Episode 155 | Top Organic Lead Generation Strategies To Grow Your Firm With Gaynor Meilke

Lead generation is the lifeline of any successful firm, but many business owners struggle to attract the right clients. Michelle Weinstein welcomes Gaynor Hardy Meilke, a business strategist and marketing expert, to share proven strategies for organic lead generation. They break down the difference between sales and marketing, discuss how to position yourself where potential clients are looking, and reveal the top ways to generate leads without relying on paid ads. If you’re tired of waiting for referrals and want to build a steady stream of high-value clients, this episode is packed with insights you can put into action today!

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Listen to the podcast here

Episode 155 | Top Organic Lead Generation Strategies To Grow Your Firm With Gaynor Meilke

Our special guest is a business strategist and certified business and transformational coach. She also owns Charisma Ink, which is a marketing and B2B consulting firm that specializes in services for accounting and tax professionals. She’s also a ghostwriter and the author of multiple books. Before we welcome our special guest to the show, if you’re an accounting, tax, fractional CFO, or bookkeeping firm owner and you feel paralyzed at the thought of your upcoming sales calls, constantly freezing up when it comes across your desk that you have an appointment with a prospect, I have a solution for you.

I understand the crippling effects of imposter syndrome, doubting your expertise even in your own niche, or the frustration when a sales call goes great, but it doesn’t lead anywhere. They ghost you. Here at The Abundant Accountant, I have perfected a simple, step-by-step sales process that will eliminate the guesswork, stress, and anxiety that you feel right now. You’ll finally be able to communicate your true value with confidence, even if talking about accounting and taxes feels dull and boring at times to your prospects.

Head on over to TheAbundantCall.com, take advantage, and book your complimentary session with me and my team. We’ll talk about how to take control of your conversations, close more high-paying quality clients, and put an end to the second-guessing about your pricing. No more trading hours for dollars. The only focus will be having a thriving firm that you feel proud of. Stop procrastinating and book a call over at TheAbundantCall.com. Let’s now welcome our special guest, Gaynor, to the show.

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Welcome, Gaynor, to the show.

Thank you, Michelle. I’m happy to be here.

I’m very excited to have you here at The Abundant Accountant. I’ve already done your intro, but if you could do your own intro, I always think it’s better to come directly from you. Who are you and what do you do, Gaynor?

Who am I? That’s a good question, Michelle. It depends on the day. No. From a work perspective, I am the owner of Charisma Ink, which is a marketing and PR consulting company for tax and accounting firms, tech providers, and a lot of the speakers and influencers in this space. I always like to say that we bring the full circle of accounting together and help firms grow. We do that in a number of different ways. I’m excited that you and I get a chance to talk because you’re also very honed in on this space, and that’s how we met.

For a lot of firm owners, especially new firm owners starting out or even a smaller-sized firm, maybe they have a team of 1 to 5 or 10 people, I always get this when I talk to new prospects, “Michelle, I need more leads.” I say, “What’s the biggest challenge with your sales?” They say, “I need more leads.” In reality, when you say you need more leads, that’s a marketing challenge. That’s not a sales challenge. It’s two different things.

The Difference Between Sales And Marketing For Accounting Firms

I’m excited to talk about this because Gaynor is going to share what she thinks the top three organic lead generation strategies are. I’d love it if you could share what you think the difference is between sales and lead generation when people say, “I need more clients.” If you get a bunch of clients and then you don’t charge them enough, you’re not pricing correctly, or you’re giving discounts, or you do some free work to try to acquire a new client, that’s a sales problem too. What’s your take on it?

The line is also bleeding as we look at some of the available digital marketing techniques. For me, lead generation is about creating demand for your product or service. It goes back to the ideal client, what their pain point is, and then what solutions you have that can help them solve the problem. We then get to the sales side, which is once we have the prospect there, how do we close the sale? As you said, make sure that you’re not giving away your services just to get a client because that’s not the client that you want. The marketing piece is all the way up to that initial prospect call, and then you’re doing the sales side of it.

