LinkedIn and Social Selling for accounting and advisory firms

If you are a fee earner or marker in a professional services firm, it can be difficult to know how to truly embrace LinkedIn. It’s huge opportunity, yet, advisory firms don’t operate like most businesses.

Selling and marketing is often more subtle and more consultative and so many firms struggle to know how to get the best from it, whilst not looking to needy or aggressive.

This is why many opt for paid advertising and avoid the huge opportunity of leveraging the subject matter expertise of their fee earners. Whilst the marketing team understand the huge opportunity that can be grasped, they often find it difficult to engage fee earners in the big opportunity that LinkedIn presents.

The fee earners struggle

Fee earners, for the most part, have never been trained in marketing or sales. In fact, for many fee earners the very concept of selling sends chills down their spine.

When a firm is looking to embrace LinkedIn, they need the buy in and involvement of their experts and fee earners, the firms brand and track record will go so far, but the fee earner is the linchpin of winning the clients account.

There are three struggles when it comes to leveraging the influence of fee earners on LinkedIn:

• They don’t see the benefit: Fee earner see posting as a vanity item rather than how it can increase their standing and attract clients.
• They don’t have the time: Fee earners have limited time and often struggle with posting and using LinkedIn efficiently and effectively.
• They don’t want to sell: Fee earners generally sell through relationships and feel that using LinkedIn requires them to be pushy or pitchy.

Let’s look at these three struggles in more detail.

Fee earners don’t see the benefit

Despite what you may think salespeople and recruiters are not the most active group on LinkedIn. It’s easy to come to that conclusion, as our feed and inboxes are deluged with marketing messages and content.

However, the reality is that the C-suite are the most active users on LinkedIn. The myth is that CFOs and CEOs don’t spend time on LinkedIn, isn’t true. The C-suite is the most active group on the platform.

Interestingly, though, they aren’t the most prolific posters. They log in to consume content. Many fee earners will not appreciate that 3–4 times per day C-level leadership will open the app and scroll to discover interesting content.

This is the opportunity for your subject matter experts.

Posting 2–3 times per week, with a mix of bite-sized insights (less than 60 second reads) that is easy to read and obvious in it’s value will not only increase traffic to a firms website you can curate discussions and conversations without ever needed to send a slimy sales pitch.

The reward of increased visibility by being very focused in their activity pays dividends. When a fee earner can see 1,000+ people, many of which are CEOs and CFOs paying attention to their insights, they embrace it and commit to it.

The key to that increased visibility is found it avoiding key behaviours which the algorithm de-ranks — these include:

• Over-use of long form content
• Excessive reposting of company content
• Over-marketing / promotion
• Sharing too many external links

As soon as a content structure is put in place and fee earners understand the way the algorithm works, they can see quickly how their effort makes an impact and they get the reward of the right people taking notice of their insights.

Fee earners don’t have the time

It’s true to say that LinkedIn needs an investment of time in order to achieve any success. Again, another myth is that you need to invest a significant amount of time to achieve success.

Fee earners can, in 30-minutes or less each day, reach hundreds and thousands of potential clients if they do the right activities. Focus and clearly defined activities, including what, when and how, can turn hours of tinkering into highly productive actions.

For example, posts are not read for minutes, in fact a very popular post which gets high visibility may only be read for 45–60 seconds. In many cases, time is used up by over-producing content.

Many subject matter experts feel that they need to fully make a point in one post, this leads to a lot of intensive work. In fact, in many cases, long posts can harm someone's account.

Short notes and thoughts do better and this allows fee earners to make their point over a series of posts rather than trying to do justice to a complex topic. Posts are not meant to be blogs.

In fact many insight pieces contain the elements of multiple posts. When fee earners realise this, they can repurpose points they’ve already made in long form and repost them as a series of shortened versions.

In 30-minutes or so, a fee earner can start discussions with content, which in turn can form the basis of a business conversation. Providing all the answers in long detailed content pieces often reduces engagement simply because the piece of content provided all the answers.

The evidence suggests that shortened content, giving high-level points, encourages more questions and inbound enquiries. Naturally, if a potential client asks a question in the DMs or comments, that’s a better outcome for the fee earner and the firm.

As an example: One recent fee earner going through my training workshop increased their content impressions by 293% and secured 2 inbound enquiries from CFOs, just by simplifying their posting.

There are only three core parts to frequent LinkedIn:

• Building your network with potential clients
• Sharing insightful bites of content for those potential clients
• Creating discussions (not pitch slapping)

These can easily be done in short burst of activity and with a structured plan do not need to take more than 20–30 mins per day.

Without a plan, you can quickly waste time scrolling, over-producing, navigating the platform or coming up with ideas for posting.

Fee earners don’t want to sell

Fee earners do want to sell, they just don’t want to have to be that pushy person. Clients need experts, it should never look like the expert needs clients. This creates a dilemma for experts as the concept of ‘self promotion’ and selling runs counter to their instincts. so how do we make this shift?

The word selling often is loaded with negative experiences of used car salesmen and the like.

Social Selling is very different, it’s relationship and trust driven. on LinkedIn content forms a part of that process, but there are simple relationship skills fee earners can learn to adopt in a digital space which mean they can network without looking needy.

Social Selling is simply about having a structured process to become known, liked and trusted. Thankfully LinkedIn isn’t TikTok, you don’t need to do any performative dance moves, you just need to be present and and amongst the right people.

Once a fee earner has a set of tools to engage their own audience, the pressure and nervousness starts to ease. They can see how their content is adding to their influence, they have simplified their approach and are able to engage in discussion with CFOs and C-level leadership as easy as they would at an in-person meeting.

It creates a win-win

Firms that harness the influencer of their fee earners see a range of benefits.

Marketing naturally will see the first shoots of benefit with increased brand reach, website traffic and whitepaper downloads, but the firm will also see an increased lead flow and more fee earners introducing business to the firm.

There are a number of ways to leverage LinkedIn for professional services firms, there isn’t a one-size fits all approach. However, if you are considering LinkedIn as a more pivotal role in your firms growth, please reach out to me and I’ can help you build a strategy that your fee earners will embrace and excel at.

Contact me directly dean@maverrik.io