Where Relationships Meet Tech: Balancing Automation and Human Connection

Cassi Klayman: Foreign. Welcome to Amplify, the podcast for accounting firm growth. I'm your host, Cassi Klayman. This season we're focusing on business development and business development tech and how bds are using tech to win. Today we're discussing how, uh, business development professionals in accounting are using tech to build their business. In this episode we're talking with Mike Jones, founder of Resound Creative and more recently Kindred Beatty. We will discuss trends in the accounting industry, what tools people are using and how people are tracking their investments and more. Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. Before we jump in, can you share a little bit more about yourself that I didn't cover in that one sentence?

Mike Jones: Uh, yeah, I'll try to still keep it short because there's probably more that I could share then people really want to know.

Cassi Klayman: They can come talk to you and ask you.

Mike Jones: Yeah, so, yeah, you mentioned Resound. Uh, Resound is the agency, marketing agency and consultancy that I've been running since 2009. CEO, uh, managing partner there. And we work with clients on all sorts of things from brand, like rebrands and brand strategy. Through all the creative website video content, lots, uh, of writing for our clients now, which has been really fun, um, and uh, even doing some ads, uh, which has been really exciting. I think the last couple years we've had more and more, uh, clients, especially in the accounting industry, trying to dabble with ads, especially on LinkedIn. Um, so we're doing some of that for them on that side. And then, yeah, last year started another business, uh, with my partner Mark. And we, uh, call that Kindred. And Kindred is all about, um, developing processes and tools and systems for creating relationships for accounting professionals, primarily for the purpose of creating client relationships. But, uh, at our heart we believe that every single, uh, person in a BD type role, even if you're just uh, a CPA and you're, you gotta, you gotta keep building your book of business, right? You're, you're putting into practice BD practices, uh, within your firm, um, that really, at the end of the day it's about building relationships and. Right. We're in relationship building and relationship keeping business. And so everything starts and ends with relationship and our philosophy and how we guide our clients through, whether it's building an outreach program or tracking your sales and your deals in a CRM, or even like fine tuning and creating a repeatable sales process that you can bring in others in your firm into do over and over. So, uh, that's probably the most, uh, indicative part of my Kind of role and what I do to our conversation today. Um, we do work with a lot of different tools. Um, we've been working a lot with sales navigator and LinkedIn, uh, several CRMs, especially HubSpot. That's like the big one. Um, and even working with clients on like, hey, how can you just improve process even with a spreadsheet, as crazy as that is? And then on all those things, there's been a lot of conversation around how to apply AI, um, how to make the process more efficient, where does it make sense to use it, where does it not make sense to use it, um, where is it going to get you in trouble? And really, how do you maximize, uh, the efficiencies and some of the knowledge gain that you can get from AI tools without losing your soul in the process?

Cassi Klayman: All right, that's a lot. I love to hear it. So the first thing I want to ask. So, you know, I've been talking to people about business development and tools because of this season of the podcast. And so, you know, the thing that keeps coming up is relationships, relationships, relationships. But we know that there are a lot of accounting marketers out there who also need to deal with tools and they need to have some tech, Tech adoption. So how do you help, or, yeah, I guess how do you help your clients? Or how do you balance tech adoption with maintaining those relationship driven selling moments?

Mike Jones: Yep. So I think that's the first step is just acknowledging, like, hey, we don't want to sacrifice relationship in this process. And that's a, that's a hard line to walk. Right. A lot of tools want you to automate things. And that sounds great because there's lots of efficiencies gained from that. Or maybe there's an AI component that removes a human from the relationship at some level. Um, and we have to make those decisions as practitioners. Right. Like when we work with our clients, we're asking them, like, to what degree are you comfortable with these tools, uh, being a part of the process? Um, and then you have to use them. And that can be really hard for a lot of professionals who have maybe built a book of business. They've had success. They think, man, our relationship is going to suffer if we implement a new technology that is very process driven, it's very systematic, that doesn't feel relational. Um, and so one part of it is actually just breaking down relationships into a process and realizing, like, every relationship you have, there is processes behind it. We just kind of intuit them. We don't really think about them in a Very linear way when we're interacting with people. But like we talk about, you know, particularly in the sales process, the standard process that most prospects go through is, uh, as a prospect for your firm, I want to know you as the individual first. That's the first level of trust I need to have. The second level is what's the team, what's the company like that I would perhaps be working with? Are you the right company? Right, so right individual, right company with the team behind it. And then do you have the right services that are going to solve my problem? And that's the typical process that most people go through in making uh, a decision to work with a new service provider. Um, and this is across professional services and very applicable within accounting and advisory firms. Um, and so just realizing like that is a process that most people go through. Now sometimes they go through it in a single conversation, right? They go from the beginning of that process all the way through to the end in one 60 minute or 45 minute conversation. Most people don't though. They do that in steps and they do that in interactions with you and with your company and with marketing materials and with people within your firm that you're putting in front of them over the course of maybe days, months, maybe even a year. Right. And so just understanding that like there is a process in relationship building, um, it's not this like, oh, if I employ process which therefore I can employ tools, I can employ software and tech into that, but if I have a process that somehow is not going to be relational, um, there's a way to do it in a relational way that's authentic to your voice. And I think that's a really key part of this too is maintaining that it's a one to one relationship we're building. So we find tools that really amplify one to one. Um, and so what we found too, the second thing that really helps, besides acknowledging that there is a process already, the second part is identifying that process in a manual way first so that we can then look at efficiencies gained through automations or through AI and tools that help us do those things, but in a way that we know already works. So if we've tried it, we've piloted it in a manual way, we've documented the process, we're really clear on what that map looks like, then we can bring in a tool that can accelerate that. Right? So like for instance, LinkedIn sales navigator, we do a lot of work on there, doing outreach programs and there's a way to use that that's very manual, it's a lot of work. Um, but what we found is that by starting manual in that process, you learn, oh, these are the things that work. This is the messaging that works, this is the process that works. If those things aren't already in place and documented, it really helps to do it manually. And then you can iterate, you can change, you can, you can tweak it. And then once it's like, oh, this is a pretty standard process that we're running over and over and it's working, let's find tools. There's one, uh, that we're using called dripify that allows you to automate that process of outreach on LinkedIn, ah, through an external third party tool. Um, and because we already have the process developed and solidified, we know it works, we know that it's still relational, people respond positively to it. Then we can automate that and scale it from there with tools like dripify. So, um, that's been really helpful is just helping people look at like, hey, there's, there needs to be a process, it can still be relational. And then there are tools that will help us accelerate that process.

