What a Phase 1 Deliverable Actually Looks Like: Page by Page, Gate by Gate

The Transparency Problem in Consulting

When a consulting firm says "market intelligence report," what does the buyer actually receive? A five-page summary with unsourced claims? A hundred-page data dump nobody reads? A polished deck with no method you can trace?

Most firms describe deliverables in aspirational terms: "comprehensive market analysis," "competitive landscape," "strategic recommendations." Those phrases say nothing about rigour or evidence. The market rewards the vagueness. The 2022 Economic Census counted 101,761 U.S. employer firms in administrative and general management consulting, with $219.1 billion in revenue, and the 50 largest held only 36.9% of it (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023, 2024). In a field that crowded, a vague promise is the norm.

This article is a specification. It describes what a Phase 1 Market Intelligence engagement produces today, how long it takes, and which checks every page passes Sagentix Phase 01 Market Intelligence, 2026.

What Runs Before Anyone Writes

Phase 1 is the only phase that cannot start until a separate due-diligence stage has finished. Since September 2026 that rule is enforced in code, not left to memory: the pipeline stops if any of the three due-diligence files is missing, unfinished or more than seven days old Sagentix Phase 01 Market Intelligence, 2026.

The checks and the due-diligence stage run in this order:

1. A live web-search check. The pipeline runs a real search and stops if it comes back empty, because a research step that silently returns nothing produces a confident report built on nothing.
2. A data-source health check. The subscriptions and public data services the report will draw on must answer before research starts.
3. A deep-research sweep across eight categories, with every critical claim checked against a government source.
4. A crawl of the client's own website, up to 200 pages, including the PDFs and documents it links to.
5. A four-lane scan of social channels, news, government programs and the client's own channels, each lane cross-checked against the others.
6. A regulatory landscape for the rules that actually bind the client's market, with a table correcting any imprecise regulatory terms.

Two guards run underneath. One makes sure an empty result from a source is not reported as "nothing found" until a control query with a known answer proves the source works. The other loads everything the client has given us in full (interview notes, documents, prior research), never a truncated slice; if the material is too large for one pass, the run stops instead of cutting.

For engagements under the CMC code of conduct, nothing from the client is processed with AI until the client has given written consent. The pipeline checks for it before the first step.

What the Analysis Covers

The report follows a fixed map of 17 sections in four parts. Each section heading is a declarative sentence that states the finding, not a topic label Sagentix Phase 01 Market Intelligence, 2026.

Part I: the situation. An executive briefing in Situation, Complication, Question, Answer form, followed by five key takeaways; the method; and the market context, including structural shifts, the regulatory picture and the reason to act now.

Part II: the size of the prize.

• Industry deep dives, each with a standard metrics card.
• TAM, SAM and SOM built from the bottom up. The total addressable market is a table of at least eight component rows, each with a named source. The serviceable market applies three filters (technical fit, customer fit and access). The obtainable market runs years one, three and five under bull, base and bear cases, weighted by probability and capped by what the team can actually deliver. Four cross-checks test the result: comparable companies, customer counts, unit economics and a conditional SAM.

Every figure traces to a named source: licensed industry research by NAICS code, U.S. Census Bureau and Statistics Canada data, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics series, and peer-reviewed research.

Part III: the competitive field.

• Porter's Five Forces for each vertical, every force rated high, medium or low with its evidence (Porter, 2008).
• Growth drivers and value migration: where money is moving, and away from whom.
• Buyer analysis with three to four personas. These are built for the way committees buy now. Gartner found that 74% of B2B buyer teams "demonstrate unhealthy conflict" during the decision, in groups that range from five to 16 people across as many as four functions (Gartner, 2025).
• At least ten competitor profiles in four categories, a positioning map, a playbook of at least five if-then responses, and a verdict on whether each competitor publishes its prices. Competitor firmographics come through the Apollo.io sales-intelligence service and are cross-checked against public filings where competitors are public.
• SWOT for each vertical, every item tied to evidence. "Strong technical team" is not a strength unless it connects to an advantage the data shows.

Part IV: the decision.

• Vertical prioritization into a first and second tier.
• A risk register of at least eight risks, each with probability, impact, trigger and mitigation, drawn as a heatmap.
• Seven strategic imperatives.
• A 90-day roadmap in three stages, with go/no-go gates between them.
• Eight to ten named partnership targets.
• An evidence ledger of at least ten load-bearing claims and an assumptions register of at least five, so you can see what the conclusions rest on.
• Hand-offs to the later phases (value proposition, messaging, pricing, sales process).

How Long the Report Runs

Depth follows what the market surfaces, not a page target. We measured the 13 Phase 1 reports delivered from April to September 2026 (11 for clients, two on Sagentix's own market). The median ran 88 pages, with nine of the 13 between 74 and 102, and 55 entries in the reference list Sagentix Phase 01 Market Intelligence, 2026. The five built in September 2026, after the source-verification gates described below were added, ran longer: a median of 120 pages and 92 references. The pipeline caps every report at 50,000 words and 200 pages.

