Know your Accreditation renewal dates
When are your different clients’ renewal dates for CPD? For example, Accountants CPD renews on 1st January each year. So what?
Well, if you were to log the CPD hours that each delegate has accumulated with you over the year and send this, along with a copy of their certificates during October, pointing out that they are (for example) 14 hours short of their requirement. Would that be a useful service?
Furthermore, if you were to suggest topics that you could offer them to make up the CPD hours before the 1st January, would you find people signing up?
But it doesn’t have to finish there. Soon after 1st January (or whatever the annual renewal date is), why not write to all your accountancy clients suggesting a CPD plan for the year? Lay out options for different levels of staff and different specialties.
The good news is that different accreditation bodies have different renewal dates through the year (contact The Office if you want our help in finding details of a specific body), so you can roll your planning to different professions at different times of year.
Know your End of Year dates
Not all businesses have the same end of year. Many are tied to the tax year, so end in March, but others have different end of year dates. So what? Coming up to the end of year, there may be surplus in a training budget. So if you suggest specific training that they have to do anyway during the year be brought forwards into the current financial year to use up that budget, you could well steal a march on your competition.
Equally, soon after the new financial year begins, departments will be given their new budgets and will therefore be planning how to spend those budgets. Tie your own contact schedule to theirs to ensure that you are talking to clients just after their end of year so your name features in the coming years budget.
Gift your clients a CPD hour
Your training is excellent; you just wish more people could experience it then they would buy more. Know the feeling? Well, here’s an idea for you. Offer a one hour taster course delivered as a webinar at no charge. Accredit the one hour course for CPD so you can legitimately offer the one hour of CPD to delegates.
Promote your free one hour CPD Accredited course to new areas of existing clients and new clients knowing that you are both getting something out of this. Your training quality is being viewed by a new audience and they are furthering their CPD compliance need.
You will also need to send them their CPD certificate after the course – another golden opportunity to remind them how great your training is and encourage them to book the longer form course.
And finally as a matter of customer care, you will need to call the delegates of your course to ensure that they got value from the one hour of training, which also present the opportunity to discuss further CPD training requirements.
These hints are the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many more way to use CPD accreditation to grow your business. Please contact one of the team on 0203 745 6462
