Why can making phone calls be such a powerful tool for your tax office? Well, when it comes to getting your message in front of people, a direct phone call is the golden standard. Being able to speak with someone directly means that you know for sure that they got the information about your promotions this season where as a text message or email might go unopened and unanswered. Even if someone’s opened your email you still never really know if they read all the info unless they respond or book an appointment through your scheduling link.
Now with a well scripted phone call, a conversation can literally be done in under 2 or 3 minutes. You can get them the information AND actually schedule an appointment for them to come in and file their taxes. Instead of having to email back and forth for days or weeks, you can immediately get in front of your client or prospect with a phone call, and book them in straight away.
Now keep in mind I’m not saying email and text are bad. Some people prefer to just text instead of talk on the phone, but having a strategy in place to hit up all these options is going to get you the best results, however, the phone call is a critical component you have to be working. This means that if you start working your list with appointment setters in the pre-season, you could potentially have your office jam packed on the very first day of the season. That kind of momentum will just keep snowballing.
Now, let’s talk about the 3 phone calls you have to be making
We have the Prior Year Customer Calls, the New Lead Follow Up Calls and the Referral Calls
So, let’s go through each call one at a time starting with the Prior Year Customer Calls.
The objective of this call is to simply reach out to your customers, let them know about the promotions you’re running this season and if possible get them scheduled in as soon as you open to get their taxes started. The most common objection you’ll hear on this call is “I don’t have my W2 yet.” This is simple to handle, just say “hey that’s fine we just want to get you in to get all of your paperwork started so that as soon as your w2 comes in, we can get you to the front of the line and get you your return as fast as possible.” It always helps to have an incentive for them coming in and filing with you to encourage them to get into your office straight away.
So for this call you also want to schedule your appointment setters to be doing these calls December 15th and run them until they’ve either talked everyone or at least until Mid January.
The next calls you’ll want to be making are the New Lead Follow Up Calls.
Now hopefully if you’re out there marketing and always generating new leads then you’ll have plenty of people to call for follow up. If you don’t have new leads coming in daily and want to learn more about how you can really grow your office this season with Early Season Marketing, click the link in the description or below this video to learn more about our program. The objective of the new lead follow up call is similar to the prior year call, you want to Follow Up with the new leads, Remind Them of your offers and Schedule Them in as soon as possible.
The schedule for these calls is CRUCIAL to the success rate and the conversion rate of new leads. Time and time again we talk to business owners who say the leads aren’t answering, and when we look at their call log they’re calling two or three days AFTER the lead was generated. That is WAY too long. When the lead fills out the form to get your offer, which takes them all of about 30 seconds, within a couple hours most people will have forgotten they even did that and that you even exist. This is why it’s so important that you schedule these calls to happen within 5 to 15 minutes of that lead hitting your inbox or at least first thing the next day.
This is speed to the lead. The faster you can follow up with them, the better results you’ll see. If leads are coming in during business hours, you better have a dedicated caller who can monitor the leads and call them back asap. For any of those leads coming in after hours make sure your appointment setter is calling them first thing the next day, another attempt in the early afternoon, and again the next day after. The most common objection we hear with new leads is something like “I never filled out a form or I don’t remember doing that.” So again, if you’re calling them within 5 to 15 minutes this is going to greatly reduce that objection and instead turn it into them being impressed with your follow up game being on point! That alone can sometimes be enough to win them over as a new customer.
So if they’re saying they don’t remember, a simple way to handle that is to try and jog their memory, say something like, “hey no worries, you would have seen our ads on Facebook or wherever your ads are running, and the ad was promoting our offers this season for filing your taxes with us where you could receive – xyz.” Tell them your offers, prizes, bank products, whatever you have in the advertisements. Most often this is going to be enough to remind them of your offer and why they gave you their information in the first place.
Last but not least are the Referral Calls
Now this is where so many tax offices are leaving a lot of money on the table if they’re not making these calls. The objective of the referral call is to… get referrals! But, there’s a specific way we teach this call to our tax office clients, and lucky for you, I’m going to share it with you just for reading this far. SO, are you ready for the secret sauce for this referral call? Here it is…
You don’t want to just start the call and straight up ask for a referral, you’re calling them on their time and you need to respect that. The way you want to open this conversation is with gratitude, say something like “Hey Shawn, we just wanted to call to thank you so much for filing with us, we really appreciate your business and we’d love to know how your experience was filing with our office?” After that lead in, once you get some feedback you’ll then want to decide if you should try and get a referral. Obviously if a customer wasn’t happy you’ll want to take note and hand it off to a manager to have them follow up directly to resolve any issues. If they had a positive experience and are happy to have filed with you, THEN you wanna ask for the referrals. Make sure you have a great referral program to incentivize them to send in their friends and family members.
A quick tip, don’t limit your referrals to require them to send in like 5 people in order to get whatever the incentive is. By doing that you’re going to limit the amount of referrals you get because on average people will generate 1 to 2 referrals if you really work for them, so make sure they get something for every person they send you and then maybe a bonus on 5, 10 or 15 referrals.
So that’s it for now. Again remember, you want to be making the Prior Year Customer Calls, the New Lead Follow Up Calls and the Referral Calls to get awesome results this season.
You can also head over to earlyseasonmarketing.com to check out the Resources and Tools section to get access to these scripts and more trainings to help you grow your tax office!
Recent Comments