The Package You Receive

Phase 1 is not one document Sagentix Phase 01 Market Intelligence, 2026. Every one of the 13 reports measured shipped with the same core package:

• The full report as a branded PDF, plus an editable Word version.
• A two-to-four-page "In Brief": the synthesis, the key numbers, five to seven findings, what they mean and the recommended actions. It is built to be forwarded to a board member or investor who needs the conclusions without the analysis.
• An executive deck of ten to 13 slides with speaker notes on every slide, using native, editable PowerPoint charts. Each deck passes an automated visual check (nothing running off the slide, no type below 9 points, no low-contrast text) before a person reviews it.
• Up to six standard visuals embedded in the report (12 of the 13 carried them): the TAM funnel, the Five Forces pentagon, the SWOT grid, the competitive matrix, the risk heatmap and the 90-day timeline.
• Client Portal access, where the findings stay available after delivery.

The Evidence Standard

Every Phase 1 deliverable clears two layers of automated checks before a person reads it Sagentix GTM Methodology, 2026.

A 15-stage verification pipeline, nine stages of it blocking. The ones that matter most to a reader:

• Source verification. Every reference is fetched, and the sentence that cites it is compared with what the page actually says. A reference that does not support its sentence fails the draft.
• Source ledger. The report may cite only sources the research actually retrieved during the run, so no reference can be invented.
• Citation integrity. Every in-text citation resolves to exactly one entry in the reference list, and every entry is cited.
• Numeric consistency. A stated count must match what the report lists: "five risks" means five rows.
• Retracted claims. Any claim Sagentix has already withdrawn, anywhere, cannot reappear.
• Knowledge-search validation. Claims from the knowledge searches are split out and checked against their sources; a contradicted claim never reaches the draft.

When a reference fails, the pipeline sources the claim properly, narrows it to what the source says, or removes it.

A quality gate of 18 checks on every deliverable (23 implemented in all, including phase-specific ones). It covers placeholders, structure, citation format, declarative titles, document architecture and cross-document consistency. Phase 1 adds a check on competitor pricing, so the report says plainly when a competitor publishes no price instead of guessing one.

Then a person. The pipeline never marks a Phase 1 complete. After the automated gates, I read every deliverable end to end and sign it before release. Nothing ships on automation alone.

The Timeline

Five to seven business days from kickoff to delivery.

That speed comes from infrastructure, not shortcuts. The research base (1,452 curated artifacts: frameworks, research briefs and evidence tables) and the checks above already exist; an engagement applies them to the client's market instead of building them from scratch.

The traditional alternative is slower and priced differently. In When a Top-Tier Firm Quotes $200K for Your GTM Strategy, the proposal ran 12 to 16 weeks. Top-tier firms price government work by the team-week: the U.S. General Services Administration's Inspector General documented awarded rates of $133,196 a week for an engagement manager and one associate, rising to $217,801 a week with four (U.S. General Services Administration, Office of Inspector General, 2019). Phase 1 is not a substitute for a multi-month strategy engagement. It is the evidence base that would otherwise take up the first half of one.

The Phase 1 Money-Back Guarantee (Subject to Terms)

Our terms state it this way: if the deliverable reveals no new insights about your market, competitive landscape or buyer dynamics, you are entitled to a full refund. Refund requests must be made within 14 days of receiving the deliverable, and the deliverable remains yours either way. The full wording is at sagentix.ca/terms.

The guarantee is affordable because of the cost structure described in Platform Economics: Why 67–78% Projected Margins Change Everything in Consulting. Those margins are projections, and they are what make a refund a manageable risk rather than a marketing line Sagentix GTM Methodology, 2026.

A deliverable specification is a promise. This is mine: every claim cited and checked against its source, every page read by me before it leaves, five to seven business days. If it reveals nothing new, you can ask for your money back.

Where This Leaves You

Sagentix Phase 1 Market Intelligence: CA$4,500, 5–7 business days, a report that ran a median of 88 pages and 55 references across the last 13, a package of report, Word version, In Brief, executive deck and portal, and a money-back guarantee subject to terms. Higher tiers credit the Phase 1 fee and run to all ten phases (CA$45,000, six to eight weeks).

If you want to see the result before you buy it, the four-page Phase 1 preview shows a sample study's answer, its map of vendors against the billing channels, its sizing arithmetic and its 90-day plan.

Founders evaluating Phase 1: which section would change your next board conversation most — the sizing, the competitor price map, the risk register or the 90-day plan?

References

• Gartner. (2025, May 7). Gartner sales survey finds 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate "unhealthy conflict" during the decision process [Press release]. Gartner, Inc.
• Gartner. (2026, May 20). Gartner survey finds 69% of B2B buyers turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights [Press release]. Gartner, Inc.
• Porter, M. E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard Business Review, 86(1), 78–93.
• Sagentix GTM Methodology. (2026). 10-phase GTM delivery methodology: knowledge-base architecture, platform economics, and quality gates [Internal methodology documentation]. Sagentix Advisors Inc.
• Sagentix Phase 01 Market Intelligence. (2026). Phase 01 market intelligence deliverable specification and delivery measurements, April–September 2026 [Internal methodology documentation]. Sagentix Advisors Inc.
• U.S. Census Bureau. (2023). Economic Census: Summary statistics for the U.S., states, and selected geographies: 2022 (NAICS 541611) [Data set].
• U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). Economic Census: Establishment and firm size statistics for the U.S.: 2022 (concentration of largest firms, NAICS 541611) [Data set].
• U.S. General Services Administration, Office of Inspector General. (2019). Improper pricing on the McKinsey professional services contract may cost the United States an estimated $69 million (Report No. A170118/Q/6/P19004).