Key takeaways
- Partner, principal, shareholder and member are one role under different entity types.
- Do not run a campaign between January and mid April. The firm is buried.
- Above about fifty staff, a firm administrator runs vendor selection.
Step by step
- Describe the people in one sentence. Try partners at CPA firms in Ohio with a work email. BuzzAI matches the meaning of the request against real titles, so it returns shareholders and members as well as partners. On Free, list the title variants yourself in the filters.
- Require firm evidence, not just the credential. CPA after a name is a qualification, and a large share of the people who hold it work inside company finance teams rather than in a practice. Ask for accounting, CPA, tax or advisory in the company name or description so you get firms.
- Use the right titles. Managing partner, partner, principal, shareholder, member and owner. Add firm administrator, practice manager and chief operating officer at larger firms, because that is who runs the software budget.
- Set the company size. Sole practitioners and small practices are 1 to 19 and the owner decides alone. From 20 to 199 there is usually a managing partner, an administrator and a short approval chain behind them.
- Time the campaign. Busy season runs from January to the April filing deadline, with extension deadlines in September and October. Late spring and early summer are when a partner will actually read you.
- Save, reveal and reach out. Save the list, reveal the partners you will write to, and let Buzzlist write four emails for each one for you to approve.
| Filter | What to use |
|---|---|
| Titles | Managing Partner, Partner, Principal, Shareholder, Member |
| Company words | CPA, accounting, tax, advisory, bookkeeping |
| Size | 1 to 19, then 20 to 199 |
| Avoid | January to mid April, and the September and October deadlines |
What to know
The title problem here is real and it costs people lists. A firm set up as a partnership calls its owners partners. A professional corporation calls them shareholders. An LLC calls them members. Same person, same authority, three words, and a keyword search for partner quietly drops the rest of them.
Size changes who you talk to. Below twenty staff the managing partner signs, reads the invoice and probably chose the server. Above that there is often a firm administrator or practice manager whose job is vendors, renewals and onboarding, and going around them is slower than going through them.
Some accounting practices now sit inside larger groups, in the way dental and veterinary practices did before them. A local firm may have a parent that standardises software centrally. The company description, and a Sales Brief on the parent, usually show it before you have spent a call finding out.
