Protection Plus: Add-On Presentation Strategies for the Tax Professional

When a client comes in to do their taxes with you, they are placing their trust in you. Consider this: when you go to doctors, you listen to what they tell you because they know much more about health and the medical field than you do. If your doctors tell you to get an x-ray or take a specific medicine, you trust them and follow their advice.

Just as you trust your medical professionals, your clients trust you as their tax professional. When you advise them on a course of action, they listen. If you advise them to purchase Protection Plus or another add-on, they usually will.

Don’t be scared to tell your clients about all of your additional product opportunities. Most of them want to hear about their options, and a lot of them will want to purchase add-ons once you explain their benefits. Imagine if your tax professional didn’t tell you about Protection Plus when you filed your taxes and a year later, you are audited and end up spending over $2,000 to resolve the issue. Wouldn’t you be upset that no one ever told you Protection Plus was an option? Similarly, all of the ancillary benefits you offer are available because you believe they will help your clients – let them know how!

Confidence and simplicity are key when presenting add-ons to your clients. They won’t necessarily understand all of the details, and you will lose the big picture, and your clients’ attention, if you try to explain everything about a product. Think back to the doctor example before: when you show up for an appointment, doctors don’t tell you what brand of x-ray machine they are using or what technical capacity it has, they just tell you it’s an x-ray machine. And doctors don’t say, “You can get an x-ray if you want to,” but instead, “You need to get an x-ray.” It doesn’t make sense for doctors to go into all the details, and they don’t lack confidence about their recommendations. That’s why patients listen to their doctors. Your role is the same as doctors’, and you will see the best results if you present add-ons with confidence and simplicity.