Every week I get mail shots from bookkeepers asking this question and all of them end up in the great round under desk filing cabinet.

The thing is that when you write you are putting the control over whether the accountant wants to talk to you in their hands rather than yours.

For larger practices you wouldn't be able to get to the accountant that you need to talk to by phone either but for small practices you will on occassion get accountants who will talk to you where they would not have answered (or often even read) a mail shot / email campaign.

Its nothing personal but try to put yourself in the accountants shoes.

Every day they will be getting a stack of letters from software vendors (lots and lots and lots of software vendors!!!), outsourcing companies, taxation service suppliers, payroll companies, insolvency practices, stationary suppliers, etc. All of which gets get filtered to the bin trying to find the stuff that you need to read. Then of course you have the CV's and the bookkeepers mailshots. I read them before binning them but I know that many do not.

You open your email and its the same story because that free report that you signed up for came at a cost. (The one's that bug me are the one's that you open because they pretend to be what they are not, such as "Bookkeeper needed" then you open it for it to read that if you join xyz they will push your services to their extensive exclusive network (of people who mistakenly downloaded a report!). People that email CV's are to my mind easier to ignore than those who have gone to the effort of sending a letter.

Worth noting that attaching a read receipt just ensures that it is never opened in anything more than the viewer panel.

Then the phone starts ringing and you get pushy sales people who cannot understand why you won't take the great offer that they are offering for this software / service that you don't need but will only cost you £100 rather than their nortmal £20 million but only if you sign up there and then as its a one day thing. And you are trying to get them off the phone without being too rude in order to open your lines so that clients can get through or you can actually phone people that you need to.

So... Welcome to the life of the people that you are trying to contact!

Not all accountants will talk to you, sometimes you will get rude responses, but still when someone comes on the phone quite sheepishly rather than in agressive sales mode the accountant is more likely to give you five minutes of their time so your initial approach that scored results was to my mind the right one and your move to an email / snail mail campaign would be a mistake.

My advice is to keep phoning. Its shown positive feedback results for you so far so why abandon it for something that is less likely to result in work and may actually allienate you from local practices.

Just my opinion but as one of the group that you would probably be phoning / emailing / mailing I hope that you appreciate a bit of feedback from the other side of the desk.

Good luck,

kind regards,

Shaun.

p.s. The more you phone the better your confidence will get. You will need good confidence on the phone for Credit control and HMRC so look at it as practice for that with the possible benefit that you could get some work out of it (But think of that as a cherry on the cake rather than the cake itself).

Thank you, all good advice! I took over a client from a bookkeeper recently whose entire workload came from one Accountant, so I'm hoping over time this will be a good source of income. Networking sounds good and something that I've been meaning to do but just never got round to.....time to step things up a gear in 2015!

The 15% is good advice - not just from a professional objectivity point, but also from a business risk point. Always spread your customer base so you reduce exposure to the loss of any.

Ive always put off ringing new Accountants to gain work. Part of this is my natural shyness with people I dont know, although I managed it well enough in Corporate Banking when on the hunt for new business. The bigger part is because I do this role without the benefit of formal training, but via experience gained although Ive had no complaints from Accountants and I ask regularly to see if they wish me to do anything differently and in fact have gained the opposite with a few compliments. Got to be easier starting on the phones then extend it to in person with networking.

Go for networking John, its gets easier each time you do it, I am okay on a one to one but not good in a crowd, but hey ho what have you got to loose!!!!

Go for it and be bold.

Good luck!

A good question, well comment, I learnt in my corporate days '' tell me about your business'' is a good opener, which hopefully will allow you to pick out common ground as they ramble on, so you can start to chat back. People always love it when someone is interested in their business. Don't forget your businesscards. Good luck