Avian Influenza.
The new Y2K?

World's Best Practice in Strategic Management

Professional Services Marketing
- Walking in step with your clients and prospects

This newsletter examines a number of current issues facing organisations in Australia and around the globe. This month we look at:

• The threat of business disruption caused by a potential worldwide bird flu pandemic


• World's Best Practice in Strategic Planning and Execution using Balanced Scorecard. If you're surrounded by systems that drown you in data but provide inadequate information to support decision making, don't skip this article!


• An update on Professional Services Marketing

Using a business modelling technique called Strategy Mapping, leading companies are finding new ways to articulate strategic plans quickly, and communicate them effectively, while demonstrating a solid cause and effect relationship between the mapped objectives.

Coupled with an effective set of measures, and preferably automated monitoring, organisational managers have their focus drawn by the methodology and the process to where it is needed most.

Forget those hours spent wading through long- winded reports trying to understand what's happening in any part of the organisation or separate SBU. An automated strategy map will tell you and your leadership team where the problems are occurring, and will help pin-point the areas that will be impacted next - so you can take avoiding action.

World's Best Practice these days means managing information to warn when to avoid a problem, and planning around strategic obstacles - not waiting for poor performance before starting to address the issues at their root cause. This is about having the information you can use now, not about simply amassing more data to try and process. It removes the potential for organisational and management headaches, before they can occur!

We've been talking with a number of professional service firms lately. Lawyers, Accountants, Specialist Practitioners and yes - even other consulting firms. They all have one thing in common.

What do they have in common? They all hate selling their services. Trouble is, a professional billing around 75%-80% hours is struggling to find the time to make those all-important cold calls.

So don't even think of cold calling, that's our message. Say what?

That's right... Don't cold call. It's a waste of time. Instead, wise professionals are creating real differentiation using their core asset. Themselves. And then developing an integrated marketing and communication program around that core asset. But the key secret for success is to get that process happening in synchronisation with the way your clients want to buy from you.

This works... For the proof, simply ask yourself: "Why do my customers buy from me?" If you can't answer that question, call ASVP Group today. We can help solve the mystery for you.

What's more, we can also help you set up a proven process to track your sales and marketing efforts, to help you reliably predict the business you have in your pipeline, and to get your firm walking in step with your clients and prospects.