Cassi Klayman: So you mentioned at the top of that something about, I mean, so I heard a couple, I heard automation a lot. So, you know, one of the questions I'm going to have for you later is around, you know, what, what do accounting firms do at the beginning? But before we get into that, you know, I'm sure there are firm leaders out there who maybe don't want to hire whatever, who knows what the thought process is. But I'm sure there are firm leaders who are like, we could just use AI to solve our problems. We can use automation to solve our problems. So could you talk a little bit about, you know, these tools that people could use or you know, uh, like, let's say we're in step five of the phase of getting this all set up. So could you talk a little bit about automation versus AI in the business development pipeline?

Mike Jones: Yeah, I mean AI at some level is probably included in almost every step right now because you can apply AI in your conceptual phase of, you know, kind of even having AI help you document your own like, BD process, um, and coming up with a standardized way of doing it in your firm. Uh, but you could also then apply AI, uh, in your creative process, whether you're creating messaging within your outreach programs, uh, if you're creating templates for following up with prospects, or if you're doing some cross selling inside the firm with existing accounts like Templating that m. AI can be a fantastic tool to help you concept, to help you create the messaging for it. The downside is always that AI is only as smart as the data put into it. And so when you're relying with an out of the box tool that's relying on an open, like an OpenAI model, right? If you're talking about ChatGPT or if you're talking about, you know, Microsoft's own model, which is basically built on OpenAI as well, um, they're, they're only as smart as the data that's been put into it, right? And you just have to know when I ask it a question to formulate a response. Maybe I'm trying to create some kind of messaging template. Um, uh, uh, let's say the use case is I want to, I want to create a, a uh, message that I'm going to provide to every practitioner in my firm to talk about a service line that they don't, they don't personally offer. It's a cross sell, right? How do we introduce that to a client who's not using it? And we have a template in our CRM for it. So I'm going to plug in some messaging from ChatGPT or from Copilot. Um, just know like Copilot and ChatGPT are giving that same answer to every other firm, right. Who's asking a similar question. And so if you don't prompt it to also make it your own message. Here is our brand, here is my personality, maybe like giving some prompts, say hey, this is a template for a practitioner to use. But then make it your own, you know, you know your client best that you're going to be sending this to. So personalize it, right? Make it unique and authentic and relational. And that requires a level of personalization that only that practitioner would know about that client. So building your template in such a way that it's not just cookie cutter. Copilot gave it to me, I plopped it in and now we're all sending it. Is that the worst thing in the world? Maybe not, but it's not really relational. Um, and so just providing steps and process that is relational I think is really helpful. And a lot of these tools are like, you know, they would prefer that, you know, like we work a lot with HubSpot. HubSpot does not really want you sending like mass emails to all your clients or all your prospects that are not personalized, that don't have value, that don't really help them in any way. Right? That actually hurts HubSpot. Um, that's like counter to what they want you to do at some level. So like, it just benefits everybody if you treat these tools as tools and say, hey, how can we still be relational in this process? So we're going to use the tool, but we're not going to leave it with the tool. We kind of have our own rule, and our rule is nothing touches someone else outside the company if it hasn't been touched by a human first. So we never just copy paste. We never just like grab the answer from AI and plug it in. Um, now you get into at scale, like maybe outreach programs. There is a level of AI tools out there that will automate some of that for you. I would caution people, uh, run really small samples first, like really baby step every single step in that process. Because AI can quickly start putting messaging out in front of very much the wrong people, either at the wrong point in the process or even like looping and sending too many messages, too many outreach messages. Um, just as much as like, do you trust everything that you get out of Copilot when you ask it a question? You should assume some level of like, no, there's something in here that's probably wrong, I gotta go find it. Right? In the same way, if you're doing an outreach program and you're gonna like, automate that through some AI tool that's guessing who, who all this, who this should be going in front of this outreach, um, just be careful and assume that it's doing some of it wrong. Right. Um, I liken it to. And I've even heard that like, um, Sam Altman, founder of uh, of OpenAI, has said, uh, ChatGPT and really AI as a whole. But especially ChatGPT is at the level of like a college intern, right? In terms of its ability to do what you need it to do. It's really fast. It's like I tell our team all the time, I'm like, it's like the fastest college intern you'll ever have, but it gets things wrong. And it doesn't know how to ask the most, like, deep questions because it just doesn't have the experience, it doesn't have the knowledge to do that. Uh, it's not really knowledge either. That's a whole other thing that we could get into, uh, how AI actually works. Um, but it doesn't really know anything. Uh, that's, I think, a hard concept for a lot of people to kind of wrap their heads around. But, um, it's basically the equivalent of a really, really, really fast college intern.

