5 upsell signals hidden in your client emails

“I wish I had another me.”

 “There aren’t enough hours in the day.”

 “The week goes by so fast, I don’t know where the time went.”

 Does any of this resonate with you? Where is the majority of your time spent? For many partners, it’s in their inbox, responding to client emails in the order they arrive, that is, dealing with them at random. Too many partners treat their inboxes as “to do lists”, a nuisance to get out of the way so they can get on with the actual work. But what if your inbox was the work? What if your inbox was filled with upsell opportunities that you and your team were too busy to recognise, let alone act on?

 We put together this article to help you spot the 5 most common not-so-hidden upsell emails your clients are sending to you. Remember, scope creep doesn’t occur when clients request services outside the scope of their engagement, it occurs when accountants fail to identify upsell opportunities and give away work for free as a result.

1. The “Quick One” that’s never quick

You’ve likely heard this on a weekly basis:

 “Just a quick question…”

 “Can you take a quick look for me?”

 These are advisory requests that consume partner time. It may feel petty to charge for something so small, but the requests rack up and often lead to tasks that take up a considerable amount of partner time. If your partners are on hourly charge out rates in the hundreds of dollars and they receive many of these requests from clients every day, they may be delivering genuine value, but they’re going to find it a challenge to turn that value into revenue for your firm.

 2. Forwarded documents with “just your thoughts”

 This is a variant of the “Quick One”, but it’s a little more involved at the outset. Think when clients forward you documents such as lease agreements, shareholder agreements, HR contracts, and so on, asking you for your professional opinion. Like the other upsell opportunities hiding in client emails, it’s actually a positive sign; if you’re receiving these kinds of emails, it means your clients trust you, but your business model can’t be built on giving away free resources with the vague excuse, “they’re a paying client, we have to serve them.”

 3. Signs of business change

 Are your SME clients growing their businesses? Many accounting firms we talk to think their future growth is going to come mainly from new clients, however there are so many hidden opportunities among existing clients, you just need to be able to identify the upsell opportunities. Key moments can be hard to spot if you’re not looking for the right things.

 When a client’s business changes, that almost always means scope change. Is one of your business clients starting to struggle with growth or are their margins taking a hit? This could be a consulting opportunity. You’re their natural advisor after all. Is a company expanding rapidly and your payroll engagement has now doubled in workload, but the fee hasn’t changed?

 There are so many moments that can act as a trigger for a re-scoping conversation where partners can upsell new services, structuring, payroll, SMSF, the list goes on. The key thing is recognising the signs and acting on them before it’s too late and you’ve given away valuable work for free.

 4. Requests that drift into grey areas

 “Can you help with general business support?” or “We’d love your advice on this HR/marketing thing.”

 Vague categories invite unbounded expectations.

 The job of a partner in an accounting firm is to grow the base and keep the clients happy. How do they do that? By managing expectations and monitoring scope for upsell opportunities. Grey areas are unavoidable. Your clients will ask you to help them with tasks that aren’t going to be covered in your engagement agreement. But this isn’t a problem, this is actually a good thing. It means your clients trust you and want more work from your firm, but it’s up to you to take the relationship back out of the grey area.

 Grey areas are opportunities to boost revenue from your existing clients, but only if you recognise them and act quickly.

 5. Cumulative favours that add up

 This is another variant of the grey area, and it comes from existing work that’s in the engagement. We’ve all been there, we’re engaged to complete the financial statements, but we can’t do that because the books are a bit of a mess. Is cleaning them up part of our job? We typically deal with the primary director, but then the second director emails us asking for support.

 A new class of Key Performance Indicators

 Does your accounting firm have Key Performance Indicators? Monthly budgets per office? Profitability targets per team? Lodgement rate benchmarks? If providing great client service and growing the fee base is at the very core of a partner’s responsibilities, why don’t we measure those things? Imagine a set of KPIs that tracked revenue generated from upselling opportunities, the number of additional services sold and delivered to existing clients, or the number of out-of-scope requests from clients per partner?

Stop scope creep in your firm today

 Acting on hidden upsell signals isn’t “salesy”—it's part of good client service. Your job as partner is to identify these key moments where your accounting firm can add value and ensure you align value with scope. These upsell emails are not-so-hidden opportunities to provide more service for your clients because you know they will be paying for it.

 Stop treating your emails as tasks and start looking at them as your primary source of increasing revenue and client satisfaction. We all want to help our clients, but it’s unsustainable unless they pay for it. That’s why we built Scopekeeper. We know partners are stretched thin, so we designed a solution that automatically flags scope creep and upsell opportunities so you can convert client requests into engagements and benefit from the fee growth.

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