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Built on Evidence.
Driven by Experience.

Growth-stage companies cannot access evidence-backed strategy at their scale and budget. Top-tier firms charge CA$200K+. DIY means opinions dressed as deliverables. We built Sagentix to close that Evidence Gap.

Stéphane Raby — Founder, Sagentix Advisors

Stéphane Raby

Founder & Principal

Over 25 years, Stéphane has worked at the intersection of technology strategy, cybersecurity, and management consulting — building practices, closing enterprise deals, and advising growth-stage companies on how to compete with firms ten times their size.

From the Founder
“I built Sagentix because I watched superior products lose to competitors with weaker features but stronger positioning — and I was tired of watching opinion-based strategy decks make the difference. Every deliverable I sign is APA-cited throughout — a median of 38 citations per report and passes an 18-check quality gate. If our Phase 1 reveals nothing you did not already know, you receive a full refund and keep the deliverable. That is the only standard I am willing to walk past.”
— Stéphane Raby|CMC · CISSP · P.Eng. · MBA

Why I Built Sagentix

The pattern was always the same. I kept working with amazing companies — cybersecurity platforms, B2B SaaS startups, management consulting firms — that had genuinely superior products. Better technology. Stronger teams. Real differentiation. But they were losing deals to competitors with inferior products and stronger positioning.

The problem was never the product. It was the narrative.

Every one of these companies was leading with feature lists: “AI-powered,” “next-gen,” “proactive.” The same words their competitors used. The same pitch decks with unsourced market sizes. The same pricing set once at launch and never revisited. Buyers couldn't tell them apart — so they defaulted to brand recognition or price. Brilliant products, invisible in the market.

That's when I saw the opportunity. The companies that broke through weren't the ones with the best features — they were the ones that completely changed the conversation. They stopped selling what the product does and started selling what it achieves. They anchored their positioning in what buyers actually hire for — what Jobs-to-Be-Done research calls the functional, emotional, and social jobs that drive purchase decisions.

When you reframe the narrative around buyer outcomes instead of product features, everything shifts. Messaging becomes about the compliance outcomes buyers actually purchase instead of detection capabilities. Pricing anchors to business value instead of seat counts. The pitch deck leads with defensible market data instead of aspirational claims. The sales process qualifies on decision criteria instead of hoping for the best.

The pattern is well-documented in B2B research. Corporate Visions' Three Value Conversations (2015) found that outcome-led positioning drives materially higher buyer engagement than feature-led pitches in professional services. Simon-Kucher's Global Pricing Study (2021) showed value-based pricing discipline lifts price realization by roughly 24% over cost-plus competitors. And Gartner's Challenger Sale research (Dixon & Adamson, 2011) found insight-led sales teams outperform relationship-led teams by 55% on complex B2B deals.

But here was the catch: delivering this level of strategic rigor required the same evidence discipline top-tier consulting firms use internally — and they charge CA$200K+ for it. Growth-stage companies couldn't afford it. So they were stuck with opinions dressed as strategy.

I built Sagentix to close that Evidence Gap. 1,414 cataloged consulting IP artifacts. 134 industry profiles and 480 research papers integrated across the methodology. APA 7th citation discipline with an 18-check quality gate. A 10-phase methodology built on Jobs-to-Be-Done analysis, evidence-backed justifiers, and complete customer journey mapping — delivering board-ready strategy in weeks, not months, at a fraction of the cost.

Because the companies that win aren't the ones with the best product. They're the ones that prove why their product matters.

Why Cybersecurity

I am an engineer before I am a consultant. Early in my career I helped build and secure some of the first Canada-wide internetworks — back when connecting a country meant physically running the links, then arguing for the controls that would keep them trustworthy. That second argument was always the harder one, and it is the one I have never stopped having.

What pulled me toward security was not the threat. It was the fact that a control decision is a business decision wearing different clothes. Whether you encrypt something, who may access it, what evidence you keep — those choices decide which markets you can sell into, and most organizations make them without ever seeing that.

Teaching it came from the same place. For close to three years I taught cloud security to public-service practitioners, roughly two thousand of them, in both official languages. You cannot teach a control to someone who has to apply it on Monday and hide behind abstraction; they will ask the question that finds the gap. That habit — explain it plainly or admit you do not know it — is the same one behind every deliverable this firm ships.

25+

Years in Tech Strategy

4

Professional Credentials

1,414

Curated IP Artifacts

Listen

Hear the Sagentix Story

Pick the length that fits your day.

The essentials in five minutes — Trust Gap, method, pricing, fit.

Updated April 2026.

Why One Firm Does Both

Most advisors pick a side. The reason Sagentix does not is that regulated buyers do not experience these as two problems.

Practice one

Sagentix Cyber & AI

Cybersecurity & AI Governance Advisory

Authoring the evidence a governed decision runs on — federal authorization at Protected B, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 readiness, privacy programmes across several regimes, AI governance and post-quantum migration. We prepare the organization. The party who judges it stays independent of us, which is the whole reason the judgment is worth anything.