Cassi Klayman: So like, it also is really flattering. It'll only tell you what you want to hear.

Mike Jones: Yes, yes. These generative AI models are hilariously like flattering. And sadly it's not even hilarious because sadly it's gotten people in a lot of trouble. Um, it's actually cost people their lives, um, in the way that it doesn't want to tell you what you don't want to hear or what it thinks you don't want to hear.

Cassi Klayman: Yeah, I mean there's an element I think that you're, you're not really, you're not really saying this, but you're also talking about having the ability. Well, you're talking about the human touch, which I think is important. We, you know, in marketing, obviously, like you don't want to be doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, doing, because how are you going to stand out? Um, but you know, having the ability to continue to ask those clarifying, curious questions to even AI, but anybody. So maintaining the human skill set I think is something that you're still talking about. And you're also, you know, touching on using it as a tool. So I think, um, you know, if we think about even just the uh, Ames population, we have a range of solo marketers to marketers with multiple bd, to many, many teams of marketing professionals on a team. So if we're talking about using these technologies as a tool, do you have any, um, advice or suggestions on how marketing and BD teams can partner to select some of these good technologies for their use?

Mike Jones: Yeah, I was thinking about this. Um, I think these tools and even just, I think our digital world, um, is forcing things to blur. The line between BD or sales is, you know, we'll use the dirty S word. Uh, I know in accounting we don't want to talk about that, but if we talk about like this, we implemented

Cassi Klayman: cross serve at my firm,

Mike Jones: sales and marketing. Like yes, they are differentiated roles, right. And there's different aspects to each of them. But we're seeing more and more that they are getting blended by the tools. So a great case in point. Um, so LinkedIn has an ad, uh, product that is sponsored in mail messages. So you can actually run ads that are one to one messages. Uh, it's a template. You have a templated message and you can kind of personalize a little bit with name and that kind of stuff. But it runs as an ad. Like it's actually run through LinkedIn's ad platform. So that would traditionally be facilitated by a Marketer, right? Or an agency run through a marketer on the team. And yet it's a one to one message run through a personal account from the firm. Well, that's bd, right? We're seeing like, there's this really interesting like kind of mashing together of uh, BD and marketing more and more. And so I would recommend to firms, you know, one start like having conversations. Right? Uh, maybe that's where it starts. It was a quarterly meetup and you roundtable sales and marketing in the cross section of the two where things working, celebrate the wins and uncover the issues right at the intersection of BD and marketing in your firm. And then I would find probably some unique and pilot some unique projects together, right? So maybe it's like, hey, take that ad, that ad product as an example and say, hey, M Marketing would like to run more advertising. We want uh, to try some things. Why don't we try running these sponsored InMail messages through LinkedIn and then bring in BD to say, hey, help us like understand how we can make this uh, a seamless experience. Because at the end of the day like the prospect doesn't care. They don't know and don't care that there's like marketers on one side and BD professionals on the other. All they care about is can I get to know somebody who I think is an expert who can solve my problems right from this firm and can I trust this firm to do that for me? And that is a joint effort that requires everyone to be working together. Um, that's going to take time. You're going to have to work through that over a long period of time. But one way to do that is find a pilot project and say, hey, let's collaborate on this. Let's maybe think about this differently where instead of like, oh, uh, there's a marketing campaign over here, we do the whole thing, we run it and then we just hand leads off to bd, right? That's kind of the traditional format that I think a lot of us are used to. And instead let's say, hey, let's bring BD into the whole process. Um, or even talk with BD and say, hey, like, is there some initiative this year that would really like move the needle for you guys in a specific industry or specific, maybe there's a specific service line you really need to grow. Um, let's put our heads together. How can we make this a joint marketing and BD campaign, um, and really work together on it? Because we're seeing like, even within our own efforts within our own firm. Like that line is very blurred. Um, our BD specialist on our team has to coordinate weekly with our marketing team because they're both on LinkedIn doing a lot of stuff. Um, and I think, you know, it's easy for me. I work a lot on, you know, I think a lot about LinkedIn. I work a lot on LinkedIn. And um, that's the platform that I think you see it most like kind of getting mashed together. But that's happening across the board, right? It's not just like, hey, let's run ads over here and then throw over the leads over the wall to, you know, somebody to close the lead. But, um, that's just not how it works anymore. If you want to be really smart about it at least.

