How Clients Choose an Accounting or Advisory Firm, and What That Means for Your Marketing

Accounting firms are turning advisory into a formal practice

I’ve spent most of my career working in and around accounting firms, first at three of the Big Four and then, as the owner of Marketri, consulting with 20 to 30 independent CPA firms. For most of that time, accounting firms were built around compliance work: audits, reviews, tax returns, and all the deadlines that come with them. Business advisory was always on the menu, but it was the vaguest service line in the building. If you asked five partners what their advisory practice included and how it helped clients, you’d probably get five different answers.

From the early 2000s until around 2020, that vagueness made advisory really hard to market. With client after client, I struggled to get clarity on what exactly the firm offered, what methodology supported the way it worked, and what outcomes a buyer could expect. A lot of that came from how advisory grew up. It was often an intangible extra, and sometimes it wasn’t billed at all. The CPA was the business owner’s most trusted advisor, and owners would come in and talk through their problems. But it wasn’t a proactive, structured service that a firm could market, deliver, and charge for.

That has really changed over the last five years or so, and it’s great news. It’s good for the accounting firms and even better for their clients. Many firms now use what’s called an alternative practice structure, with compliance work living in one company and advisory work in another. To me, that shows how serious firms have become about building advisory into a real practice, with its own services and its own way of working.

The work itself looks different, too. Compliance is delivered one deliverable at a time, whether that’s an audit, a tax return, or a set of financial statements. Advisory is an ongoing relationship, and it’s often priced that way, on a retainer, with the firm acting as an embedded advisor to the business. Not every practice works like this, but it’s clearly where things are heading. And that means the way clients choose a firm, and the marketing that helps them choose, has to change too.

How clients choose a firm for compliance work

Compliance is the more clear-cut purchase. Buyers trust the CPA license, and they assume that more experience means a better result, so a compliance firm doesn’t need many proof points to show it does the work well.

When buyers choose a compliance firm, being local is preferred, but it’s a nice-to-have rather than a must-have. The ideal is a firm that has experience doing compliance work in the buyer’s own industry.

Much of this work is still built on referral relationships, but that’s changing too. Buyers are getting more comfortable with recommendations from Google and from AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude when they’re looking for top firms in their industry or their area.

Why advisory needs its own kind of marketing

Advisory is a different purchase, and this is where I think many accounting and advisory firms haven’t caught up. Marketing for advisory needs to look quite a bit different from marketing for compliance.

Here’s why. Advisory can mean different things to different people. A firm that wants its advisory practice to succeed has to be very specific about two things: exactly which services it offers, and more importantly, how those services help clients seize opportunities and overcome challenges.

Often the answer isn’t a single service. It may be a bundle of services built around a pain point that a lot of businesses share. Some of the larger firms are already formally building out advisory offerings in areas like IT, HR, marketing, business strategy, and fractional CFO services. But even with all of those options, the firms that get it right are the ones that package their services around what a company is trying to achieve. That’s what the buyer really wants. They don’t want to pick through a list of services and figure out on their own which pieces add up to what they need.

That kind of clarity has to start inside the firm, because you can’t market effectively if you don’t know what you’re marketing. When Marketri partners with a CPA firm, we start with a due diligence process that digs deep into the advisory work and pushes the firm to get specific and aligned on how the practice is actually going to work.

Here’s an example of where that can lead. One of our clients used that process to launch a family business practice that brought many disciplines within the firm together under one advisory practice. It was built around the challenges family businesses face, like preparing the next generation of leadership and resolving conflict within the family. A family business owner didn’t have to sort through a menu of services. They saw their own challenges named, and a team ready to help with them.

And it worked. Three partners became certified advisors through the Family Firm Institute, which formalized the firm’s method for advising family businesses. We hosted peer groups and roundtables for family business owners and their next-generation leaders. The firm became known as the advisory firm for family businesses in the DC metro area, and it built a pipeline of mid-market family businesses that came to the firm for advisory work, not compliance.

Why proof matters so much in advisory

On the compliance side, the CPA license signals a baseline level of competence. There’s nothing like that for advisory. And quite frankly, many CPAs aren’t made to be business advisors. The two don’t automatically go hand in hand. Advisory draws on a different skill set, especially when a client’s challenge isn’t clear-cut and takes some investigation to uncover.

