Strategic Intelligence for marketing professional services

The best marketers in professional services are often spread thinly. The volume of work leaves little time for strategic thinking. There is always another pitch to write or an ad hoc request to deliver.

You operate in a field where your firm's technical expertise is table stakes. As a marketer, you know this means clients need to see more than the firm's credentials.

But what do clients want to see? How do clients really make their choices?

Your critical business decisions — positioning, pricing, client acquisition, retention — are based on incomplete (or missing) intelligence. And that intelligence gap is about the people whose choices determine your success.

Asymmetric Strategic Intelligence (ASI) changes this.

Asymmetric Strategic Intelligence (ASI) combines 30 years of direct response marketing expertise with AI-powered research:

1. We survey synthetic personas (which we call Client Proxies)

2. The Client Proxies answers give us synthetic data (which we call Strategic Intelligence because the insights from those answer are very real)

Strategic Intelligence is data you can use to make confident decisions, data that was previously impossible to access affordably and quickly.

The result: The outsized marketing advantage that comes from a deep understanding of your clients’ psychology. An understanding that transforms every aspect of how you compete and grow.

The client intelligence gap

Most professional services firms operate with dangerous knowledge gaps about their clients.

What really makes prospects choose one firm over another?

You know your technical capabilities. And you know the general requests clients make in RFPs. But you’re guessing about the psychological factors that drive selection decisions.

What actually makes existing clients satisfied and loyal?

Client feedback is filtered through politeness and relationship concerns. You’re not getting the unvarnished truth about what works and what doesn’t.

How do your target clients truly perceive you vs competitors?

Traditional market research with busy professionals is expensive, slow and limited. So, you make positioning decisions without comprehensive competitive intelligence.

What new services would cients bite off your hand for?

Launching a new service consumes bandwidth — and budget. Basing your launch on guesswork or small samples increases the risk of failure.

What messaging really resonates with your market?

You develop content based on what you think matters to clients, not what actually influences their decisions.

Tactical marketing hell

These intelligence gaps force you into tactical marketing hell. Spinning the marketing roulette wheel while trying to be all things to all people means all your time is consumed by execution. That leaves nothing in the tank to make the strategic moves that would give the firm a sustainable lead.

How traditional solutions miss the mark

Traditional market research is best at reaching consumer markets, not professional services. Reaching busy decision-makers is expensive and slow. Response rates are terrible and over-represent the disgruntled and the very happy. Sample sizes are too small for reliable insights. And respondents filter their answers through professional courtesy, so you don't have the real story.

Generic AI tools produce generic results. AI "wrappers" are black boxes built to serve the maximum number of users. And if everyone is talking into the same black box, no one has competitive advantage.

Management consulting provides expensive recommendations but doesn’t build internal capability. You become dependent on external expertise instead of developing your own systematic intelligence advantage.

ASI Research: Client insights that change everything

ASI Research surveys Client Proxies (synthetic personas). The Client Proxies' answers are Strategic Intelligence (known in academic circles as synthetic data).

This Strategic Intelligence is an all-access pass to your target clients’ unfiltered thinking.

Taking Client Proxies to the next level, you can hold focus groups with perfect representations of your target clients. This is your chance to ask questions and probe the answers, including questions that would be career suicide in real client relationships:

• “What would make you fire us?”
• “When do you think we’re overpriced?”
• “What do our competitors do better?”
• “What concerns you most about working with firms like ours?”

How it works

Client Proxies are AI-generated representations of your exact target market, trained on massive datasets about human psychology and decision-making.

ASI Research surveys a representative sample of your audience. Depending on the scope, that sample of synthetic personas could be 100 Client Proxies or 1,000 Client Proxies.

Just like with human participants, each Client Proxy fits within your target audience while being a unique individual. And just like with human participants, each Client Proxy is surveyed individually.

Unlike human survey respondents, Client Proxies never get tired, bored or diplomatic. They give you honest answers to questions you could never ask real clients.

In market research, the answers from synthetic personas are called synthetic data. We call them Strategic Intelligence because the insights are very real.

What you discover

Hidden decision psychology: Why clients really choose competitors despite your superior expertise. What unstated concerns prevent prospects from engaging with you. Which factors actually drive decisions, versus what clients say matter.

Retention intelligence: What makes clients genuinely satisfied versus what they tell you in feedback sessions. Which service elements create loyalty and which are taken for granted. What early warning signals predict client defection.

Competitive positioning: How your firm is really perceived in the market. Where competitors are vulnerable and where they’re genuinely stronger. Which positioning territories you can credibly own.

Message optimisation: Which value propositions resonate versus which fall flat. How to frame your expertise so prospects immediately understand your differentiation. What language creates confidence in your capabilities.

Academic validation that matters

Professional services firm EY compared synthetic personas like our Client Proxies to real C-suite executives across 500 senior leaders. The correlation was 95%. The headline of Mark Ritson's Marketing Week column about the correlation is Synthetic data is as good as real.

As Ritson concludes, this isn’t experimental methodology. Studies from Stanford, Harvard, and NYU show 75-95% correlation between synthetic persona responses and real human responses. Major corporations including BP, Major League Soccer, Unilever and Coca-Cola are using synthetic personas and synthetic data for Strategic Intelligence.