Cassi Klayman: Yeah, you make a good point also about from the perspective of the client or the lead or the prospect. Like, keep it simple for them. Like they don't, they don't care. You know, keep it simple for them and then keep it simple for yourselves as well. I mean, I think that's kind of what you're getting at. Um, I do have a random question. Do you know if this, this kind of merge of marketing and business development professionals is happening in other industries?

Mike Jones: Yeah, it is. And like I pay a lot of attention to the tech world. Um, historically I've done a lot of work there and we still have some clients in that case. And in my experience that kind of the world of marketing within tech is usually about 10 years ahead of where the accounting advisory industry is at. Um, for probably pretty obvious reasons. Uh, and fine reasons like that's fine. Um, but you know, I've been seeing over the last like probably about eight years that there's a lot of push to blend marketing and sales efforts together in that industry. Uh, even all the way up to like in a lot of tech companies now, marketing and sales report to a single C level, who is often now the chief revenue officer. Um, and so you see like even the hierarchy of the structure, the authority, uh, the decision making tree within the organization that marketing and sales are kind of being put together in order to kind of force that integration of the two. Uh, and when you see them going to market, right, you're thinking like it's really a lot of product marketing is the approach that they take into the technology world. And a product marketing campaign will include top line kind of like ads and brand awareness, uh, and product awareness. But it also includes how do we go to market directly through direct outreach. Right. Get the SDRs involved in that process. And it's the same talk track all the way down. So you're seeing the messaging, even from top line advertising and marketing messaging all the way through to scripts for SDRs who are doing outreach or those that are closing the deals, uh, trying to align all of them together. Because that's where, like, if you don't have that alignment, there's so much disconnect for the prospect. It's like, well, I read your website or I looked at an ad, or I saw some things you were doing at an event that's really cool. And then I get in front of, like, a traditional salesperson. Right. Or someone who's doing bd and it's like, well, they're saying very different things. Uh, they're on a different wavelength than what the marketing was saying. Um, now I'm confused. And we talk a lot, you know, on the marketing side of our business. You know, friction in marketing and friction in sales is how you kill the business. Um, anytime you have disconnect, anytime you're producing, like, some kind of, like, mixed messaging, um, any kind of friction in your visuals, any kind of, like, this process is hard for the prospect. Uh, whether that's like clicking too many buttons or like, getting on a phone call is hard, or like getting the kind of communication they want to get and the means that they want to get it, you're just adding more friction, which is going to slow down or kill the deal. Um, so, you know, wherever you can find, get rid of the friction, make it just super easy.

Cassi Klayman: So what kind of tools can these teams use to reduce those friction and those touch points without feeling robotic? Because I do think, you know, I can just hear firm leaders saying, well, I don't. I only want to talk to them. I don't care. You know, who I don't want. I don't say they don't care. But what is some automation that these teams can use to reduce that friction without feeling like it's a robot or anything like that?