Lead Generation: Make sure that you’re not giving away your services just to get a client, because that’s not really the client that you want.

I’m curious about this. I’m all about sales, conversions, and enrollment. Why do you think when I ask a firm owner, “What is the biggest challenge with your sales process in your firm,” their answer is lead generation, marketing, or “I need clients?”

This is because a lot of firm owners don’t understand the sales and marketing cycle. I also think that they don’t do enough of it. It’s one thing to say, “I need more leads,” but I see a lot of firms where I hear the same thing, “I need to get more people in contact with me to understand what I do.” They’re not out there doing it, and they don’t realize that it’s an ongoing process. If you map out that client prospect journey, which you and I can delve into a little bit, you start to understand that every client will go through the same series of steps. If you can systematize that and do it consistently, you’re not going to have a problem with getting leads or closing sales.

If you own a business, the lead generation marketing side, and then the sales conversion side, meeting with clients to acquire new clients, has to be ongoing. It’s the lifeline of your business. We can’t do any bookkeeping, accounting, advisory work, fractional CFO work, tax planning, or resolution work if we’re not doing those two elements all the time, and as you said, having a step-by-step system in order to execute that in a systemized approach that we’re staying consistent with.

The biggest thing is that the firm owners think, “The clients are going to fly out of the sky and land on my lap.” Unfortunately, that’s not how this works. What would a firm owner need to do to systemize this ongoing process for the lead generation side? That’s the demand or to create the demand for their bookkeeping service, for their accounting services, for their tax resolution business, or whatever it is? I know we’re going to talk about three main organic lead generations.

Before we talk any further, firm owners might be wondering, “What does organic mean?” Should we talk about the difference between organic lead generation marketing and paid lead generation marketing? Usually, when you hear organic, you see it in the grocery store. You have an organic apple or you have a regular apple. You have organic bananas. What’s the difference?

Organic Versus Paid Lead Generation Strategies

That’s a good reference point because, unlike the grocery store, organic is cheaper in marketing than the paid one. The non-organic is the paid side, which is something like having Google ads, social media ads, or paying for placement to get people to come and do a sales call or something like that. Those are all pay-to-play. The organic pieces are things like content, doing a podcast without paying for placement, or sending an email and getting people to book a consultation through that.

There are lots of different organic ways. That’s what we’re going to focus on, because what we find is when somebody says, “I don’t have enough leads,” we don’t want to flip straight into paid. We need to understand some of the triggers for their lead gen turning into those conversions. Also, I find that a lot of firms haven’t even identified who their ideal client is in a detailed sense. There’s no point in paying for online ads or anything paid like that if you don’t know who you’re targeting because it’s not going to be successful.

I align with that. As you said, understanding triggers was crucial because if you don’t understand the triggers of your clients and what’s going to get them to move and take action to do something different, people don’t want to change. How many of us have said every year, “I want to go to the gym. I want to exercise more. I’m going to walk 10,000 steps a day,” or whatever the goal is?

To have change requires a lot. For your prospects to make a change, like someone on a resolution case who hasn’t paid the IRS in eons, hasn’t filed a tax return, to get that taxpayer to change, you’re going to have to understand maybe the trigger will be once all the money is wiped out of your bank account, then maybe you’ll want to do something.

I say this to people all the time, especially in the tax, accounting, and bookkeeping space. You do not want clients who are going to stop, drop, and change accountants in a heartbeat like that. Those are not your people. You want people who you can build relationships with. Relationship-building is best done organically and it does take time. You have to appreciate the sales cycle of this space. That’s another reason why it has to be ongoing. You’re not just going to grab fifteen new clients in an afternoon because you sent one email. You’re not selling jeans like Old Navy. You’re selling relationship services, hopefully.

It’s very different. The lifetime value of a client will be so much greater than the pair of jeans or maybe how much you spend in a store if you shop often. It’s very different from the amount of revenue you’ll generate from one client. Gaynor, what is the first way that you would recommend for a lead generation strategy for a newer firm owner, or someone who’s been around and relied 100% on referrals and grew that way? They’re like, “I’m ready to find more high-quality premium-fee clients. I want to know who my ideal client is, and I don’t want to work with people who don’t respect and honor me anymore.” What would you say?

