen your client personas to maximise your current and future opportunities with more individualised accounting services.

According to our Your Future Practice studies, less than half of all accounting practices in Australia (45%) have a client management solution in place, with only 14% using client management software.

Therefore, accountants have tremendous potential to get on board with client management software to elevate their client relationships. As David Francis, General Manager of Access Accountants, says:

"If accounting practices connect with client management software, they'll have all the important information: names, addresses, phone numbers, location, industry, and all those other key psychographics."