Mike Jones: Yeah, I mean, it does start with, like, having top line messaging and making sure that you're carrying that messaging all the way through down into, like, sales scripts. And, you know, I think a lot of accounting and advisory firms are not going to be using scripts at the sales level. Right. But even some kind of, like, bullet points. Hey, we're running this campaign. If we're a marketer, I'm running a campaign. Here's what it's about. Uh, here are some talking points that might be helpful when you get on A call with them, right? Because they've already heard these things in the marketing, in the messaging already, or they're seeing them. So just like having alignment, that's not really a tool issue necessarily. Although you, you know, there's great project management tools, communication tools inside your organization, you know, utilize teams. That's a great tool that a lot of orgs have access to. Um, and start, like, thinking creatively about how do you, how do you cross collaborate, uh, and making sure that that messaging is, is making it all the way through. Um, but then allow them to personalize it. Right. So don't necessarily give them like an elevator pitch. They don't need that. They're not going to do it. Um, but you say, here's the talking points, here's some ways to think about those talking points, uh, from the perspective of the person that you're actually talking to and the information you already have about them. Right? And let them personalize it to that conversation. They're going to love that. They're going to do that probably naturally. Um, AI tools are great at giving you some direction on that. I love using Copilot or ChatGPT to say, hey, I'm drafting a script with some bullet points for this campaign we're launching. Um, what would a BD professional need to know and how could they personalize it? It'll give you some really good prompts, um, that can guide that. Um, um, so that's one, um, you know, your CRM, that's a really core tool. Um, I think, you know, one of the things that comes up every time with CRM is like, oh, you know, it's like, I don't want to use these templates because it's not personalized. And yet at the same time, like, they don't even send the emails anyway. Right. So, um, in my opinion, it's like, what's more important in this process that you are uber personalized or that you actually just sent the email to your clients that introduced the new service line? Or, you know, hey, we made an acquisition in cybersecurity, and so we want to let you know that we have this offering now. Um, it's sending the email, like, get it out there, get the communication across. If it feels a little bit flat, great that now you know that. And so what can you do to, like, on the next round, make that better, uh, and make that more personalized, more relational. So, um, you know, you get into automation, it's really hard. Um, you know, the more automated it gets, the less personal it's going to be. Um, that's again, where I love testing the messaging through manual processes first and really refining them to a point where it's like, this is as personal as we can get in a template. Right. And it resonates with them and then ultimately, like, being very targeted. Right. So the more targeted you are with who you're reaching out to or who you're talking to, you can refine that template down to, like, okay, I know exactly who my ideal client Persona is. I know how they think. I know what messaging has worked in the past. Um, I know the context they're a part of, like, in their life. And so I can craft messaging that is really tailored and feels personal. Right. Um, you know, I'll just pull back the curtain here. For people like, we work with marketers in accounting firms. That's our icp. Right. Um, one of the things we found is that every single marketing director across the board is overwhelmed. So when we talk about being overwhelmed and we acknowledge that experience that marketers have, we know that it's going to resonate. And we don't need to know, like, every last detail of the person across the table from us in that marketing message or in that outreach message that's being automated. But we know so much about our prospect because we have studied and we want to know them, we want to relate to them. And so we know, like, hey, that's one of the key things that they're dealing with is just the overwhelm. Um, and so how can we talk to them? So I know it's a little bit like nobody wants to like, wizard of Oz it and see behind the curtain, but, um, I think it's helpful. I think you just have to acknowledge that that's how it works.

Cassi Klayman: I think the people listening to this podcast appreciate that.

Mike Jones: Try to be honest.

Cassi Klayman: Yeah, well, you know, I think you touched on a couple things. I think, um, we, as people, you know, marketers, whoever it is, we forget that the biggest lessons you can learn are from when you fail. And failure doesn't have to be big, catastrophic failures. Right. But we forget that it's okay to just send the email and realize what we could have done better and then do better the next time. You know, there's. I can think of a million quotes where it's like, just. Just do the thing and then figure it out later. Not to say that we're doing that, but, you know, remember that it's okay to fail because that's how you're going to improve. And the other thing I'M hearing from you is I'm just gonna say that. So I kept thinking of a swimming pool. So, like, you're talking about technologies and you put them in place and you have them ready to go, but they're only getting you 80% of the way there. We put on our swimsuits, we get our floaties, we have our sparkling water, we have our pool toys. But the fun doesn't happen until you jump in the pool. Right. That's the 20%. That's where all the good stuff is happening. But you have to be prepared. You have to have the swim lessons. You can take this if you want. I live. That was what I was thinking.

Mike Jones: I love this metaphor. I think it's great. You just gotta jump in at some point. You just have to jump, right.

Cassi Klayman: And got your arm wing floaties on. Like, just trust that you'll be okay.

Mike Jones: Yep. Yeah. And you know, will it be a little uncomfortable when you first get in too cold? Probably. Right. And then you, you get comfortable and you, you learn. Right. You, you get used to it. Um, and then eventually, you know, you do that enough. You do that enough days in a row. You're. You're like a fish in water. Right.

Cassi Klayman: Uh, go to the Olympics.

Mike Jones: Yeah. Go to the. That's how Michael Phelps did it. He just got in the pool every day.

Cassi Klayman: Yeah. And he ate 15,000 calories a day. But that's a different story.

Mike Jones: Yeah.

Cassi Klayman: Um, so you've talked a lot. We've, we're kind of dancing around it. But I'm curious what your team uses. What are some tools that are like non negotiables in your team or that you see other, you have other teams use? I know you're going to say LinkedIn, sales navigator, but what other? Like, give me some, give me lots of tools.

