A firm that accepts every mandate is screening none.
When you ask an outside firm whether it can create demand in your market, the answer is almost always yes. That should make you cautious. A yes given to everyone carries no information about you.
It also tells you where the risk has been placed. A firm that does not screen its mandates finds the unsuitable ones later, during the engagement and at your expense. In a small market of sophisticated buyers the expense is specific: approaches made in your name that should not have been made, and months you cannot recover.
We assess every incoming mandate against four criteria before our team commits. The assessment is diligence at our cost, it ends with a clear answer on fit, and it is finished before anything is built for your market.
Four criteria are assessed before our team commits.
The four criteria are market fit, ticket size, complexity and timeline. Each asks whether a mandate can succeed in your market, which is a different question from whether your business is a good one.
The assessment looks at two companies and never mixes them: your business, and the accounts you want to win. A strong business can still face a market that cannot deliver, and finding that case early is what the four criteria are for.
Industry is not among them. We do not specialize in one vertical, and the problem we work on appears across 40+ industries and 200+ sub-verticals. A private credit lender, a shipping line and an AI platform look very different on paper and can pass the same four tests.
The pattern we look for is a familiar one. The firm grew through referrals, partner networks or its own reputation; it knows how to deliver, and its contracts are valuable. What it lacks is a controlled route into the rest of its market.
This is what each criterion looks for.
- Market fit: sophisticated buyers who are hard to reach, in a market where generic demand generation is insufficient.
- Ticket size: one new client worth high five figures, six figures and above in annual contract value, and six or seven figures over the relationship.
- Complexity: several decision-makers who must agree, over a cycle measured in months.
- Timeline: enough runway for the mandate to succeed at the pace your market decides.
Ticket size and complexity decide the economics.
Two of the criteria are arithmetic. Proprietary technology, market intelligence, established partnerships and strategic relationships are costly to deploy on one client’s behalf, and high lifetime value is what pays for them. A small to mid-ticket deal cannot, and goodwill on either side does not change that. You can apply this test before any conversation with us: work out what one new client is worth over the whole relationship.
Complexity is the other half. Where one or two people decide within two to six weeks, speed and volume are the right instruments. Where a whole buying group must agree over months, precision takes their place. To test it, take your last three signed contracts and note two things for each: the time from first conversation to signature, and the number of people who had to agree.
Timeline asks whether the mandate has room to win.
The fourth criterion asks whether a mandate has the runway to build its intelligence, reach each decision-maker properly and improve quarter by quarter. A short timeline is not disqualifying in itself: one completed mandate, for an education technology company, ran ninety days within a strict fall and spring window. A deadline shorter than your own sales cycle asks the market to decide faster than it does. The effort then widens to make up for the months it lacks, which damages a firm’s standing with a small set of buyers, so we would sooner decline.
Screening early protects both sides.
Intake is the cheapest moment to decline, for both of us. Nothing has been built, no approach has been made in your name and you have paid nothing for the assessment.
For you the protection is concrete. Your reputation has not been spent on approaches that could not succeed, and your team has not given time to conversations that would never qualify. Both sides have also been through the economics, the risk and the expectations before anything depended on them.
A decline is also an answer you can use. If the market cannot deliver, you are told early and you are told why. Knowing which of the four tests your market did not pass is useful whether you keep the channels you have or approach the market another way.
For us the reasoning is as plain. An engagement is judged by the qualified opportunities that reach your team. A mandate that cannot produce them fails on the only measure we accept, however much activity surrounds it. So we accept mandates where the market can deliver.
Some markets are better served by the conventional model.
The conventional model of demand generation was optimized for velocity, volume and simplicity: short sales cycles, transactional deals and simple buying decisions. Where your market looks like that, it is the right model and you should keep using it.
Our thesis starts where that model stops working. Above the threshold, talent costs rise, timelines extend beyond quarters, and success needs infrastructure that a traditional retainer cannot support. Below it, the value of one new client does not pay for that level of investment.
So when a company on the conventional side of the line asks us for help, the useful answer is no, given early and plainly. It costs us a mandate, and it costs the company far less than a year spent finding out.
