You already know POUNCE is a professional resume and marketing material management tool that can enable your team members to easily find and distribute up-to-date collateral to prospects. (If this is news to you, check out our video.)
But after using POUNCE in our own firm, we’ve discovered a few other ways the system makes our lives easier. Here are a three surprising ways POUNCE has helped the P&N marketing team:
1. Quickly find outdated or prohibited language.
POUNCE’s search feature makes it easy to find words or phrases in user profiles or marketing materials that may need to be updated. Here are a couple of real life examples:
Regulatory Changes: Our firm performs a LOT of audits in the governmental and non-profit arenas, which means we had numerous marketing materials and resumes referencing the single audit standard OMB Circular A-133. As you know, this standard was recently consolidated into OMB’s Uniform Guidance.
With POUNCE, we were able to do a quick search of all marketing materials and resumes containing “A-133” so we would know exactly which pieces would need to be updated with “Uniform Guidance.” Without POUNCE, we would have had to individually go through each resume and marketing material that might contain “A-133” and that would have been time-consuming to say the least. POUNCE helped us quickly identify only those materials requiring updates rather than having to sift through each one.
Prohibited Language: The State Board of CPAs for our home state does not approve the word “expert” or “expertise” in advertising, marketing materials, or public communications.
However, our practice professionals have a tendency to describe their industry or service expertise in their resumes. (“Why shouldn’t I say I have expertise in state and local tax?”)
POUNCE makes it easy for us to perform periodic searches of these and other prohibited words and terms to ensure we are compliant with industry regulations.
2. Keep track of speakers and presentation topics.
It’s no secret that speaking engagements can be a powerful way to position your firm AND the individual speaker as a thought-leader and subject matter expert. But in our experience, it can become an administrative nightmare trying to keep track of each speaker and presentation.
POUNCE provides a place for your professionals to update and maintain their own list of past speaking engagements.
This information can be incredibly valuable for your marketing team (to understand who is speaking, where they are speaking, and so on), but can also be a huge benefit for your practice professionals as well. Why?
- The full-text search feature in POUNCE makes it easy to see if others in your firm have presented on a specific topic. This means you can see if someone else has existing presentation content that you can leverage, which can save valuable time when developing a new presentation.
- Your firm may have expectations of its practice professionals to participate in marketing and business development activities. POUNCE provides a central, visible place for users to document their speaking engagements that are aligned with these expectations.
3. Mitigate the risk of potential conflicts of interest.
Especially in the accounting and legal professions, potential conflicts of interest can arise before or during the course of an engagement. As an example, having a partner on the board of a non-profit organization would impair independence in performing that organization’s audit.
However, by performing a quick search of the name of the non-profit entity before investing time in the sales or engagement process, you can understand if any of your team members are currently serving (or have previously served) in a board member role.
Most firms have policies and procedures in place to govern how conflicts are identified and managed to ensure that client interests are not jeopardized and professional standards are not violated. POUNCE is not designed or intended to act as a conflicts management or client acceptance tool, but is has become a valuable reference tool for our firm.
When we developed POUNCE, we were not seeking to alter the way we find and share presentation content across offices or check for potential conflicts of interest. We simply wanted to provide our doer-sellers with on-demand accessibility to the resumes and marketing materials they need in business development.
But we’ve found that the adoption of POUNCE has helped us become more efficient in ways we had not intended.
For a free demonstration of these and other ways POUNCE might be able to help your firm, please contact us.
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