The four-quadrant ICP framework
How we qualify whether a prospect belongs in Modernization or Spend Rescue — in the first 30 minutes.
Two questions separate almost every engagement we take on: is the pressure on cost or on capability, and is the constraint technical or commercial.
Plot those and you get four quadrants. High cost pressure with a commercial constraint is Spend Rescue. Capability pressure with a technical constraint is Modernization. The two mixed quadrants need sequencing advice before any programme is scoped, because doing them in the wrong order wastes a year.
We run this in the first thirty minutes of a conversation, deliberately, before anyone talks about tooling. It protects the client from buying the wrong programme and protects us from delivering one.
It also makes declining work straightforward. If a prospect sits outside all four quadrants, the honest answer is that we are not the right party.