I'm pretty sure someone in the tax community recommended Never Split the Difference to me. I don't remember who. I do remember the opening. Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, starts with an actual high-stakes negotiation where people's lives were on the line, and it pulled me in right away.
At first glance, a hostage standoff has nothing to do with a client who's upset about their tax bill. But the more I read, the more I recognized myself, and not always in a flattering way. The book gave me language and tactics for conversations I'd been handling on instinct for years, and my instincts weren't always right.
These are the lessons that have stuck with me and actually changed how I work with clients.
Stop rushing to fill the silence
I used to be really bad about this. If someone asked me to do something, my gut instinct was to rush to say yes. Any pause in a conversation felt like something I needed to fix.
With practice, I've gotten comfortable letting a pause just sit there. Silence does two useful things. Sometimes the other person fills it and shares information that turns out to be helpful to me. And if nothing else, it gives me time to think about what I actually want to say.
It's uncomfortable at first, so I practiced it everywhere, not just at work. I practiced it in personal situations. I practiced it on the board of a nonprofit I sit on. Now it's almost second nature.
If I'm going to respond, I'll usually pause for two or three seconds. If I don't want to respond until I have more information, I might not say anything at all and let the other person fill the space, whether because they feel uncomfortable or just out of instinct.
Mirroring gets you to the real problem
Mirroring means repeating back a key word or phrase the other person just said. It sounds almost too simple, but it's been especially useful for me in difficult conversations, like when a client owes more in taxes than they expected.
This required a real mental shift on my part. My old reaction was basically: you made more money, were you expecting to pay less taxes?
Now, if a client says, "Gosh, this amount you're having me pay just seems really unexpected," I might simply say, "Unexpected?" Then I let them fill in the blanks.
A lot of the time, there's something they're not saying. Maybe they just made a major asset purchase with cash, cash flow is tight, and they forgot a quarterly payment was coming. Mirroring makes the client feel heard, and it gives me a chance to get to the root of the problem instead of arguing with the surface of it.
The conversation I wish I could redo
Labeling means naming the emotion in the room. The best way I can explain why it matters is to share a time I didn't do it.
A high-net-worth client of mine, someone whose business and personal returns I handled, told me his mother was moving to the state and needed a new CPA. Normally I wouldn't take someone with just a 1040, but because he was a VIP client, I wanted to be accommodating.
She was very fee-averse from the jump. She told me she'd been paying her prior CPA $200. My minimum fee at the time was significantly more than that, and she wasn't going to be a minimum-fee client anyway. She had income in two states and investments. I don't know how a CPA was doing that work for $200, and honestly I don't really care. I tried to be completely transparent about our minimum fee, but of course, when you say "here's my minimum fee," people hear "that's what I'm going to pay."
When she came to pick up her return, she was arguing with my intern about the fee. I stepped in, and she told me again she'd only ever paid her prior CPA $200 a year. I asked how long she'd been paying that. She said probably 30 years. So I told her, essentially, that her prior CPA hadn't raised their fees since the '90s and she was asking me to match a price from the '90s.
That was not the right approach at all. It was tax season, I'd hit the end of my rope, and I went straight into defensive mode. It escalated from there, and I ended up firing her. I was really worried it would cause a conflict with her son. He never brought it up and kept working with me, but I didn't handle any of it as well as I could have.
What I could have said was something like: "It sounds like there's some hesitation. It sounds like you feel like you're not getting value. It sounds like you feel my price is unreasonable." That wouldn't have guaranteed a happy ending, but it would have taken the conversation in a direction that left her feeling better instead of cornered.
Name the objection before they do
My focus now is multistate income tax. I work directly with a lot of other CPAs and their clients to figure out which states they should be filing in and what that looks like. There's a lot of resistance in this work, and the question I hear most is some version of: what happens if we do nothing? What if we skip the nexus study and keep filing only in our home state?
