Client Advisory Services
Lean Market Development + Agile Engineering = Market Dominance.
The waterfall product development model (Concept → Product → Development → Alpha/Beta Test → Launch/First Ship) followed by traditional companies has never worked well for startups. Unlike established markets, founders can’t be sure WHO represents their target customer, the product features that should be prioritized, the nature or size of the market or the level of competition expected. Even with all of these unknowns, most startups continue to follow this “build first” “sell later” approach all the way to the inevitable going out of business fire sale.
Cognicient Advisory Services offer a more efficient approach. We advocate pursuing a lean market development approach that acts in concert with a proven agile solution development methodology that reduces costs, guarantees product/market fit and preserves owner equity.
The five core principles that drive our primary strategy include:
Cognicient Advisory Services offers a team of business advisory and technology domain experts committed to helping your startup initiative achieve market dominance. Our team serves the business needs of the startup with our Lean Market Development Advisory as well as the operational requirements of the enterprise with our High Tech Advisory.
Cognicient Lean Market Development Advisory
Our approach to lean market development is focused on six key disciplines that drive lower costs, rapid growth, and global market penetration. These practice areas include:
Cognicient High-Tech Advisory
Our approach to leveraging high technology for the enterprise is focused on six key disciplines that offer our clients guidance towards developing, implementing and supporting a superior best of breed technological infrastructure. These practice areas include:
Is the business problem that you are solving important enough that the right product will drive significant numbers of customers to buy or engage with the product?
Does your customer believe that your Minimum Viable Product elegantly solves their problem or fills the need well enough to persuade lots of other customers to buy?
Phase One – Market Discovery
Translating a founder’s vision into a series of business hypothesis that will test the market potential of their solution is the goal of Lean Market Discovery process. These hypotheses become analytical models that guide and provide instant feedback at every stage. Our goal is to save time to market, reduce spend and preserve as much founder equity as possible.
Defining Your Vision
Define the problem statement for your startup and a business model scorecard that measures your progress.
Testing Your Problem
Test your problem understanding with the customer and validate their desire and timeline for getting it fixed.
Testing Your Solution
Test that your solution solves the problem vision and validate that your customer is willing to pay your price.
Verifying Your Solution
Validate that you have gathered enough facts to know whether your solution has the potential to scale.
How do you prove that your “idea” has a repeatable, scalable business model that can deliver the volume of customers required to build a profitable company?
Does $1 in sales and marketing resources generate $2+ of revenue, users, views, or clicks?
Phase Two – Market Validation
Enabling the development of a financially well-managed startup that minimizes the need for funding and preserves founder equity. A business model must be rigorously tested with a large segment of target customers in order to determine its scalability. An easy to follow sales roadmap must be developed for the sales and marketing teams so that leadership can predictably determine whether each new dollar invested in acquiring a new customer will result in at least a 2X+ return in revenue.
Sales Readiness
Develop a strategy for executing a repeatable direct and indirect sales strategy.
Sales Execution
Test and implement sales strategies that result in predictable sales pipeline development and closure.
Market Positioning
Test and develop market positioning strategies that focus on maximizing market penetration.
Final Assessment
Gather final data analysis and make final assessment as how and why and how your chosen business model will scale.