Client-facing professionals
Reflect document exchanges, calendar invitations, portals, signatures, and urgent client requests without imitating a live matter or distressed client.
For Professional Services
Phishing Simulation Planning for Professional Services Firms
Professional services teams depend on client email, shared documents, billing, scheduling, cloud platforms, and outside specialists—often with a small internal support team.
A focused simulation can practice verification around those daily requests without copying confidential client work or disrupting a live engagement.
Small-team planning • Relevant scenarios • Simple measurement • Practical follow-up
01Understand the team
Design around how small professional services firms actually work
Start with a business decision employees already make and the safe verification route available to them. A small organization benefits more from one focused exercise it can support than from a complicated campaign with unclear follow-up.
Billing and administration
Practice callback and approval steps for invoice, bank-detail, payroll, tax, and benefits changes.
Partners and owners
Include executive impersonation and unusual approval requests only when a trusted out-of-band verification route already exists.
External IT and specialists
Agree how providers recognize the exercise, handle reports, protect real-incident response, and share the permitted results.
02Choose the scenario
Use a familiar request with a clear next step
Give each scenario one learning objective and use fictional people, organizations, accounts, and transactions. Avoid exploiting a real deadline, dispute, employee concern, or customer problem.
Client document share
Practice checking the sender, engagement context, destination, and access request using an invented client and file.
Invoice or bank update
Reinforce confirmation through a saved client or supplier contact before accepting new payment instructions.
Electronic-signature request
Ask employees to inspect the sender and independently open the normal signature service before reviewing a fictional document.
Cloud account notice
Practice reaching the known service or IT contact instead of signing in through an unexpected expiry or storage warning.
03Write the brief
Answer four questions before sending anything
| Decision | Question to answer | Required preparation |
|---|---|---|
| Client confidentiality | Could the scenario reveal a real client, engagement, dispute, transaction, or document? | Invent all names and details, and keep client information out of messages, landing pages, and reports. |
| Verification route | Can employees validate the request without replying or using contact details in the message? | Publish a known number, portal, directory, or support route before testing the behavior. |
| Provider support | Who receives reports and handles a real suspicious message during the exercise? | Brief the internal owner and external provider, and test their handoff using approved accounts. |
| Client deadlines | Does the campaign overlap a filing, closing, audit, tax, payroll, or delivery deadline? | Choose a lower-pressure period and define when an active client event should stop the exercise. |
04Run the exercise
Use a manageable five-step workflow
- 1
Choose one behavior
State the request being tested, the expected verification or reporting action, the approved audience, and how the observation will be used.
- 2
Name the owner
Assign the person who approves the message, handles questions, monitors impact, stops the exercise, and makes sure follow-up occurs.
- 3
Test the complete path
Use approved test accounts to check delivery, links, landing pages, supported devices, event records, reports, and follow-up material.
- 4
Launch with support available
Brief the responsible employee or IT provider and avoid business-critical deadlines, staff absences, and active incidents.
- 5
Make one improvement
Debrief the expected action, provide relevant private learning, and assign the most useful workflow or control improvement to an owner.
05Measure responsibly
Use results the business can act on
Record intended recipients, successful deliveries, exclusions, unique recipient events, verified reports, response handling, and completed follow-up. Separate repeated activity and automated link inspection from confirmed employee actions.
Interpret results with role, client-contact frequency, device, delivery, scenario relevance, and access to reporting in view. In a small partnership, show actual counts beside percentages and avoid public comparisons.
Treat the review as input for improving reporting, verification, email, identity, access, backup, or provider processes. One interaction does not explain why a decision occurred and should not become an employee risk score.
Common questions
Common questions about Phishmake's features, onboarding, and support, answered to help you get started with confidence.
Can a simulation imitate a real client request?
Use an entirely fictional client, matter, document, and deadline. Copying a live engagement can expose confidential information or cause an employee to take a consequential client action.
Should partners receive a different scenario?
Partners may face different approval, payment, and impersonation requests. Segment them only when the expected action and follow-up are relevant and the group is large enough for results to be handled privately.
Can the exercise collect passwords to test employees?
Do not collect real passwords. The landing experience should teach the expected action and record only the minimum approved campaign events.
What should the firm improve after a campaign?
Prioritize the most useful discovered gap, such as a clearer callback rule, easier reporting route, stronger authentication, safer file sharing, or better provider escalation.
Sources & further reading
Published by Phishmake · Updated
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