So I use labeling and what Voss calls an accusation audit, which means naming the objection before the other person raises it. If they don't volunteer it, I'll start with, "It sounds like you have some hesitation," or, "You might be wondering what happens if we just wait and see. You might be wondering how likely it is that a state finds you on its own."
Then I give them a second to marinate on that, because it usually captures their objections. From there, I address them directly. I explain how the statute of limitations works, and that if you've never filed a return in a state, it never starts running. The exposure is essentially unlimited. Labeling the concern first makes people feel understood before they've even said anything.
I've even built an accusation audit into the marketing materials I give other CPAs. That way, they can start the conversation with their clients, and it comes from someone the taxpayer already trusts.
"They genuinely just don't understand what all goes into the work that we do... and those people can actually be really good clients."
The three phases of pricing confidence
Voss argues that if a client says yes too easily, you're probably priced too low. That idea made me think about how my own relationship with pricing has evolved. I went through three phases, and I suspect a lot of professionals do.
In phase one, you land every deal and think, wow, I'm really good at this. They really want to work with me.
In phase two, you realize they want to work with you because your fees are too low. You also get better at recognizing the tire kickers, the people who only care about price and will never see the value in what you do. If they're unhappy with your fee, you let them walk.
I still feel that way to a degree. But eventually I reached a third phase: some potential clients are worth courting and worth convincing. They're not cheap. They just don't understand what goes into the work or the value it creates, and showing them can turn them into great clients.
So beyond being confident in my pricing, I'm getting better at communicating it and seeing it from the client's perspective.
Scope creep doesn't have to be awkward
Scope creep used to make me really uncomfortable. A client would ask for something extra, and it felt awkward to say, "Yes, I can do that, but you're not paying for it right now, so you'll need to."
I was way overthinking it. When I put myself in the client's shoes, I realized they probably expect to pay for something extra, or they didn't realize it was extra. Either way, it can be treated as completely neutral.
There's a moment in the book where Voss takes over a negotiation from someone who'd been talking to the hostage-taker all morning. When asked where the previous negotiator went, he essentially says: I'm Chris, and you're dealing with Chris now. No room for debate.
That's how I handle scope creep now. I'll say, very matter-of-factly, "Yeah, we can do that. Let me send you a new proposal with that service included." Then I keep rolling into the next topic or the action plan. It flows naturally, and it's much less awkward for everyone.
Assume no ill intent
The biggest change the book made for me isn't a tactic. It's that I've learned to be more empathetic and to put myself in the taxpayer's shoes.
It's easy to get frustrated when a client makes what feels like unrealistic demands or pushes boundaries. Especially during tax season, we think, why are they doing this to me?
"In reality, they're not doing anything to you. They're just trying to navigate this relationship."
In their mind, their timeline, their request, and their expectations are completely reasonable. So I go into those conversations assuming no ill intent. That sounds obvious, but going in neutral changes the questions I ask: What is the request? What's at the root of it? And how can I satisfy it in a way that works for everyone?
If you're heading into a hard conversation with a client or a partner, start with what Voss calls tactical empathy. Listen to understand. Set aside the urge to wait for them to finish so you can jump in. Pay close attention to what they're saying, verbally and nonverbally. Let go of your ego and your need to explain yourself, and focus on making them feel heard. Active listening seems like a no-brainer, but in client service it matters enormously. If we rush through our spiel to get to what we want to say, we miss opportunities to listen.
I've started rereading the book, and I think it's one I could read every year. Even moving from my more traditional practice to the work I'm doing now, I see it through a different lens. The skills stay the same. The situations change, and there's always something new to practice.
Connect with Sabrina
Sabrina is a CPA and the founder of Honeycomb State Tax Strategies, where she helps CPAs, EAs, and their clients navigate multistate tax. Her background ranges from Big 4 SALT consulting to building and selling her own practice. If her candid take on client conversations resonated with you, she's a great person to follow, especially if you serve clients who do business across state lines.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.