What does a go-to-market assessment cost?

That is the whole answer, and it is deliberately at the top of this page rather than behind a form. Most firms in this category will not put a number anywhere on their website. We checked, and the section further down names them.

What follows is what moves the price inside that range, what the fee covers, what it explicitly does not, and what the alternatives cost, with sources for every figure that is not ours.

What moves the price within the range

Three things, in order of impact.

How many segments need separate treatment

One profile and one message track is the bottom of the range. If you sell to genuinely different buyers who respond to different arguments, each needs its own profile, its own positioning, and its own validation test. That is the single largest driver.

The state of your historical data

The ICP is derived from your own closed-won, closed-lost, churn and expansion history. If that lives in a well-maintained CRM, stage one moves quickly. If it has to be reconstructed from invoices, inboxes and memory, it takes longer, and the fee reflects it.

The complexity of the buying committee

A single decision-maker is straightforward. A committee spanning several functions with different routes to the same budget requires mapping each of them, and separating the routes properly is what makes the resulting targeting usable.

What the fee covers

Phase one runs as four labs across five to six weeks, ending in seven deliverables you own outright.

Lab 01: ICP

• A documented Ideal Customer Profile. Firmographics, prioritized segments, buying-committee roles, trigger events, and explicit disqualification criteria.
• A revenue analysis of your own history. What your numbers reveal about which relationships actually produce economic return, with the supporting work shown.

Lab 02: Message

• Positioning and messaging frameworks. Segment-specific value arguments, competitive positioning, and proof-point mapping.

Lab 03: Channel

• The go-to-market plan. Channel strategy, outreach cadence, sequencing, and the operating rhythm required to run it.
• A metrics framework. The specific measures that will govern execution, with baseline expectations and review cadence.

Lab 04: Signal

• Live market validation findings. Real response data from putting your message in front of real buyers, including which segments and messages produced engagement.

Close

• An executive presentation. A working session walking your leadership through the findings and the execution path.

The validation test is the part worth reading twice. It is not a research exercise that produces a slide. Your message goes in front of real buyers inside phase one, which means you typically finish the engagement with first conversations already in motion rather than a document and a hypothesis.

What the fee does not cover

Naming this now is cheaper than discovering it in week four.

• Paid media spend or advertising placement. We do not mark up media.
• CRM licensing or third-party data subscriptions beyond what a deployment bundles.
• Brand identity, website, or creative asset production.
• Closer or account executive placement. Available, scoped separately, never assumed.
• Execution itself. Phase two is quoted after phase one, for the reason in the FAQ below.

Why it is a fixed fee and not an hourly rate

An hourly engagement pays a firm to take longer. That is not a claim about anyone's character, it is a description of what the incentive rewards, and it is the reason a scoping conversation with an hourly firm tends to expand rather than narrow.

A fixed fee moves that risk onto us. If stage two takes an extra week because your data is messier than it looked, that is our problem, and it is priced in. You know the number before you start, and the number is the number.

It also makes the engagement refusable. Because phase one is scoped to stand alone and you keep everything, we can tell you at the end that execution is not worth doing yet without that costing us the entire relationship. A firm whose revenue depends on the follow-on engagement is structurally worse placed to say that.

What the alternatives cost

Hiring instead

The most common alternative to buying strategy is hiring someone to figure it out. The Bridge Group's 2025 survey of 351 B2B companies puts median sales development OTE at $80,000, split roughly $55,000 base and $25,000 variable. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data for March 2026 puts benefits at 30.1% of total employee compensation, which brings salary plus benefits to roughly $114,000 a year before tools, management time, or a desk.

The same survey puts average ramp at three months and average tenure at 1.9 years. So the realistic picture is a year of cost with a quarter of it unproductive, and a rehire inside two years.

Phase one costs about six to nine weeks of that same spend. The difference is that the hire starts by guessing who to call, and phase one is the work of answering that first. Most companies do both. The order matters more than the choice.

Buying execution without strategy

Some published rates in the adjacent market, from firms that do post them:

Those are execution, not strategy. A platform at $250 a month will run outbound against whatever targeting you give it, enthusiastically and at volume, including if the targeting is wrong. That is the specific failure this assessment exists to prevent, and it is why we sequence assessment first.

The firms that will not tell you

We checked the pricing pages of every comparable firm we could find. 11x, Artisan, Qualified, SalesHive, and Martal Group publish no pricing at all. Tiers are named, figures are not, and every path ends at a demo request or a sales call.

That is a legitimate way to run a business. But it means the first honest number you get arrives after you have spent an hour on a call, and it is calibrated to what that call suggested you would pay. We would rather you decide whether $14,000 to $22,000 is in your range before either of us spends the time.

Common questions