Number one, you need to find out where they go to get the information that you can provide. That would be their professional associations. For example, if you’re targeting medical practitioners, e-commerce owners, or any specific vertical, and you’re not doing that, I would highly recommend that you figure out who your best clients are and what industries they’re in, and start providing some education in those spaces. Whether that’s a blog article, a webinar, or if you’re in real-time going to some kind of event. It sounds old school, but in today’s digital age, a lot of professionals are still leveraging their associations and getting information that way. You need to be able to position yourself where they’re looking for the information that you have.

Let’s do real-life examples. Medical practitioner, how would you identify a medical practitioner, even on a smaller intro version of that?

You might have orthopedic surgeons.

Let’s go with orthopedic surgeons. Where’s the old-school place where they would hang out, where you could now stand out in this digital age, where people don’t do anything in person anymore, to find orthopedics?

You think about what their learning habits are and why they need to learn or go to continuing education. There are a lot of organizations that offer continuing education to doctors and medical professionals because they have to get that, just like an accountant does. There are a lot of associations, as we’ve said, professional associations and alumni associations. They may have gone to a certain medical school. Maybe there’s one in your area.

I like that idea. My university has an alumni group for everyone who lives in San Diego and went to the university I attended. You could meet those professionals. I think that’s a great idea. I hadn’t even thought about that. Wonderful.

I went to an event like that. Somebody who has a franchise bookkeeping company does alumni events around, I’m in Michigan, so the University of Michigan, for all of the CPAs. That was pretty effective. I would also say any kind of conference. You don’t necessarily have to go and speak at a conference. You could just go to a conference or something like that.

As you said, they’re continuing education, so wherever they’re learning. I work with accountants, bookkeepers, tax professionals, and CFO firm owners. I’m going where you’re getting CPE credits, typically, or I’ll speak at different conferences that you all hang out in. That’s how we can meet the old-school way, off-digital. Even though I do a lot of the other marketing, I like digital marketing and paying. I don’t mind paying a high price. That’s a good first step toward figuring that out. When you think of systematizing this, how many places, conferences, continuing education events, associations, or alumni associations should one go to on a monthly or annual basis? If they were to say, “I’m going to focus on this every month.”

I would first do a little bit of research on the organization to see how active they are and how many members fit your ideal client profile. If it is an actual in-person event or an online event, you usually can go to 1 or 2 before you have to pay to be a member or volunteer to provide that information to keep it truly organic. I would say that you should be aiming for at least once a month, twelve times a year, to touch base with that membership of an association in some format. That might be the online/offline event. It could be providing education. It could be working with the actual administration there to develop an education program or something like that. Doing a podcast with them, anything like that counts.

What’s the second top way for a firm owner to focus on organic lead generation as one of their strategies?

Creating Valuable Content To Attract Ideal Clients Organically

I would say creating content that is very relevant to your ideal client profile.

Let’s take orthopedics as our example.

They’re a great example because they typically might have. You have to think about who’s going to be buying the services or considering the services that you have. It’s probably not going to be the orthopedic surgeons themselves. If they have a practice that’s got more than a million, and most of these orthopedic practices are going to be well over a million just from the type of work that they’re doing. They probably have an office manager or somebody like that who could potentially be looking for information online.

If you’ve got something that’s very targeted towards an office manager or an administrator in an orthopedic firm or practice, you can create frequently asked questions for them, or something like that on your website or LinkedIn, and get into some of the groups. That can be a beneficial thing from a purely organic standpoint because Google, if we tie it back to search engine optimization, loves FAQs that answer specific questions.

You need to understand who is looking for the specific information. It may not be the end client. It could be somebody who’s doing the research for them. You have to keep that in mind. I would say developing a niche resource center on your website and then sharing it on LinkedIn, with some of these associations, through YouTube, or doing some short reels that are organic. Reels, if you’re not familiar with them, are short video clips that you can put out on social. Now, the next generation of practice owners is looking at social as opposed to just looking at written content online. We have to think about that.