That’s why marketing for advisory needs proof just as much as it needs specificity. Prospects want to see how you’ve helped businesses just like theirs solve their challenges and take advantage of their opportunities. Case studies, client testimonials, and podcasts where clients talk about how you helped them make progress on their business goals all help here.

Every prospect goes through some kind of vetting, whether they were referred to you or found you through an online search. At some point they’re going to ask, where can I see that this firm has helped a business like mine? The firms that can answer that question well are the ones that make the final list of firms the prospect wants to talk to.

Hiring an advisor is a lot less cut-and-dried than hiring an auditor. Your prospect is taking a leap of faith that you have what it takes to help them get ahead. They can spend an awful lot of money and not get ahead, and that’s frustrating, it sets them back, and it eats into their bottom line. Strong proof makes that leap feel a lot less risky.

Growing advisory beyond your existing clients

Most firms want to actively grow their advisory practice, and moving compliance clients into advisory work is a natural place to start. But cross-selling only goes so far. If you do a company’s audit, independence rules generally keep you from also serving as its advisor, so only part of your compliance client base is even open to advisory work.

So advisory practices also need new clients who’ve never worked with the firm. Winning them takes a real go-to-market plan for advisory, which is simply a plan for how you’ll reach and win new clients. That plan should be built to earn trust and awareness, make sure people can find you when no one referred them, and give them enough proof to take the next step once they’ve found you.

Standing out when you’re one of five to seven firms

Whether the need is compliance or advisory, B2B buyers today are going through a much more thorough vetting process. They may get a firm or two from their lawyer or financial advisor, and then they’ll ask Claude or another AI tool for other options. So instead of interviewing one or two firms, a lot of buyers are now talking to five to seven.

That puts a lot of weight on the last stage of the decision, the meetings and conversations where the prospect decides who to hire. When you know you’ll be one of several firms they’re talking to, you have to show why you’re the better choice. That takes clear messaging about your firm, your brand, and how you work. On the advisory side, it means showing how you become embedded in a client’s business and give proactive advice.

I can’t stress the word proactive enough. To be honest, compliance-focused accounting firms aren’t used to being proactive with business advice. They’re proactive about hitting deadlines, but they don’t always stop to think about what the business needs next, or what they should be doing to help it get ahead. Showing a prospect that you’ll think that way, and that you’ll help them more than the other firms on their list, is critically important.

And then there’s simply looking the part. It’s really hard to get ahead with a brand that looks like it’s from the 1990s and hasn’t evolved with the times. Your messaging, your brand, how your people present themselves, and the information prospects can find about your firm all need to be in sync with how you deliver. A lot of firms are catching up on the delivery side but not on how they present themselves, and marketing is often the first impression.

It’s gotten really competitive out there, especially for mid-market firms that are staying independent. Those firms need to look and sound every bit as strong as the firms backed by private equity that are buying up and combining smaller practices, and in some ways even more so.

Two practices, two ways to market

So how do clients choose an accounting or advisory firm? For compliance, they look for credentials, experience in their industry, and often a local presence, and they’re finding firms through AI recommendations as well as referrals. For advisory, they need a clear picture of what you offer, how it solves their problems, and proof that you’ve done it for businesses like theirs.

The good news is that advisory isn’t the vague service line it used to be. It’s become a real practice inside accounting firms, and its marketing deserves the same attention. The firms that market compliance and advisory as the two different purchases they are, and that look and sound the part when they sit down with a prospect, are the ones that are going to win the work.

Growing your advisory practice in 2027

If you have aggressive growth goals for your advisory practice in 2027 and beyond, and you want some marketing muscle behind them, Marketri can help. We’ll take you through our due diligence and planning process, where we get down to brass tacks about your advisory capabilities, your ways of working, and what makes your firm different.

That last question is broader than most firms expect. You’re not only competing with other CPA firms’ advisory practices. You’re also up against boutique advisory firms outside the accounting profession and every other way a company can get outside help. From there, we make sure your messaging is crisp, stands out, and lines up with what your firm can actually deliver, so it really helps you win.

Then we build your go-to-market plan: which markets we’ll go after, why we think you can win in those markets, and the specific campaigns and measures that will get you to your goals over time. If that sounds like what your firm needs, let’s talk.