Frequently Asked — The way and why of AbilityMatrix consulting projects

Working with us is a unique experience. We know it is different. But how? Judge for yourself. This post is a collection of the most common questions we receive from our clients during the early stages of cooperation.

Some of the questions look simple and straightforward but being in the process is always more complicated than looking at it from the outside. Everything is obvious in hindsight; as the phrase goes.

1. Why do you pick such a small target market (niche)? Isn’t it a problem to have a small list of contacts and even smaller business potential?

There are multiple reasons we tend to pick smaller niches.

First, the smaller the market segment, the more repetitive the decision-making pattern will be. This is extremely useful if you plan to use the first few calls, interviews, discussions as feedback on the topics, and vocabulary for the upcoming meetings. To put it simply: the feedback you get in one meeting can be used in the next. If you target a larger segment in reality it tends to be a collection of segments. As a consequence, the information you get will be most likely useless by the next meeting.

Second, the companies we work with are usually at the early stage of go-to-market for their innovation. They cannot even handle 150 leads. Probably not even 50. So it makes sense to pick a sizable market segment. Sizable considering the execution capabilities of the organisation. A segment you can serve well, start small — and eventually scale in.

2. What happens to all the landing pages, graphics, texts you create for our cooperation?

It’s yours. We are not in the business of graphic design or copywriting. We want to enable you to improve and sustain business development. Therefore, you will have the results, the source files, everything. As we keep cooperating using our methodology, we will be providing new and improved iterations. Our focus is on showing your product appropriately to as many decision-makers as needed for gaining their insights and generating interest for it. Marketing assets are just ever-changing tools to facilitate your smart initial exposure.

3. Who holds the right of any new product ideas resulting from your work. Either during the workshops or interviews?

It’s yours. During the cooperation, we will suggest changes to the product based on the feedback we collect or root from decision-makers. Sometimes the ideas are direct, but more often inspired by factors even the potential clients can not express clearly.

If a completely new product idea will emerge — it’s all yours again. Do not forget that the market power of an idea is limited: some claim only 1% of the success! You still have to do the 99% of hard, mundane work to get to the summit.

4. Can I use /re-use the offered process documents? And the templates?

Again, it’s all yours. Use them, change them, adapt them to your new challenges.

5. How to measure the return on your services?

You can measure and compare the cooperation results in various ways, depending on your actual business goals. So there is no one-approach-fits all — as there never is.

The most obvious approach: did we help you generate more revenue? That is the lucky situation when all you need is… leads with a bit of insights, and everything else falls in the right place.

But, the challenge of benchmarks is surfacing fast when it turns out that unsatisfactory revenue streams are only the symptom to deeper factors… so similarly to understanding the value we need to dig deeper.

In case of a transforming organisation, the benchmarks change to a mix of soft and hard indicators: how much would you have paid for the management training, sales workshops, or a marketing agency to reach the same evolution? How much would be lost in translation between parties? What is the worth of exposing your team, your developers to actual, living breathing clients? What is the price tag for helping software developers design systems with a “customers first” mindset?

In case of launching the scaling-up process, the comparison is rather about the risk of losing opportunities. Hiring a semi- professional team with less experience than us to do your sales, marketing and product validation work would require something in the range of 10–30k/month. If you happen to make a wrong (key) hire, you just wasted valuable growth time — and the money. Compared to this, you can get a full team for a fraction of the cost.

6. How fast is the change in the organisation?

There is no one size fits all answer here. It depends on the speed of the organization we work with and the resources you can invest — especially your time. We were never billed as a slow and unresponsive, lazy team. You have to be patient with your own organization as they not only learn but also learn how to execute a completely different business development process. Transformation just starts with working with us, but you will have to utilize what you have learned to make it a full transformation.

Still have questions? Let us know, and we’ll add it to the list.

If you want to learn more about the decision-maker/problem matrix we employ to prioritize the target segments, book a call with us on the following page: bizdev.abilitymatrix.com

Contact: info@abilitymatrix.com