This gathering is designed for any attendee with an interest in marketing and business development – no experience required! We’ll recap resources available to Alliance firms, including key marketing and business development contacts, and then divide our time exploring and discussing three chosen topics: client satisfaction and the latest (2023) Net Promoter Score benchmarks for the accounting industry; best practices in training staff about marketing and business development; and how members of the BDO Alliance community can better collaborate with BRN members to jointly identify prospects and grow niche practice areas. Join us for this interactive and lively session.

Featuring BDO USA, LLP, ClearlyRated, Kernutt Stokes LLP, The Rybar Group, AFS Logistics, Walker Reid Strategies and Acadia Leadership Partners (ALPS).

Ready to expand into new markets, but not sure where to start? In this dynamic session, we will introduce you to the key principles and action steps you need to successfully pivot from a local provider to a truly national or global firm. Learn the techniques enabling you to attack new geographic or industry markets and secure clients in other cities, states or across the globe. Regardless of your ambition, the concepts are similar, and we are ready to share them with you!

Being ‘future ready’ means advancing your digital culture, embracing champions, and taking calculated risks in order to grow. As firms recognize the need to accelerate their digital investments to facilitate transformation, new challenges, problems, and opportunities will arise. A significant part of overcoming hurdles is employing a digital strategy that is aligned internally — between marketing, business development and firm leadership. In this session, we will lead you through real-world scenarios that highlight the importance of a cohesive internal structure and how, with the use of appropriate technology, your firm can become successfully future-focused.

While there are many ways to look at capacity, most firm leaders agree they don’t have enough people to properly serve the number of clients they have. How about, instead of talking about getting rid of clients to solve our capacity problems, perhaps we talk about revenue replacement. In this session, we will discuss how to identify your target clients, create three core packages of services, develop a business development process to support, message your offering in a compelling way, and create a marketing strategy to attract leads.

It’s imperative to develop future rainmakers, no matter the market, to expand your firm’s reach, deepen relationships, develop centers of influence and grow. In this session, we’ll help you apply a customized approach for developing a new generation of business developers, meeting them where they are and helping them achieve their rainmaking goals. Leave this session with new ideas and tools to invest in your future rainmakers, enabling your firm to grow for years to come!

Purpose is a hot topic in today’s business world. Statistics show there is a business case for tying what you do, to why you do it. Defining your organization’s purpose and connecting it to your branding has to be authentic. In this session, you will hear about GBQ’s and BDO’s journeys in showcasing their purpose-driven organizations in their external storytelling and employer branding.

How you create an exceptional client experience (CX) for your clients goes beyond providing great service. Looking at how you actively build and nurture relationships from the outside-in can drive revenue, create consistency, and build capacity with client loyalty and satisfaction. This session will focus on creating practical, client-centric processes around your interactions, such on-boarding, customized communications and understanding client feedback to increase retention and reduce churn.

What does growth look like when you have limited capacity? And what happens to your growth strategy when you are dealing with staffing limitations, burnout, and an ultra-competitive job market? These are the questions many firms are struggling to address. In this session, we will focus on the tools you need to create a successful growth culture in today’s challenging environment. By implementing strategies that include client culling, defining your ideal client, establishing your firm brand, and bringing business development conversations to the forefront, you will be able to control your growth in a manageable and profitable way.

Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) factors are increasingly utilized by company stakeholders for evaluating an organization’s ability to manage future risks and opportunities. Ensuring your clients understand the usefulness of ESG reporting, as well as proper reporting requirements and how they should be developed, communicated and audited, is critical. In this panel discussion, we will demonstrate how a strong connection between reporting, storytelling and auditing can produce positive outcomes for organizations looking to share and highlight their ESG efforts with clients and stakeholders. We will also share case studies on how other CPA firms have supported their clients in developing and implementing their ESG strategy and story.

Winning in today’s marketplace requires an understanding of DEI. Every client has an expectation that their professional services provider can understand, support and deliver on DEI. Developing a comprehensive DEI narrative is a given. Translating the narrative into demonstrated behaviors, actions and outcomes is the requirement. In this session, attendees will learn how to protect and grow revenue by harnessing the power of difference.