create your own
Sweet Spot Sweet Spot Sweet Spot
marketing solutions for
Professional Services Firms
awezzom is a Marketing consultancy for Professional services firms
that want to do their best work for better clients who eagerly pay a price premium for deep expertise.We develop our marketing solutions around a unique resource you already possess — your competence. Most of the time we apply our expertise in these areas to solve your unique challenges:
- Positioning
- Differentiation
- Lead generation
- Messaging
- Service design
- Pricing strategy
Differentiate from competitors making them less relevant.
Get and maintain a 2-year head start on your competition.
Become less interchangeable.
Stop reinventing new ways of stepping on the same rake.
Do your best work for better paying clients who eagerly pay a price premium.
Build the right culture attracting better talent and expelling toxic individuals.
Discern opportunities from distractions focusing on meaningful activities.
Achieve alignment across the board allowing everyone contribute to the whole.
Build a sustainable practice of comfortable size.
Often biggest struggles occur in three major areas: employees, profits and clients. The underlying reason — quality of business decisions.
We have developed the SCP model to help you qualify critical business decisions at your firm. Application of this model allows us to find alignment, making your practice profitable, your services valuable and your people capable to constantly deliver on your promise.
Twelve signs in favor of our custom-made marketing solutions
- Your revenue per each full-time employee (FTE) is below the market average of $165k per annum (in the US).
- You have one large client account that represents more than 25% of all of your business.
- Your gross profit margin is < 37% and net profit is < 14%.
- You are forced to change your processes to satisfy client demands more frequently than 20% of your engagements.
- You win less than 55% of project / opportunity bids.
- You can accredit more than 25% of all new business to a single individual who isn’t a principal at the firm.
- You do not share thoughts, white papers and insights on a scheduled basis. Your marketing communications are infrequent or generic.
- Referrals and word of mouth are the primary source of your new business.
- You keep using PPC ads year over year to stay busy rather than grow or get better qualified clients.
- Principals wholeheartedly believe the purpose of your firm is to make money.
- When asked casually about your firm’s mission and vision for the future your employees make confusing, vague or contradictory statements.
- Your people believe what sets your firm apart from everyone else is that: you work harder, you think strategically, you have your clients’ best interest at heart, you dive really deep into clients’ problems, you are very creative problem-solvers.
The world needs more competent people like you. To grow your expertise and authority you need continuous influx of better clients.
It is the only antidote to unforeseen challenges, rapid changes, black swans and point-blank ignorance.
The best people gravitate toward other competent professionals. The better you get the better people will join to help you get even better.
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Diagnose, Explore, Prescribe & Execute f...
Not every buyer is shopping for all four stages of the engagement. Matching buyer's type to the right mix of these four phases is key to market success of the firm.
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Preventing Quiet Quitting among Professi...
The biggest problem you currently have at your firm is the one you aren’t aware of. Like a mold behind a drywall, it’s invisible to you but every inhabitant (employee) is exposed to its noxious fu...
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The buyer is always right ... even when ...
It appears that buyers of professional services are happy with making the same mistakes over and over again. Why wouldn't they take your professional advice when it is clearly in their interest?
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Practical Considerations dealing with th...
The ongoing talent pipeline crisis in the accounting profession isn't the first one. We've faced comparable challenges two decades ago, and know which levers to pull to make it better at the level of...
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Vision, Mission and financial performanc...
Meaningful vision and mission statements, when aligned and articulated clearly, can improve financial performance of the firm.
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How your “Foot in the Door” Tactic w...
The Foot-in-the-door is a well-known and widely used tactic in the market. Professional firms suppose this way they'll earn trust and build rapport quickly. This approach can backfire too.
Let our lovely white e-doves deliver insightful articles straight into your mailbox. Easy to unsubscribe should you wish to crack the white dove’s wings.
When key stakeholders, owners or principals refuse to understand the value of thinking and candid conversations.
When owners spend their personal savings rather than budgeted profits of the firm to fund our involvement.
When the firm hasn’t been burned by the cursory approach of some consultants or marketing folk before.
When the team strongly believes they can create a differentiated business strategy themselves without any prior experience or external professional help.
When principal wants to assign a junior assistant to evaluate the fit between our services and their challenges.
When principals, owners or C-level execs place strategic thinking, website and digital marketing in the costs bucket along with stationeries.
When principals are actually interested in weekly gatherings contemplating rather than making change happen.
When top management lets procurement people squeeze out the best price reducing the total value of the services rendered.
When the firm is already up there — among other top 20% “sweet spot” firms.
The world desperately needs more competent professionals. Our mission is to enable professional services firms do their best work for better clients who eagerly pay a price premium for deep expertise.
To continuously raise competence levels at scale we have to develop an affordable marketing framework that would allow firms of any size make prudent business decisions. Join us if you share this vision.
We think and write for professional services firms. Join other 2015 prudent decision makers.
Questions & answers▾▾▾
Our insight comes from various sources. It is an intersection of our work with clients, research data, other consultants’ insight, company financial reports, business books, white papers and marketing & management theory.
You will discover that your challenges aren’t unique thus the solutions will follow a certain path. But often the combination of individual challenges at your firm is quite unique and requires customization to our approach.
The nature of our work requires full confidentiality. We will not share any sensitive data about our clients. Firms working with us get insight into what’s possible in the marketplace and how to get there.
You will learn what top 20% and top 5% sweet spot firms have in common and what sets them apart from the rest 80% of the firms.
They will not work for organizations that will fail to be disciplined about following through with agreed steps and actions. Also we can’t assume responsibility for how these firms treat employees, handle clients or how the marketplace is going to change.
We can give you the tools and teach you how to use them but it’s up to you to decide what you will or will not do.
We will have a brief conversation some time after you submit one of the contact forms. We will then schedule a paid Diagnostics session. It will reveal what solution best fits your current challenges. Please refer to the “Process” page for more details.
Sometimes, yes. After thorough diagnostics and then at later stages of the engagement we might leave out some of the components when it makes sense.
We have to be sure you are serious about the project ahead of us. If during the diagnostics either of us determine that now is not the right time to move forward or that we’re not a great fit, we will refund you this fee.
Our Diagnostics session is a must for any meaningful strategy or worthwhile deliverables. You can expect to invest a minimum of $2,000 as a refundable fee.
We will schedule a 1-2hr call or a meeting with one of your key decision makers to go through a series of questions. This will help us identify the scope of future work and whether or not our expertise is sufficient.
If we come to a conclusion that we’re either not a great fit or we wouldn’t be able to provide value we would return this fee.
At our core we understand the value of connection between two worlds: intuition and logic, emotion and reason, artistic and industrial. We won’t give vague advice. We always assess the consequences of practical implementations: costs, feasibility, time, effort, priorities, etc.
We expect key decision makers to take part in our workshops. Normally we are looking to have co-owners, principals, marketing director and head of sales join our conversations.
We provide a structured approach — you are getting a framework. We’ll be asking questions in the same manner as you would’ve done within your company ranks, but differently — in a more structured, coherent, deliberate and unexpected ways.
We were told that we are more focused; that we had helped to stay on course without sinking into off-topic discussions. We were praised for our ability to listen, pay attention and pick important nuggets of information that were otherwise unseen, overlooked and unrecognized.