See the practice

Practice two

Sagentix Go-to-Market

Go-to-Market & Management Consulting

The story above, made into a method: ten phases from market intelligence to roadmap, every claim traced to a source your board can check. This is the practice that fixes a product whose positioning is losing to weaker competitors.

See the practice

The reason they belong together:

A vendor selling into a bank, a hospital or a federal department meets a gate before it meets a buyer. Clear the gate with no motion behind it and you have an authorization nobody is selling. Build the motion without clearing the gate and the pipeline stops at the first security review. A firm that only does one half hands you the other half as your problem — which is why the two bought together has its own name.

Regulated Market AccessBoth practices, one engagement

Credentials That Back Every Recommendation

Four professional designations spanning cybersecurity, management consulting, engineering, and business strategy.

CISSP — ISC2

CISSP

Certified Information Systems Security Professional

(ISC)²

Cybersecurity domain expertise, risk management, and security architecture.

CMC — CMC-Canada

CMC

Certified Management Consultant

CMC-Canada

Consulting methodology, ethical standards, and client fiduciary duty.

P.Eng. — OIQ

P.Eng.

Professional Engineer

OIQ (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec)

Engineering rigor, technical credibility, and analytical discipline.

Telfer Executive MBA

MBA

Executive MBA — ranked #1 globally by CEO Magazine, 2023

uOttawa Telfer

Strategic leadership, finance, and organizational behavior.

Why Evidence Discipline Changes Everything

Other firms deliver opinions. We deliver evidence.

APA 7th Citations on Every Claim

Every market statistic, competitive assertion, and strategic recommendation includes a traceable in-text citation linked to a full references section. No "industry research suggests" hand-waving.

Research-Validated Data Sources

Premium industry research reports, regulatory databases, SEC filings, and peer-reviewed research form the evidentiary foundation. Each data point is triangulated when possible.

No Unverified Assertions

Claims that cannot be sourced are explicitly tagged [Unverified]. Every deliverable passes an 18-check quality gate and is then personally read and signed by Stéphane before it reaches your inbox — automation plus a human-in-the-loop final review. The same rigor applied at top-tier consulting firms, now accessible to growth-stage companies.

"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. In every deliverable we produce, the standard is evidence — sourced, cited, and defensible. That is not an aspiration. It is a requirement."

— Stéphane Raby, Founder

Our Vision

Where we're building toward.

We are building toward a future where the quality of a company’s go-to-market strategy is determined by the rigor of the methodology, not the size of the consulting budget.

Through Continuous Intelligence, strategies evolve as markets shift — so growth-stage companies operate on the same current intelligence as Fortune 500 firms with dedicated competitive intelligence teams. The evidence gap closes. Strategy becomes accessible. Growth becomes defensible.

Deep Industry Expertise Across High-Growth Verticals

Every engagement runs the same 10-phase methodology. What changes by industry is the vocabulary, the regulator, and what a buyer in that market treats as proof — grouped below by the kind of buying system, because that is what actually differs.

Regulated & public sector

Where an authorization, a certification or a statute decides whether you can sell at all.

Government & Public Sector

Federal delivery record

Positioning and evidence for vendors selling into federal, provincial and municipal buyers — where the procurement instrument, not the pitch, decides the outcome. Working knowledge of supply arrangements, sole-source justification, security categorization and the difference between a standard and the clause that binds it.

Examples: Federal departments and agencies, central banking, Crown corporations, municipal and provincial buyers, GovTech platforms

Defence & National Security

Multiple defence engagements

Go-to-market for defence software, sensing and deployable systems across direct-to-department, prime-subcontractor and innovation-programme routes. Familiar with the tiering that decides which door a supplier can actually use, and with the controlled-goods and cyber-certification gates that sit in front of the contract.

Examples: Defence software and AI, deployable infrastructure, ISR and intelligence platforms, NATO and allied programmes, defence innovation routes

Banking & Financial Services

Central bank + Caribbean banking

Advisory for banks and non-bank financial institutions on AI governance, post-quantum readiness and the control baselines their regulators and correspondent banks expect. Built on work with a central bank and with indigenous Caribbean commercial banks, whose constraints are not the constraints of a North American tier-one.

Examples: Central banking, commercial and development banks, non-bank financial institutions, InsurTech, financial regulators

Healthcare & Digital Health

Delivered engagements

Positioning for digital-health, medical-device and clinical-workflow companies where the buyer is a health system, the evidence bar is clinical, and a privacy regime governs every data flow. Distinguishes what a readiness programme can assert from what only a regulator or a clinical trial can.

Examples: Emergency-department workflow automation, medical devices, digital health platforms, wellness and preventive health

Insurance & Employee Benefits

Carrier + broker channel

Message architecture for products sold into carriers and through the broker and advisor channel — two audiences with opposite economic logic. Life and extended-health carriers do not buy for the same reason, and a single message aimed at both persuades neither.

Examples: Life insurance carriers, extended-health carriers, employer and corporate benefits, broker and advisor distribution

Industrial, resource & infrastructure

Long capital cycles, procurement-driven buyers, and a regulator in the room from day one.

Mining & Critical Minerals

ROI modelling delivered

Market sizing and investor-grade ROI modelling for technology sold into mining and critical-minerals operators. Covers metals, non-metals and the critical-minerals list, and treats the capital-approval process inside a mine as the real sales cycle it is.

