Making Your Web Store Work for Your Clients

by

People & Business

Editor's Note: This is the second and final part of Laura Redmond's series on developing a web store for your firm's fixed fee services. Here, she describes the sales process for standard client accounting services.

The first determination you have to make when you set up your web store is to ask your prospects to choose between the type of service they're looking for:

  • Standard client accounting services – where you act as the accounting department for a business and perform selected services using our standard tools and processes
  • Concierge client accounting services – where you act as the accounting department for an entity and perform selected services using your tools, but with some customizations to the processes to fit unique needs of your clients
  • Consulting – where the prospects perform their own accounting work and purchases help from you

Here, we will describes our sales process for standard client accounting services. Once the prospect selects that option, they are asked their entity type and revenue level. These factors affect the pricing they receive on the following screens.  

Next, they can select from three base plans, which include recording transactions, reconciling accounts, closing the period and controller calls.  

They click a button to read, “How It Works,” and are required to check a box to accept that they understand how it works before moving on.  

Then, they advance through the add-ons to build their service plan by selecting any additional services they want – bill pay, company credit cards, staff reimbursement and payroll. All add-ons give three options with different pricing. This pricing easily can be updated by us from a central pricing grid in our system that will be reflected in the web store.

All add-ons require acceptance of “How It Works.” As each add-on is selected or deselected, the summary of services selected is updated on screen and the monthly fixed fee amount is updated. This gives the prospect full control to prioritize what they can afford.

Finally, the prospect is required to select from three support plans with varying frequencies and types of communication with our team.  

Once the plan is built, the prospect is presented with our terms of service in the format of individual rules that must be accepted in order to continue. These further clarify the expectations of service between the client and firm.  

Next, the client views a summary of the plan they selected, approves the one-time setup charge, enters bank information for auto-pay and purchases the plan.  

They receive an email with all of the details of the service plan they built, copies of all of the "How It Works" pages associated to services they selected, and all of the terms of service in working with our firm (the latest interpretation of that proposal we’d been building over the years). They also receive a copy of the auto-pay agreement authorizing us to pull funds monthly.

When we receive the sales booking, we set up the customer’s ACH info in Bill.com Receivables, charge for the one-time fee, and set up the recurring monthly invoice. Then, we schedule the work in Aero.

Since these are standard services, we pull from the Aero Library. It’s a marriage made in heaven. (I’d love the web store to integrate with Aero, but at this point it is just a live test – maybe one day.)

We booked our first client with this web store the second day it went live. With this system in place, we now feel much more open to talking to prospects. As “webby” as we are, we do not mean for this to replace human interaction.

We view the web store as a tool and we're happy to lead them through the store and answer questions about the store, as opposed to pulling numbers out of thin air that could cripple the company if they're not profitable.  

We know this will work for some prospects, and not for others. Those who are not comfortable shopping online may not like this process, but we also feel that it's a good test of their tech capabilities. Our clients must be comfortable working with us in the cloud, and this is a good, early filter for that.

And, we also have the option of talking to prospects and asking them questions as we ourselves navigate through the web store for them. Similar end result.

We have a slew of improvements we already want to make. Again, it’s a work in progress, but we thought it was one worth giving a shot.

Love to hear your feedback.

Laura Redmond is a financial controller and IT manager turned cloud accounting advocate and app designer. She is a QuickBooks Online power user, Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor and member of the Intuit Trainer/Writer Network. She also is co-author of Intuit’s award-winning QuickBooks Online training and certification programs for accounting professionals, as well as a regular speaker at national accounting technology conferences.

In addition, Laura is founder of Redmond Accounting Inc., a boutique cloud accounting and consulting firm in Silicon Valley that was awarded Intuit's "2015 Top 20 Firm of the Future" and a Top 10 ProAdvisor for "Leading QuickBooks Online Practice." Redmond Accounting's workflow is centered on QuickBooks Online and its eco-system of apps.

Laura co-created the Aero Workflow app used by accounting firms to manage service delivery by staff performing recurring tasks for multiple clients. The Aero Library includes step-by-step instructions and procedures for many of today’s most popular apps in the QBO eco-system.