Mike Jones: Yeah. Sales Navigator is a big one for us. We've already covered that. Um, a CRM of some kind. I just. And you know, I have a case. You know, if you're in a firm where, like no one is tracking anything, then maybe start with a spreadsheet. But I would say sooner than later, get into a CRM. Even if it's like really basic, um, and only one or two people are using it. Um, you just find that it forces you to mature your process from a BD standpoint and it gives you the tools and the structure kind of right off the bat. Now, obviously, like, maybe don't jump into the deep end of that pool. Like, don't go get Salesforce if you've never done Anything with sales tracking. Maybe start with HubSpot CRM, um, and just do the free version, right, like see how far you can get with it. There's plenty of others out there. Pipedrive is another one that's really easy, uh, and very simple to set up. So I just encourage people to have like some way to track deals and I would start with that. Just track deals. You don't even have to track prospects right off the bat. Track something that has a dollar amount on it and just build it out from there and start small. Um, we're using Dripify now for outreach on top of LinkedIn and I highly recommend, if you're already starting to mature your usage of outreach on LinkedIn, that's a fantastic kind of tool to layer on top. Um, we're a little bit agnostic when it comes to AI tools. We use ChatGPT a lot. Ah, from a concepting standpoint, uh, some rough messaging. Try not to let that messaging hit the public without a lot of editing. Um, we use Claude. I love Claude for messaging. I think it's a better messaging tool, uh, writer, a writing tool than ChatGPT or even Copilot. Um, so that's, that's an interesting one I think people should try, probably check out. Um, those are kind of like the main tool set for us. We're still pretty like, it's pretty basic. It's not like we need like 40 tools to run BD, uh, and most of our clients don't need like a ton of tools. Um, you just need a small handful and you can get pretty far. And then obviously as you scale, whether that's scaling your BD and your outreach and your cross selling or as you scale, um, your organization, um, then you might want to look at some additional tools, um, that'll help you in that process. I do recommend, you know, it's a little bit, you know, on the operational side, like having pm, a PM tool of some kind, uh, will eventually become really helpful for you, uh, as you're looking at managing initiatives. Um, this is not a technology tool but it comes up so often with teams that we work with. Um, we use a business system called Entrepreneurial Operating System or eos. I know some people are familiar with that. There's other ones out there, like I'm not going to tell you that's the only one and none of the others work. But I would recommend that, I would recommend having some kind of operational system to keep track of the work that you're doing, to be on a frequency of meetings. I love the L10 meetings and the way that we can track work week to week with our teams using eos. So that's just one reason I love that particular system. But, um, there's others out there. There's like the Gazelle system and plenty of others scaling up. That's the Gazelle scaling up one. But um, I just really recommend having some kind of way that you coordinate on work on a weekly basis. And you can see it somewhere. There's a dashboard of the things you're working on. I'm a huge fan of like hidden work is the death will be the death of your organization. Um, that's where things get dropped. Um, and so don't let anything be hidden. Show it. Have some kind of weekly sync to talk about it. Work through issues. Reprioritize as you need to. Uh, I'm a big fan of strategizing on a 90 day sprint. Um, so like every 90 days you're resetting your projects. Um, but then for the 90 days between the planning you're going. Right, you're just executing. So, uh, we don't take on new initiatives in the middle of a 90 day sprint or we try not to. Um, so those things are really helpful.

Cassi Klayman: Those are some great suggestions. I also think that second to last thing you talked about, tracking your work and everything, you know, from a, even from a perspective of someone who, I mean, I can think of a million different scenarios just in our audience about why this would be good. Track your time to get a seat at the table. Track what you're doing to get more people on your team. Track your time so you know, you can prove what's working and what's not working. There are a million reasons why it's a good idea to track your projects and what you're working on and what doesn't work and what did.

Mike Jones: Yep. And um, you know, one thing that we do within that system is just saying, hey, here's the project we're going to work on for the next 90 days. What does done look like? What are we aiming at? Right. Like what's the um, end goal here? And when you chop it down to 90 days and not like a whole year, you start to get granular enough that you're like, okay, I think that might actually be achievable. And we can track it week to week and we can kind of see are we hitting that mark or are we going to be off the mark when we get to the end of the 90 days. If you set goals that are purely annual, um, that's fine, but they're much harder to track. And I think most of the time, you find you start hitting Q3 and you're like, we're either way off track, and it's really too late now. There's nothing we can do by Q3 or Q4 to get back on track with that goal. Or you kind of, like, blew that goal out of the water because it was super conservative, and now you're having to reset your goals halfway through the year. Um, I like 90 days. I think every quarter is a good frequency, and you kind of look at your goals. Um, and I love having scorecards. Uh, we do that with our clients. Anytime we're working on a campaign for them, it has a scorecard. We're tracking the metrics. What are we aiming at? How are we doing on that? Hey, there's something wrong here, because the metrics are telling us that. All right, what can we do to optimize that? What can we do to fix that? Like, one case in point. Um, we had a client we were working with on an outreach program. Uh, we had concepted the campaign, and we said, hey, we're going to be sending these prospects a survey at some point in the process, we're going to warm them up with a couple messages, and then we're going to send them a survey. A link to a survey. The link didn't work. People did not want to do it. They did not want to fill out a survey. Surprise, surprise. I mean, we should probably already figure that out. So what did we do? Well, we pivoted. The client actually recommended this. Well, client's husband actually recommended this, which was awesome. And he had told her. He was like, hey, um, what if you just ask the questions from the survey as messages? And we did that, and it means that we got the data that we were looking for, we engaged the prospect, we built a relationship, and it went really fast. What we found was, like, two messages and a survey link was taking us a week to get to the survey link and then finding out they don't want to fill it out. Right. And then the prospect basically is like, well, now we got to start over and warm them back up again, right to another conversation. What we found was like, if you start just asking the questions as individual messages, we could get through them m all in 48 hours. Um, because you captured them at a point where they were ready to like, oh, this is a conversation. We're just going to have a conversation on LinkedIn. Um, and you got questions already teed up and Ready to go. Um, and they loved it. People responded. Some of them would write paragraphs in their answer. Um, and you're like, wow, that's a super engaged prospect. Um, so like just things like that where like we wouldn't have caught that if we hadn't had a metric that said we had so many survey links we need to send and we want so many percentage of response to those survey links up front. Like we set goals. If we didn't know that, we wouldn't have caught that as quickly to say, hey, this isn't going to work, let's pivot and try something else. So, um, yeah, that's just, I love metrics. That's another one. Like have some kind of tool to track what you're doing.