When you think about the FAQ, because I like that as an idea, what would be an example that a firm owner would put on their FAQ or a couple of ideas that would create a good piece of content for a prospective orthopedic firm that’s doing over a million, where their office manager or their administrator would be online searching for this?

I’m going to back up a minute. You’d want to do some research. One of the best ways to do research, which a lot of firms never think about, is if you’re targeting a specific niche and you’ve got clients in that niche, think about what questions they’re always asking you. For example, they may have asked you specific questions when they became clients.

Are there specific things that particular types of clients are always struggling with or that you help them with that they value? I can think of an orthopedic practice. One thing might be, “How do you finance the medical equipment or surgical equipment?” If you’ve got multiple practitioners in a practice, “How do you do the distributions of an S-corp?” or something like that. Very specific queries.

You can also take a look in Google in your Google Analytics, and see what some of the queries are being done when people hit your website. That’s an advanced strategy. One of the easiest things to do is think about what your existing clients in that niche are asking you, or things that they struggle with that you help them solve, and then write some FAQs around those questions.

I love that idea. That’s fantastic. I think “How does one finance surgical equipment?” would be a great one. I’ve worked with a few bookkeeping firm owners who are working in the medical spa industry. One of the biggest questions too for a med spa is “How do they finance lasers?” If you have a great compelling answer and then say, “We would love to meet with you to go over your different options and how you could do so,” that’s now an organic searchable piece of content. With other questions that you would have on an FAQ page, let’s say a firm owner does not have this FAQ page set up, how many questions do you think would be good to start out with?

Gating Content And Building An Email List For Long-Term Success

I would say do the Top Ten Tips for Financing Your Medical Lasers. What I would also say is because you’re trying to get leads, you don’t want to leave that out on your website ungated. You want to have a form on the website with a landing page, which is a page that might have the URL of your firm, name.com/medical-laser-FAQ, or something like that. You’d have a form, and you would make a nice PDF download of those ten questions with your contact information and a little bit of information about how you’ve worked with many orthopedic practices.

These are some of the top ten questions they have about financing lasers, and then this is how we can help you, then you’ll get those leads through the form, as opposed to hoping that people are going to read and then click through and contact you. You can also see how effective that content is, but don’t let it sit there on the website. It is because even if you build it, they’re not going to come. You need to put it out on social or through these associations. We talked about sharing content with them and asking them to share your content. It’s all a big wheel of collaboration.

I think this is great. As you said, you can test it, but these are all unique ways to start generating interest. You can also start gathering more questions to create other future pieces of content that you can put as gated, which means that you will be getting people’s emails and names so you can start building your email list, which is a very valuable asset to have in your business.

Many firms that first come to start working with us have no email list because I think people have the false impression that email is dead. Email is way more effective than organic social media, yet people are spending a lot of time and money doing all these posts that lead nowhere. I always say that you want to make your website your hub. That’s your home. You don’t want to build your firm presence on third-party platforms and leave it there. You always want to bring people back to your digital home, which is your website.

Lead Generation: Make your website your hub. Don’t build your presence on third-party platforms and leave it there. Always bring people back to your digital home.

You always want to capture them because, in the future, when you turn to paid lead-generation marketing, then you’ll have them pixeled, and they’ll be able to be tracked on all of the social platforms if you ever spend money on advertising. What’s the third way to generate some leads and focus on marketing from the organic standpoint?

Collaborating With Adjacent Service Providers For Co-Marketing Opportunities

It’s a tie in my mind because one of them is an adjacent strategy to the associations. I’m going to throw it out here because it goes well with medical, dental, or any professional services. Getting strong relationships, building strong relationships, and doing some co-marketing potentially with adjacent service providers.

Let’s use our orthopedic example.

