Your best methodology earns once per engagement, then sits in a drawer. The drawer is getting expensive. Here's how to productise IP without cannibalising billing.
You've got a methodology that clients love. I know you do, because every consultancy worth its fees has at least one - the diagnostic framework, the maturity assessment, the proprietary scoring model that kicks off every engagement and makes clients nod and say, "This is exactly what we needed."
And every time you deploy it, you embed it inside a bespoke project, wrap it in senior consultant hours, bill it as part of a larger engagement, and move on. The methodology generates revenue once. Then it sits in a slide deck until the next project.
I'm not telling you something you don't know. Most managing partners I speak to have had the "we should productise this" conversation at least twice. It comes up at the offsite. Someone mentions recurring revenue. Everyone agrees it's a good idea. Then the conversation drifts back to pipeline, utilisation, and hiring - and the productisation idea goes back in the drawer for another year.
The drawer is getting expensive.
The cost of turning a consultancy's intellectual property into a functioning digital product has dropped to a level that would have been unimaginable five or six years ago. I'm not being dramatic. A diagnostic tool that would have cost £150k to build in 2018 can now be prototyped and tested for a fifth of that. SaaS billing, cloud hosting, authentication, analytics - all essentially commoditised now. And AI has compressed development timelines further still. McKinsey's latest State of AI report shows 71% of organisations regularly using generative AI, with 66% reporting measurable productivity gains. That same wave is making your build costs lower, your prototyping faster, and your time to market shorter.
But the bit that matters more than the technology: the market is ready. Your clients - the ones who can't afford a full engagement, or aren't ready for one yet, or simply want ongoing access to a tool rather than a one-off project - they're already buying products like this from someone. If it's not from you, it's from a competitor who had the same methodology but got to market first. Or worse, it's from a SaaS company that built something generic that does 60% of what your proprietary framework does and charges £200 a month for it.
That's the window. Lower build cost, established infrastructure, growing buyer appetite for on-demand expertise. Consultancies with genuine IP are better positioned than almost anyone to use it.
I think the reason this conversation keeps stalling is that "productise our IP" sounds abstract. So let me make it concrete.
I've seen four models work particularly well in consultancy contexts.
The internal tool that becomes client-facing. You've got a project tracking framework your team uses internally - the one that structures every engagement, tracks milestones, flags risks. Productise it as a client portal. Clients get visibility into their own projects, you get a differentiated delivery experience, and the tool itself becomes something you can offer to clients who want to run their own transformation programmes without commissioning the full engagement.
The self-assessment platform. Probably the most natural starting point for most firms. Take the diagnostic that kicks off every engagement, the one where you sit with the client for two days and assess their maturity across twelve dimensions, and build a self-service version. Clients identify their own problem before you propose a solution. It's a lead generation machine disguised as a product. We've built several of these at Distinction, including scorecards for digital platform health and CX investment benchmarking, and they consistently open conversations that would never have started with a cold outreach.
The benchmarking dashboard. If you've been doing the same type of work for ten or fifteen years, you're sitting on a dataset. Aggregated, anonymised engagement data that tells clients how they compare to peers. That data is commercially inert sitting in a database. Packaged into a dashboard with quarterly updates, it's a subscription product that clients will pay for because they can't get it anywhere else.
The subscription advisory. Not a retainer - a product. Monthly or quarterly access to the firm's thinking, structured around a specific theme. A briefing, a data update, a short advisory call. It monetises the firm's ongoing expertise without requiring a project to trigger it.
None of these replace your core advisory business. That's the point I keep coming back to with managing partners who are nervous about this. They're entry points, not substitutes.
I should be honest here: I've pushed clients toward the self-assessment model more than any other, partly because it's the one I understand best from building our own. But I've also watched it go wrong - one firm we worked with built a genuinely excellent diagnostic tool, then buried it three clicks deep on their website and never promoted it. Eighteen months later they couldn't understand why it wasn't generating leads. The product was fine. The commercial thinking around it was an afterthought. That's a mistake I should have caught earlier.
The temptation is to jump straight to "let's build a platform" - and that's precisely where most productisation efforts go to die.
Before you write a line of code, three questions need answering.
What's actually productisable? Not everything is, and that's fine. The test is straightforward: can the value be delivered without the human layer, or is the human layer the value? If your methodology's magic is in the interpretation - the moment where a senior partner looks at the data and says, "Here's what this actually means for your business" - then the framework alone isn't the product. The framework plus a structured interpretation guide might be. Or the framework as a lead-in to the conversation might be. But the framework on its own? Clients will be disappointed, and you'll have spent money proving that your people are what they were actually buying.
How are you pricing and positioning it? This is where I see firms get stuck. Three options: subscription (recurring revenue, requires ongoing value delivery), transactional (one-off purchase, simpler but no recurring income), or free-to-access as a lead generation tool. Each has different implications for how much you invest in the build, how you market it, and what it does to your pipeline. A free self-assessment that generates fifty qualified leads a quarter might be worth more than a paid product that generates ten subscribers. Do the maths before you commit.
