How To Communicate With Tax Resolution Clients | Canopy

Here is the second part of an interview we did with Jassen Bowman. Here we discussed how he has perfected the methods of communication with his tax resolution clients and tax professional coaching.

How to Best Communicate with Tax Professionals and Tax Resolution Clients

In business marketing in general, you have to be open to communicating with your audience and your prospects in the way that they prefer. My blog does well, the email newsletter is good, I also do a bunch of live training seminars every year.

However, I mainly communicate via email. I built my entire tax practice around email. I don't have a business telephone. I have a Google voice account which sends my voicemails, texts, and faxes to my email. Everything in my communication sphere is done through email. 

When you are doing outbound business communication, there are people that do prefer being in a live-seminar environment. It's less than 20% of tax professionals. But for that 20%, they want to come to a live, educational event. Webinars are also huge, I do a lot of those.

How to Standardize Tax Resolution Marketing and Communication

For my tax resolution marketing, the vast majority of my advertising, content marketing, and direct mail all directs people to a webinar. I do a couple webinars a month in order to do group presentations to potential tax clients. That's just the reality of marketing in a multi-state region for tax resolution.

Tax resolution consultations do not vary that much. Most of them are the same. So the best thing to do, in terms of time efficiency, is to do the same presentation to 50 people once, instead of one at a time. For my tax resolution clients, that's how I do my marketing.

For my marketing to tax professionals, I do my marketing and communication in the way that they prefer via gmail, webinars, live conference calls, one-on-one coaching calls.  

Time Management for Tax Resolution Businesses

I'm a firm believer in time blocking. When it comes to time management, one of the most difficult things is getting started on a task. But once you get started,  it's really hard to switch gears. One thing I teach tax professionals if they work by themselves without an assistant, that they can increase revenue in their business by not answering the telephone. Answering the telephone is a $10-15 dollar an hour job. Tax resolution specialists should be doing the $150-250 an hour job, which is actual tax resolution work. 

If you don't have enough work to justify hiring a full-time receptionist, you can go to a virtual office center, like Regis, for $150-$250 a month and route your calls through there.

There are also answering services that you can get for as little as $30-$40 a month that will answer your phone.

That is the number one thing - to get away from answering the phone.

If you can do that, you don't have to worry about missing a call when you are on hold with the IRS trying to get transcripts for 3 tax resolution clients all at the same time.

Little things like that make a big difference. I'm a big systems person. You need to have a system for everything to run a business effectively. The simplest way you can manage your time is to never answer the telephone. 

Control Your Business Communication, Design Your Life

There is no way I could have spent 3 years traveling all around the United States and the world without having designed my communication systems. I set the expectation ahead of time that I am not reachable to my tax clients by phone. I can then travel around the world and still make a solid income from tax resolution clients.

I do want to point out––not answering your phone is not an original idea––it is straight out of The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.

Want more insight from Jassen Bowman? Check out Interview with Jassen Bowman: His Start in Tax Resolution and Marketing.