For the orthopedic example, the thing that would be a no-brainer on the laser side is to go to the laser manufacturers or the laser sales reps and say, “We’re both targeting these orthopedic surgeons. What type of marketing are you doing? This is what we’re doing. How can we collaborate?” Oftentimes, they would probably love to do a webinar with a CPA that talks about financing the lasers. That’s probably a big stumbling block in their sales process because that’s a high-ticket item. You’ll get the distribution because they’re always going out and talking to potential laser buyers in the firms who are probably looking for financial info and services.

That’s one. The other one would be like number three, and the other one is two and a half. It would be reviews. Those are important for organic SEO and social proof. If you’re not getting Google reviews, and you’re not actively soliciting testimonials that you can use for case studies from your existing clients, then do that. Not only are you going to get great testimonials, but like attract like when people are happy. You’ll also have things that you can use in your marketing, like quotes and case studies, which can be powerful in attracting people and closing the sale.

If I look at how I started this whole business back in 2018, I started the podcast, and then I started getting client reviews. To this day, I have a couple hundred testimonials. I always ask everyone for a Google review and to put it up on Facebook as well. This is the backbone of our whole business here at The Abundant Accountant because people want social proof. It helps the search engines.

I don’t know how impactful or how searchable Google reviews are, but I know people have asked me for them, “Can we see your Google review page?” I’m like, “Here you go.” Here’s what everyone has to say about getting a great sales process in place being able to price accordingly, and not having to feel like you’ve been run over by a dump truck in your firm and taken advantage of by your clients. When people start to see the repetition, because now they’re repetitive, the problems don’t change for your clients. In the orthopedic business, their challenge is to fund lasers and big medical equipment. All of their challenges are going to be the same.

For me, most firm owners get paralyzed by the thought of their next upcoming sales call. “What am I going to say? I have no idea. I’m going to freeze up. The person’s going to take control of the call.” I know that those problems aren’t going to change until you create and have a new system. For the orthopedics and those medical doctors or the med spa, their problems don’t change. It’s probably cashflow, trying to fund and make payroll consistently, and figuring out how to expand or remodel their office or waiting room. All of the challenges will start to have consistency.

With social proof and reviews, people live vicariously through other people. They’re now going to say, “I’m not alone in this.” Back to what we were talking about before about having the niche, they do specialize in them. With me, for sales, I hear it all the time. I talked to someone the other day. “We’re talking to four other people.” I’m like, “I didn’t know there was even one other person that teaches sales for tax, accounting, and bookkeeping firm owners. I think I’m the only one.”

There are now tons of sales education and sales training, but they’re for a broader audience. These reviews, instead of calling it 2.5 or 3.5, I think this should be number one. This is the goldmine of any firm. I know they’re not easy to get, and you have to ask for them, and you’ll probably sometimes get rejected, but those are all sales challenges. Getting reviews is crucial to your organic marketing, and people do want to share their experiences and how much they enjoyed working with you and your firm.

I would also say there’s software you can use to help automate the follow-up process to get reviews. If you make it part of your actual client journey, then every month, you can target five people to get a review from and also encourage people to go and leave a review on Google. That would put you further ahead. I know in my business, I hate to say it, I don’t do any marketing other than go to conferences.

That’s a lot of marketing. That’s a lot of travel.

It is, but I enjoy the education. I don’t feel like I’m marketing. I’m being in the community of the people that I love to serve. If you think about it that way as well, accountants tend to be people who love to help people. Think about it through your client’s eyes. The ones that you have already, how did they hear about you? What have you done for them? You tell the story in the places where other people like them are looking for that, and that’s the best type of marketing there is.

It is. I couldn’t agree with you anymore. I’m very aligned and I am passionate about getting reviews.

I would also say it’s not about the quantity of 100 reviews. It’s about if you had twenty great ones, that’s a great place to start. It’s more about getting in the mindset of asking people. You learn a lot. Imagine if somebody says, “I don’t feel like I can give you a review.” You’d want to know why. There’s a multitude of ways to grow your firm without spending a lot of money. It does take an investment of some time. I would also say that if you’re clear on who you’re serving, there are probably only 3 or 4 levers that you need to keep pulling to get new clients.

