Without knowing the level of effort required to complete the “discovery” it is difficult to suggest a range of fees.
I typically find that you can charge between 10% and 25% of the total expected implementation budget, depending on the depth of discovery and the detail design and plan that results.

Feel free to contact me directly to further discuss.

Gary G.

A Q&D (quick and dirty) way, estimate the total hours you think will be expended - multiply by $250 an hour - voila the fee (don’t forget T&E).  Very rough but could give you the rough order of magnitude - $250 would be a mid to high-end consultant from a product company - perhaps on the lower side for high-end.

Regards,

Nigel Z.

I would suggest you first identify a couple cultural items within your
organization:

1) Is your organization focused on selling products while services
are secondary (ie. supporting the product sale and not necessarily the
core of the organization’s biz is services profitability and revenue)?

2) Is the client a current client with a reputation (good or bad)
with a few or many cross-products?

The reason I ask these questions is that in product organizations
sales may be willing or open to paying some or all of the investment
dollars to provide the opportunity to 1) build a deeper relationship
with the client if a current client and/or 2) invest in the client for
penetrating product sales.

I would recommend engaging your sales counterparts to put an account
plan together on what makes best sense holistically (product and
services) and then execute the plan as a team each doing your own
tasks to meet the overall outcomes for your organization and the
account plan.

As to specific fees, I agree with my peers here in that $250/hr is
about right however if you have no/little competition you can probably
charge more or if you have lots of competition probably lower rates
for entry purposes. If any of your service peers internally have done
work onsite in the past, I would find out what they have charged for
engagement services (sounds like consulting services are somewhat new
to the org. so this may not be available) to ensure the client doesn’t
already have a history of rates for their comparison purposes.

Larry

Tom,

You are embarking into an area of great diversity. I’m sure my colleagues
will agree that we rarely do this work for free any more. The decision on
what to charge up front has many factors:

1) If you charge too little, the client will expect that rate for the
follow on work. If you charge too much, you may not win the business.
2) Most of the time, our fees are based on a time box. Basically, we
charge a fee per week per resource. Admittedly, we may do more work than
we bill, but that’s where the investment in the relationship comes in,
rather than significantly discount the up front cost.
3) We do frequently credit our customers for at least some portion of this
work, depending the deliverables. If, for example, the deliverable is an
RFP, we would charge based on whether we would be excluded from the bidding
or not.
4) Since I don’t know the size of the follow on work, it’s difficult to
give you a number for the up front service. My suggestion is to come up
with a round number based on the number of resources and weeks using a
standard margin as a basis. A typical price for a three person project
per week would range about $20 to $25K, depending on the level of expertise
required.
5) Traditionally, the up front work requires the most senior talent. This
not only gets the best solution for the client, it presents the best
visibility for the relationship. Our clients understand this and accept
the up front fees, with credit if we get the follow on work.
6) My best advice to you is to structure your solution so that the client
is so impressed with your up front work that they nobid the follow on work.
Recognize there is an investment on their side, even though you may be
doing the analysis.

Best of luck.

Hi Tom,

As an ex-Reuters person I can suggest that sometimes this is also about expectations from the client. If they are seeing this as clearly pre-sale, it will be a difficult consultative sale and will likely prolong your sale. You may want to price the services into the data-deal itself as it may be more palatable to the client and then you absorb it if the deal does not happen