What does v1 look like? And I mean v1, not v3 dressed up as v1. The firms that fail at productisation almost always try to build too much in the first version. I watched a 200-person consulting firm spend fourteen months building a comprehensive benchmarking platform that tried to cover every dimension of their methodology. By the time it launched, the market had moved on - a competitor had released something covering the same ground, the internal champion had changed roles, and nobody could quite remember what problem the thing was supposed to solve. Their competitor launched something scrappier six months earlier and owned the space.
Your v1 should take weeks, not months. One methodology, one audience, the simplest possible delivery of the core value. Everything else is v2.
I've written about the broader challenge of showing impact digitally in a companion piece on digital proof for consultancies - productised IP is arguably the most compelling form of that proof.
Let's talk about what's actually keeping you up at night. Because it's not the technology, and it's not the pricing model. It's the partner who's going to stand up at the next meeting and say: "Are we seriously building something that competes with our own billing?"
It's a fair question. I'd be worried if nobody asked it.
Cannibalisation is a real risk, and anyone who tells you it isn't is selling you something. If you build a product that delivers the same output as a £200k engagement and charge £5k a year for it, you will lose engagements. Full stop.
But that's a positioning failure, not a productisation failure. The product shouldn't deliver the same output as the engagement - it should deliver a subset of the value. Enough to be genuinely useful, enough to demonstrate the firm's expertise, but explicitly designed to create demand for the deeper work rather than replace it.
A self-assessment tool that tells a client "you're underperforming in three of twelve dimensions" is valuable. But it doesn't tell them why, and it doesn't tell them what to do about it. That's where your partners come in. The product makes the case for the engagement. It doesn't substitute for it.
The firms I've seen get this right are deliberate about the boundary. They define, up front, what the product delivers and what it doesn't. They brief their partners on how the product feeds the pipeline. And they track the data - because once you can show that product users convert to full engagements at a higher rate than cold outreach, the cannibalisation argument tends to evaporate.
Will some clients use the product and never commission the engagement? Yes. But those clients probably weren't going to commission the engagement anyway. You've just monetised a segment that was previously generating zero revenue.
I want to come back to this because it's the failure mode I see most often, and it's particularly common in consultancies. Consultants are perfectionists. They want the product to be comprehensive, to reflect the full depth of the methodology, to be worthy of the firm's reputation.
All of which is admirable. All of which leads to eighteen-month build programmes that consume a disproportionate amount of money and attention, and frequently produce something nobody uses.
McKinsey's data shows that only one-third of organisations are successfully scaling AI across their operations. The pattern is identical with productisation: the firms that succeed start small and iterate. The ones that fail try to build the finished article on day one.
Your v1 should be slightly embarrassing. Not broken - functional, valuable, representative of your thinking. But it shouldn't try to do everything. It should do one thing well enough that clients use it, and then you learn from how they use it and build v2 accordingly.
If you're thinking, "Right, but where do I actually start?" - here's what I'd suggest.
First, identify the firm's highest-value, most repeatable deliverable that isn't already a product. It's usually obvious. The diagnostic that kicks off every project. The framework that clients reference years after the work ends. You already know what it is.
Second, build a minimal version. Not a prototype - something that actually works, that delivers the core value, that a client could use without a consultant sitting next to them. This should take weeks, not months. If someone tells you it'll take six months, you're building too much.
Third, test it with five existing clients. Not a hundred. Not with a marketing campaign. Five clients who know you, who've used the methodology, and who'll give you honest feedback. If three of them say "I'd pay for this," you've got something. If three of them say "it's interesting but I'd still want the conversation with your team," you've learned something equally valuable about where the product boundary should sit.
For readers thinking about productisation as part of a broader digital presence and demand generation strategy, I've written separately about why consulting firms struggle to scale their digital presence - it's related territory.
Productisation is not a technology initiative. It's a commercial and strategic decision about how your firm generates revenue, builds visibility, and creates relationships with clients who aren't yet ready for a full engagement.
The technology is the implementation. The decision is about whether you want to keep deploying your best IP once per engagement, or whether you want it working for you continuously - generating leads, generating revenue, making your firm's expertise tangible in a way that a credentials deck never will.
The barrier isn't the build cost. The technology is cheaper and more accessible than it's ever been. The real shift is from selling time to selling value. And I get it - that's genuinely hard when your entire commercial model is built around utilisation rates and day rates. It requires partners to accept that some clients will get value from a £500 product instead of a £50k engagement, and that this is fine, because those clients weren't commissioning the engagement anyway.
The consultancies that figure this out will have a revenue stream that doesn't depend entirely on headcount. A market presence that extends beyond their personal networks. And a commercial relationship with the hundreds of firms that need their expertise but will never commission a six-figure engagement.
The IP is already there. The only question is whether you're going to keep having the "we should do this" conversation at the next offsite, or whether you're going to actually start.
If you want a structured way to work out which of your firm's IP is most productisable and what a realistic v1 would look like, we've put together a productisation readiness assessment that covers the three key decisions - what to productise, how to scope v1, and how to price and position it. It's designed to be something you can share with your partnership group before committing to anything.
