Client Advisory Services

Lean Market Development + Agile Engineering = Market Dominance.

SCHEDULE A COMPLEMENTARY BUSINESS MODEL ASSESSMENT SCHEDULE AN ASSESSMENT

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:

You must have a process of quickly turning guesses into facts before your financial well runs dry.
Testing, learning, and refining is key to finding a repeatable, scalable and profitable business model
Don’t assume that customers will come just because you made what you believe is an excellent product.
Focus on reviewing results of hypothesis testing to determine the actual state of business model validation
Business plans that leave little room for error, learning, iteration or customer feedback are doomed to fail.

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:

Market Discovery
Market Penetration
Sales Enablement

Market Expansion
Business Development
Solution Development

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:

Cognitive Technologies
Decision Management
Content Management

Advanced Analytics
BIG DATA
Vendor Evaluation

COGNICIENT Lean Market Development Framework

Helping our clients build a successful product, articulate unique product differences and offer their prospects a compelling reason for buying it.

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.

The client deliverables of this phase include:

Founder Solution Vision Brief
Discovered Business Model Development / Testing / Validation
Customer Problem Statement and Hypothesis Testing / Validation
Customer Solution Statement and Hypothesis Testing / Validation
MVP Solution Development / Testing / Validation

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.

The client deliverables of this phase include:

Direct/Indirect Channel Sales Roadmap
Market Positioning / Strategy Brief
Sales Process Definition Brief
Business Model Scaling Assessment

Client Advisory Services

COGNICIENT Lean Market Development Framework

The client deliverables of this phase include:

The client deliverables of this phase include:

Schedule Business Model Assessment

Advisory Services

Project Acumen

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