Cassi Klayman: Well, yeah, so you just, I mean a couple things you just said there, I think in the same vein of like, it's okay to fail. Like failure in this moment was just okay, we didn't reach our metric. How do we change? It's not just like, okay, we need a new metric. It's like, okay, go back and like work through the problem a little bit. Maybe you won't find a solution to the problem, but maybe you can just in the second iteration of that. One thing I'm hearing, you know, I think one thing I, uh, respect about the business professional, business development professionals that I've met is how agile they are. Marketers are agile too. But there is an element of, you know, you have to have like I've been working in document management personally. So like you can't update a document every single day, you can't update certain things and there has to be a level of kind of groundedness and I do appreciate the agility of, of the business, professional, business development, professional mindset. Um, and one more thing. When you were talking about making year long goal, I made a face because the idea of a year long goal to me is so overwhelming. How do you even. I'm a big fan of small wins, I'm a big fan of track, like checking in, what did I do in all aspects of life. But if you don't do that, you get to the end of the year and you're like, did I even. I reached this goal, but how did I get here? Did I even do anything? You have no information about how you got from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. So I really do appreciate that. 90 days is only a quarter. I mean that's actually, it's crazy to think about, but it's, it's a great. It's a great set of time.

Mike Jones: Yep. Yeah. And, you know, we, as a team, we track, uh, we have a weekly scorecard that we update on specific metrics that we know if we, if we move the needle on these metrics, we're. We're moving the needle on our business. Um, and that can be, you know, very highly leading metrics. So that could be things like how many invitations to events did we send out this week? Right. Uh, or how many new prospects, like target prospects, did we put into our pipeline at the very top end, just identifying them and saying we added. Not saying, but actually adding them to our process. Right. If we don't do those things, we know we don't get clients down the road. Um, and so we track those weekly, um, and we just say, hey, are we on track? We off track? If we're getting off track three, four weeks in a row, like, okay, we got a problem down the road. We know that, like, the deal flow, the deal pipeline is going to be probably dry in about three months, um, because we haven't been doing the work at the front end to make sure that there's clients in the pipeline. So, um, you know, just weekly tracking, and that's obviously, like, for marketers, that's going to probably look a little bit different. But even things like, you know, content you're publishing, how many times did you sync up with, you know, certain practitioners or BD professionals in the. On the. In the organization to say, like, how are they doing? What do they need help with? Uh, what's working, what's not working? Um, maybe you have some goal. You're saying, I'm going to have one of those a week. Great track that. If you think that's going to move the needle for you as a marketer, um, you know, come up with some other metric that you know or think is going to be really helpful for your. For your business? But, um, I just. I'm a huge fan of just tracking things, keeping on track, having the hard conversations with data. The data is going to hold you accountable. And sometimes it's like, hey, why, why didn't we hit the number? Because we just didn't do it. We didn't do it. We got distracted. Something else came up. There was a big fire with a client. You know, it's like there's. There's always a reason, and sometimes they're really good reasons. But, you know, sometimes it's just. You just need to have the conversation, okay, how do we get back on track? That's Fine. We can acknowledge that there was an issue last week. Great, let's. Let's get back on it. Is there any issue this week that we're foreseeing? Oh, yeah, it's going to happen again because of xyz. Okay. How do we mitigate that? Um, and that might even raise flags of like, hey, capacity issues. We actually need more talent. Um, we need more budget or we need to drop things. We're doing too many things. So what needs to cut? And, um, I'm a big fan of that as well.

Cassi Klayman: You know, we all are.

Mike Jones: For everything that you add, you should probably drop something.

