My (somewhat outdated) experience with consultancies was that they depended a lot on the customer believing they had some wizardry, and that involved selling a

My (somewhat outdated) experience with consultancies was that they depended a lot on the customer believing they had some wizardry, and that involved selling a lot of industrial jargon that the manager had a passing familiarity with. Whether the consultancy could produce a working product was secondary to the proprietary and arcane technology (300 combined years of experience or whatever) that they could bring to the sales meeting. The manager could rest well knowing that they had bought an intricate Patek Philippe of code, that might be as fit for purpose as a Citizen, if it works at all. Now, you can't sell a Patek Philippe by saying it's the most expensive out there. It has to be "the best" which is reflected in price. And you don't really ever make the comparison because it wouldn't reflect favorably. The aesthetics are, of course, top notch, but the sales copy is full of specs and descriptions of the arcane, lots of words to say it's the watch that goes ding. Marketing an upstart consultancy, you reach past the manager who makes these safe, expensive decisions, and you try to do the Apple thing mentioned in the article. You'll be laser-focused on providing value, lots of easy wins that the manager can show off at every opportunity. They will wonder who their wizard is that is doing all this with only 4 team members while the other project is using 30 and has nothing to show for it yet. Familiarity eventually causes the manager to short-circuit the upstart's sales pitch. They get 10 minutes into it and the manager says, "You mean you're just Agile? We already use Scrum. Boring." So the upstart will have to come up with new things to stay ahead of the established player.