The Advisory Gap Is A Conversation Gap

Accounting firms have been talking about the move from compliance to advisory for years. The usual conversation centers on services. What new advisory offerings should we build? How should we package them? How do we price them? How do we market these services to clients? But new buyer research from ClearlyRated suggests firms may be looking at the problem from the wrong direction.

Clients do not need to be convinced that they want advice. They need their accountants to start giving it. According to ClearlyRated’s 2026 Accounting Buyer Insights Report, 91% of buyers want their accounting firm to function as a proactive business advisor rather than simply a compliance provider. And 90% say they would pay more for proactive identification of risks and opportunities.

Sounds like great news for firms, right? It would be, except only 27% say their accounting firm proactively brings advisory topics to the table. If that wasn’t big enough of a blow to accountants, 35% say they — the client — typically initiate those conversations. Gulp!

That is a very different kind of advisory gap. One that starts at the conversation level.

Clients Already Want the Next Conversation

There has long been an assumption that accounting firms need to persuade clients to see them as advisors. ClearlyRated’s findings suggest the demand is already there. Not only do clients want proactive advice, but 94% say the advisory services they receive have had a measurable positive impact on their business. And 90% are willing to pay more for proactive risk and opportunity identification.

The opportunity is not theoretical. Buyers are telling firms directly what they want, but there is a significant difference between having an advisory service offering and behaving like an advisor. A firm can add “business advisory” to its website tomorrow. It can create packages, establish pricing and train everyone on the technical components of the service. None of that guarantees that an accountant sitting across from a client will recognize an opportunity and say, “There is something else we should talk about.” That moment is where the transition really happens.

Compliance tends to begin with a question that already exists, like how something is treated for taxes, what is required by regulations or whether a number is correct. Proactive advisory requires something different. The questions that get into advisory opportunities are around:

• What is changing in the business?
• What are you trying to accomplish?
• What might get in the way?
• What are we seeing that you may not be seeing yet?
• What should we be talking about before it becomes a problem?

The accountant has to move beyond answering the question in front of them and start discovering the question that has not yet been asked.

Proactivity Drives the Relationship

ClearlyRated found an interesting relationship between who starts the advisory conversation and client satisfaction. When the accounting firm proactively initiates advisory conversations, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is 62. When the client is responsible for initiating those conversations, NPS falls to 48. We often treat proactive communication as a nice-to-have client service behavior. The data suggests it affects how clients experience the value of the relationship.

The same pattern shows up elsewhere in the report. For example, among buyers experiencing staffing-related service problems, reduced proactive communication produced the steepest decline in satisfaction. NPS among those buyers fell to 27, compared with an overall survey NPS of 55.

Accountants tend to think about client service in terms of deadlines, responsiveness and accuracy. All of those matter, but clients also notice what you bring to them before they ask. That is where advisory value becomes visible.

You Cannot Market Your Way Into Being an Advisor

Thirty-one percent of buyers cite a trust gap when considering additional advisory services. They trust their accounting firm for compliance, but not necessarily for strategy. ClearlyRated notes that this is not something pricing or marketing alone can fix. Firms have to demonstrate strategic thinking and build credibility.

That distinction is important. You cannot declare yourself a trusted advisor. You have to behave like one. Trust grows when:

• Someone asks a question that makes a client think differently.
• They connect two pieces of information the client had not connected.
• They challenge an assumption.
• They identify a risk before it becomes urgent.
• They understand where the client wants to go instead of simply explaining what happened last quarter.

Those are conversation behaviors, and they are learnable. But they have to be developed intentionally.

For years, accounting firms have trained people exceptionally well to arrive at the right technical answer. That remains essential. The profession cannot abandon technical excellence, but the next level of value requires that accountants know what to do after they have the answer.

AI Does Not Automatically Create Advisors

Buyers are not broadly rejecting AI. Actually, the ClearlyRated survey shows that 77% of clients say AI has improved the accuracy and quality of accounting work, and 81% agree that automation has made their firm faster without sacrificing quality. At the same time, 83% prefer human judgment over AI-generated outputs for final deliverables, and 86% say they would hold the accounting firm responsible for AI-related errors.

That tells us something about the future role of the accountant. AI can increasingly gather information, process documents, conduct research, identify patterns and produce outputs. Those capabilities can free enormous amounts of human capacity. But freeing capacity does not determine what people will do with it. A firm can automate 20% of someone’s workload and still have that person spend the newly available time doing more compliance work. The shift to advisory does not happen automatically because technology becomes more capable.

While AI can create capacity for advisory, it cannot automatically create advisors. Firms still have to develop the human capabilities required to use that capacity differently. That means curiosity, strategic thinking, empathy, challenge, listening, diagnosing problems, connecting business issues, understanding a client’s vision, creating action and so much more. These are sometimes dismissed as “soft skills.” Yet, there is nothing soft about them when nearly all clients say they will pay more for the outcome.

Stop Telling Accountants to “Be More Advisory”

Firm leaders can tell their people they need to be more consultative. Ask better questions. Spend more time with clients. Bring ideas to the table. Think strategically. Those are reasonable expectations, but they are not a development system.

Imagine telling a first-year accountant, “You need to improve your tax skills,” and then providing no technical training, no review and no feedback. You would never do that, but accountants regularly tell people to become better advisors without giving them a meaningful way to practice the behaviors advisory requires.

If proactive conversation is becoming a core business competency, firms need a way to develop it like one. That means looking at real conversations and asking:

• Did we understand the client’s challenge?
• Did we ask enough questions before recommending a solution?
• Did we connect the conversation to the client’s broader goals?
• Did we challenge their thinking when appropriate?
• Did we identify a next action?
• Did we bring insight to the conversation or simply respond to what the client asked?
• Did the client leave knowing something, or thinking about something, they had not considered before?

This is the thinking behind what we are building at XcelLabs with Navi. The goal is to build the behaviors that make stronger advisory conversations visible, measurable and coachable. Because “be more proactive” is not useful feedback. It’s better to show someone where an actual client conversation became reactive and coach them on what they could do differently next time.

The Revenue Opportunity May Already Be Sitting in the Client Base

ClearlyRated reports that 95% of clients intend to continue working with their existing accounting firm, 78% are likely to purchase additional accounting services in the next 12 months and 50% expect their spending with their firm to increase. Those numbers should change the way firms think about growth.

There is enormous emphasis on lead generation, new business development and winning new logos. Those things will always matter, but there is an equally important growth opportunity sitting inside conversations firms are already having every day. The client already trusts you, wants more advice and is willing to spend more. Does someone in the firm recognize the opportunity and start the conversation?

The move from compliance to advisory will require new technology, new service models, different pricing and changes to talent development. But it will not happen because a firm launches an advisory practice. It will happen one client conversation at a time. And if firms want to know whether they are really becoming more advisory, that may be the first place they should start measuring.