Cassi Klayman: Yeah. If only you. Okay. We're kind of running out of time, so I want to. This question kind of, I think, is a twofold question, but you're sort of talking about cultural changes. Um, I'm curious what kind of culture changes or even, like, what are some mistakes? You see when firms want to layer on too much technology or what kind of trainings or, I mean, talk a little bit about that for these firms that they want automation and these processes you're talking about to stick long term.

Mike Jones: I think when you're. Let's just limit it for the moment to just bd. Let's say we're talking about BD functions in the firm. I would really be a strong proponent of only adding one tool at a time. Um, and even within that, I would say find a test group to run that with and develop it out and then roll it out to the whole firm. Um, I see a lot of firms who want to just like, oh, we're going to pull the trigger on a CRM. We don't. Maybe you've never even used a CRM before, and we're going to force it on everyone on day one. Um, that usually epically fails. Uh, usually you get really low adoption rates, you get really bad practices. The data within three years is incredible, incredibly dirty, and you end up basically having to redo that process later. Um, it's just I am a huge proponent of, like, take two practitioners in the firm and say, we're going to roll out a CRM and we're only going to use it with you, and we're only going to use this section of it for now. Like, maybe just say we're going to track. We're just going to track deals in the pipeline. That's it. Uh, we're not going to worry about every lead that comes into the firm, um, you know, before a conversation. Right. And then layer in from there. Right. So add more people, add more functionality and step it out. And I'd say almost any technology I use CRM because I think that's very accessible for a lot of people. But I would say almost any technology is like that. Whether you're thinking about like, oh, we're going to use a prospecting tool, or we're going to use some kind of like, research tool to identify prospects and like collect data on them, um, we're going to use some kind of other, like, cross selling tool. I just, I'm a huge fan of like, start really small, build the best practices for it that actually work for your firm, and then scale it out beyond that. And I think you'll also find like, you'll get much higher adoption rates because people will be like, oh, I see the roi. This makes sense to me. This is why I'm going to adjust my process and why I'm going to spend the time to actually do the things that are required. Because I see the value at the end of it. If they don't see it, and they won't, if you just go out and buy a tool and you just force it on them, they're like, well, what's the value? I don't understand. Right. They, uh, can see case study after case study, but when they see someone else in the firm who's been willing to use it for six months and they see the numbers and they go, oh, okay, now I get it. Now I get why we're using this.

Cassi Klayman: There's also a competitive nature to accountants or anybody really, like, not that you want to incite competition, but definitely like, oh, well, if they can do it, so can I. It's that easy. Or whatever the mindset is.

Mike Jones: Yep, yep. And then also just know, like, you're not going to get everybody. There's going to be that one stickler who's going to be like, nope, it's worked for me. Without using a tool like that, I'm just not going to do it. And you just say, okay, great. Maybe, uh, you lessen your support for those kinds of people in the firm over time and say, hey, if you're not going to do it our way, we can't help you in certain other ways. Um, and ultimately, I think when you start to use reporting and analytics within those tools to show activity, to show results, to track the sales, to track the closed deals, all of a sudden it's like, oh, if I don't play in this sandbox, I don't get credit. Um, and that is probably where you have the most leverage down the road. Right. Um, and again, that's where, like, if you don't have a metric layer to your implementation of a tool, you miss out on that opportunity to build the case for why this tool matters, um, and show it and prove it to people in the firm.

Cassi Klayman: Great advice, Mike. Um, well, I had one more question, but we can be done. Um, thank you for joining us. Can you tell the people listening where they can find you if you have a newsletter, what you got going on?

Mike Jones: Yeah. So you can check out Resound, that's our marketing agency and consultancy@resoundcreative.com and you can check out Kindred, which is our BD consultancy firm@kindredgrowth.com and I think there'll be links for those.

Cassi Klayman: I'm sure you can show them your shirt, too.

Mike Jones: Yeah. This one right here. Um, yeah. And you can always hit me up on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to find me. I'm very active on there. If you want to reach out, have a conversation. If you want to see things I'm thinking about, I post a lot of content on there. And we actually started earlier this year, we started a YouTube channel called Remark Brand, and we talk all about brand and marketing, and some of these bd, uh, things are starting to seep in there as well. So definitely check that out as well.

Cassi Klayman: Yeah, you can see the fun thumbnails that they come up with, too. I think that's a crucial part of your YouTube page.

Mike Jones: We have a lot of conversations about, uh, thumbnails, I imagine.

Cassi Klayman: Well, thanks again, Mike. That's it for another episode of Amplify, the podcast for accounting firm growth. A big thanks to all of you for listening today. And again, Mike, thank you for an engaging conversation. If you like what you heard, we'd love a review on the podcast platform you're listening to us on now. And be sure to listen to other episodes in this season. Our theme is business development and business development tech, hosted by myself and Chris Kamara. You can learn more about Amplify and our past seasons on accountingmarketing.org, look for the podcast under publications if you want to connect with me. Cassie Klayman, reach out on LinkedIn. Thanks again, and we look forward to having you join us for another episode soon.