Examples: Critical minerals, metals and non-metals extraction, mine-site monitoring and AI, mining services

Environmental Intelligence & Monitoring

P.Eng. + delivered engagements

Go-to-market for environmental monitoring and remediation companies building AI-powered sensing, Data-as-a-Service models and continuous emissions intelligence. Working knowledge of EPA and Environment Canada frameworks, LDAR mandates, remediation lifecycle economics and multi-pollutant monitoring architectures.

Examples: Continuous emissions monitoring, waste and spill response, municipal and ICI services, remediation, smart cities

Energy, Oil & Gas

Upstream to downstream

Positioning for technology sold across upstream, midstream and downstream operations, where an operator buys on measured risk reduction and regulatory exposure rather than on features. Includes the functional-safety expectations that follow energy assets through their life.

Examples: Upstream, midstream and downstream operations, emissions and leak detection, energy safety assurance

Construction Compliance & Permitting

Active engagement

Market entry for software sold to authorities having jurisdiction and to the code consultancies that file with them — a buying system where the customer is a municipal department, the budget cycle is annual, and the product has to be right about the code rather than merely fast.

Examples: Municipal building and permit departments, fire and building code consultancies, architecture and engineering practices

Logistics & Transportation

Delivered engagement

Go-to-market for courier, same-day and time-critical logistics, where the buyer is operational, the switching cost is low, and the differentiation has to be provable in a service-level number rather than an adjective.

Examples: B2B commercial and industrial courier, same-day and timed delivery, logistics platforms, transportation and warehousing

Technology, security & professional services

Where the product is genuinely good and the positioning is what is failing.

Cybersecurity

CISSP-certified

Go-to-market for security vendors who need to translate technical capability into compliance-aligned market positioning. Deep understanding of threat models, NIST and ITSG-33 control families, and the procurement-driven buyer journey that decides a security purchase.

Examples: Managed compliance services, detection and response, endpoint and XDR, identity and access management, GRC platforms

Cloud & Infrastructure

Authorization advisory

Advisory for cloud and SaaS providers going through a government cloud assessment, and go-to-market for the same platforms once the authorization exists. The authorization is a gate, not a differentiator — how it gets sold afterwards is a separate problem, and both are handled here.

Examples: Global infrastructure and connectivity platforms, SaaS providers seeking federal authorization, sovereign cloud, data residency

Safety-Critical Systems Assurance

Engineering background

Positioning for functional-safety and systems-assurance firms whose buyers evaluate against named standards rather than value propositions. Comfortable in the vocabulary of automotive, aerospace and defence assurance, where naming the wrong revision of a standard ends the conversation.

Examples: Automotive (ISO 26262, SOTIF, ADAS), aerospace and defence (DO-178C, DO-326A, MIL-STD), energy and industrial assurance

Satellite, Space & Broadcast

Delivered engagement

Market entry for satellite and broadcast technology across government, defence and commercial media buyers, including the LEO and GEO operators whose economics and procurement cycles have very little in common with each other.

Examples: LEO and GEO satellite operators, broadcast and media infrastructure, government and defence communications, datacasting

B2B SaaS

Growth-stage focus

The core case: a company between $2M and $50M ARR whose product works and whose positioning does not. Segmentation, value proposition, message architecture and pricing rebuilt on evidence a board can check rather than on a workshop opinion.

Examples: Vertical SaaS, developer and infrastructure tools, frontline and retail operations technology, analytics platforms

Higher Education & Research

Active engagement

Go-to-market for analytics and research technology sold into universities, international organizations and non-profit associations, where accreditation cycles and committee governance set the pace and no single buyer can sign alone.

Examples: Universities and accreditation-led entry, international organizations, non-profit and member associations, research analytics

RegTech & Privacy Technology

Active engagement

Positioning for privacy-enforcing technology — redaction, disclosure and compliance tooling — sold into public-sector and education buyers who must satisfy a statutory obligation on a deadline, and who deploy on-premises as often as in cloud.

Examples: Video redaction and disclosure, privacy compliance tooling, public-sector RegTech, education technology, on-prem and hybrid SaaS

Management Consulting

CMC-designated

Go-to-market for mid-market consulting firms competing against larger brands on the same shortlists. Productization, defensible differentiation and the evidence discipline that lets a smaller firm win a procurement its size would normally lose.

Examples: Mid-market advisory firms, engineering consultancies, professional services, boutique specialist practices

Your industry isn’t listed? The methodology adapts.

The 10-phase process is industry-agnostic. What the list above buys you is a shorter run-up — the vocabulary, the regulator and the buying system are already understood on day one rather than learned on your time.

Why domain expertise adds an advantage:

A generalist consultant translates your technical language into generic business language — losing the nuance that makes your product defensible. A domain expert builds positioning that resonates with buyers who evaluate vendors in your specific market. The difference shows up in RFP win rates, sales cycle length, and pricing power.

See How We Apply This Rigor to Your Market

10 phases. 10 deliverables. Every claim defensible. Explore the full methodology behind Sagentix engagements.