Common Challenges Faced By Accounting Firm Owners

I align with that, too. I would say probably 3 or 4. I can go granular, but for firm owners, when you said 3 or 4, I’m like, “We’re underpriced.” You feel underappreciated. That’s one. You don’t get paid upfront all the time. You have all this AR piling up, and now you’re a free bank. You’re missing out on revenue from interest and other things. You’re now chasing money instead of generating money. How many people haven’t billed for services that you’ve heard of and haven’t sent invoices? Maybe you send out a proposal or a quote, and then you get ghosted. That’s another all-one category.

Those are not the clients you want.

The Importance Of Strategy Before Tactics In Business Growth

They’re the clients I want because I can help you change all that. When you’re not pricing correctly, and you don’t have that confidence, then it feels yucky to probably sell and have to do that part of your business. You’re probably like, “Why did I even open my own firm? I should have kept a job.”

I think the common thread in what I’m saying, too, is that by helping to educate people and providing them with information of value, your services sell themselves because they start to see how what you do is going to make their business better. If you position it correctly. That is the battle. If you know who you’re targeting, what their pain is, how your solution helps them alleviate the pain, and then you price appropriately and communicate the value, which is what you help them do, Michelle, then it should be like clockwork. It’s not like this big uphill battle. I finished doing a video on a one-page marketing plan for our YouTube. It is five steps. People get so distracted by all of the tactics, and what you need is a strategy first.

Lead Generation: If you help educate people and provide them with information and value, your services will sell themselves because they start to see how what you do is going to make their business better.

Strategy before tactics.

All the time. Otherwise, it’s chasing, “This person’s on TikTok.” If your clients aren’t on TikTok, it doesn’t matter.

You don’t need to be everywhere. That’s a whole other conversation for a different time. Gaynor, thank you so much for sharing these three main ways to focus on creating organic lead generation for a firm owner and the top strategies to go for. I wanted to say thank you again for taking the time to be here with us. Always remember that strategy before tactics. I love that. Thank you again so much.

Thank you for having me. I hope it’s helpful for people.

You now have to go implement it because talking about it and doing it are two different things, so take action. Go at least do one of those things. Go find one conference or one continuing ed to look for once a month. You’ll be onward and upward. Thank you again, Gaynor, for being here and sharing all of your wisdom, knowledge, and time.

Thank you, Michelle. We’ll have another session at some point, too.

Thank you all so much for joining Gaynor and me on another amazing episode here at The Abundant Accountant. As a firm owner, I know the paralyzing feeling of imposter syndrome, like you’re maybe new to your niche and you feel like you’re pretending to be an expert, like Gaynor was talking about. Even maybe the frustration of a call that goes amazing, only to find out that you’re ghosted after, you never hear back because you sent a proposal or a quote and heard crickets.

Here at The Abundant Accountant, I will show you a step-by-step, simple sales process so you’re never aimlessly winging it ever again. You’ll have a blueprint and a formula for communicating your true value with confidence, even if accounting seems boring to talk about. When you book a call with me and my team over at TheAbundantCall.com, I will show you exactly how to take control back of each conversation that you have with prospects, close more clients with confidence, and end the second-guessing over pricing for good. You will finally be able to stop trading time for dollars and start growing the firm on your terms. Make sure to head on over and book your strategy call with me and my team at TheAbundantCall.com. Stop procrastinating your potential, and let’s get into action.

Important Links

• Gaynor Meilke on LinkedIn
• Charisma Ink
• The Abundant Call

About Gaynor Meilke

Gaynor Meilke is a business strategist and certified business and transformational coach. She owns Charisma Ink, a marketing and B2B consulting firm that specializes in services for accounting and tax professionals.

She is also a ghostwriter and the author of multiple books, including Avoiding App-athy: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Winning More Sales and Customer Advocates in the Accounting Channel, The Bank Your Brain Blueprint™, and The Market Ownership Method, Everyday Higher, and The Emotional Home Improvement Project.