Decision intelligence for professional services positioning

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 in professional services, you know this means clients need to see more than the firm's credentials.

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

Your critical business decisions — positioning, pricing, client acquisition, retention — are based on assumptions, not decison 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 decision intelligence methodology.

We survey 100-500 decision-makers in your category to reveal what consistently drives their choices when evaluating similar firms.

The intelligence you receive answers questions you couldn't ask real clients — and reveals patterns that informal feedback misses entirely.

The result is the competitive advantage that comes from understanding what actually drives decisions in your category. Intelligence your competitors don't have because they're relying on assumptions.

The professional services intelligence gap

Most professional services firms operate with dangerous intelligence 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 what actually drives selection decisions between similar firms.

What actually makes existing clients satisfied and loyal?

Client feedback is filtered through politeness and relationship concerns. You're not getting unfiltered intelligence about what creates loyalty versus what's taken for granted.

How do your target clients truly perceive you vs competitors?

You make positioning decisions without systematic competitive intelligence. Partner assumptions replace category-wide decision intelligence.

What new services would clients actually commission?

Launching a new service consumes bandwidth and budget. Basing your launch on assumptions or small samples means you're guessing about market demand.

What messaging really resonates with your market?

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

Assumptions masquerading as intelligence

These intelligence gaps force you to make five- and six-figure positioning investments based on partner assumptions, relationship-specific feedback and post-pitch debriefs. That's guessing with extra steps, not marketing intelligence.

How traditional solutions miss the mark

Traditional market research struggles with professional services. Reaching busy decision-makers is expensive and slow. Response rates are terrible. Sample sizes are too small for reliable insights. And respondents filter their answers through professional courtesy — you don't get unfiltered intelligence.

Generic AI tools produce generic results. AI wrappers are black boxes built to serve the maximum number of users. If everyone uses the same tools, no one has a competitive advantage.

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

ASI: Decision intelligence that changes everything

ASI surveys 100-500 decision-makers in your category to reveal what consistently drives their choices when evaluating similar firms.

This intelligence is unfiltered access to your target clients' actual decision-making patterns.

You can probe deeper with focus groups — asking 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

We survey decision-makers matching your exact target market profile using synthetic personas. These synthetic personas are distributed by role, sector, geography, company size and any other criteria that define your category.

Depending on the scope, that sample could be 100 decision-makers or 500 decision-makers.

Each decision-maker is surveyed individually about what drives their choices when evaluating firms in your category.

The methodology produces synthetic data revealing decision patterns with incredible reliability (Stanford research, Journal of Marketing, and others). As a result, you know all that's knowable about decision-making behaviour.

What you discover

Hidden decision psychology: Why clients choose competitors despite your superior expertise. What unstated concerns prevent prospects from engaging with you. Which factors drive 65% of decisions versus which drive 5%.

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 actually 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 buyers define the terms you use (their language versus yours). What language creates confidence versus what creates confusion.

Academic validation that matters

Professional services firm EY validated this methodology against real C-suite executives across 500 senior leaders. The correlation was 95%. The headline of Mark Ritson's Marketing Week column about the research is Synthetic data is as good as real.

As Ritson concludes, this isn't experimental methodology. Studies from Stanford, Harvard and NYU show synthetic personas produce synthetic data with 75-95% correlation to real human decision makers. Major corporations including BP, J.P. Morgan Payments, UK Foreign Office and Coca-Cola use this methodology for strategic intelligence.

The methodology question is settled. The question is whether you want systematic intelligence on what drives decisions in your category, or whether you want to keep making positioning decisions based on assumptions.