Promising opportunities may not be sporting overalls at your firm, but it’s likely a number of them have successfully camouflaged themselves from you and your partners! Sure, you’re busy these days, but sheer momentum isn’t enough to guarantee long-term sustainable growth. For that you need an orderly approach to opportunity planning.

Remember the theme from Cheers, the TV series about a friendly Boston pub and its memorable ‘regulars?’ The refrain says: “You want to go where everybody knows your name.” Something similar is at work when it comes to building value propositions to grow revenue. To succeed, you’ve got to determine what makes the buyer tick.

When it comes to managing your inventory of active opportunities, where you are and where you want to be may not be all that far apart. “Why bother” you say – since most of us have more work than we can handle. Well, just like we’ve built efficiency on the delivery side of the firm in order to optimize our resources, building efficiency on the practice growth side of the firm will also optimize our resources.

The world is flat, according to the best-selling book by Thomas Friedman. He writes about technological changes that are linking people and breaking open business opportunities at warp speed. That’s certainly the case for forward-looking CPAs, especially those in mid-market firms. Just a few years ago it was unthinkable that a mid-size CPA firm could compete and win multi-location opportunities from prospects with operations outside of the U.S.

Many CPAs picture the selling cycle something like this: Have a meeting where you identify a need, write a proposal, sit down with the prospect and walk out with the business. I call it the two-call close and it’s often more of a fantasy than a formula.

Reprinted with permission from CPA Practice Management Forum. CPA firms often ask for my top recommendation to help them win large opportunities. Unequivocally, I suggest the development and strategic deployment of the “opportunity pipeline.” Hands down, it is the single best tool to identify and reel in big pieces of business. Sound difficult? It’s not.

As fallout from passage of the Sarbanes/Oxley Act in 2002 continues to emerge, one certain area of change surrounds audit committees.

For CPAs, winning significant opportunities is the ultimate team sport. If you or other tigers in your firm are accustomed to going it alone, you’ll find it’s next to impossible to do this consistently when the business is large and complex. The reluctance of CPAs to recognize this keeps many from conquering high-value targets.

Recent events in the profession will continue to result in more and larger clients evaluating a potential change in their CPA firm over the next couple of years. Firms which invest in the expertise necessary to win significant opportunities have a once-in-a-lifetime ability to grow their revenue substantially. In evaluating this ability to win, I