Marketing payroll as a separate service leads to thousands of dollars of other services to the same businesses. Practical experience has shown that there were more businesses that wanted to talk about payroll than accounting.

It is easier to negotiate with business owners about their payroll issues, and once you are in front of them and they are comfortable with the fact that you can help them, the other services your firm provides naturally flow onto the table. In fact, what we found was that for every $1,000 of payroll fees paid to an accounting firm, another $3,000 in accounting fees can be realized.

One accountant firm from Ohio, Columbus, acquired salesperson to provide payroll only. In the second month of marketing payroll full time, the seller acquired 12 new payroll-only clients for $1,217 in monthly billings ($14,604 in yearly billings). In the first 30 days of processing the new payrolls, three of the 12 new payroll clients became monthly accounting clients for an additional $17,255 in yearly billings. The total of new billings for that month was $31,859 – and all created through payroll. This also opens the door for all the other related services that a firm may also handle, such as financial services, IT services, or eldercare.