Just as businesses are increasingly turning to cloud marketplaces like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft's Azure to find, integrate, turn on and pay for software products, a similar trend is emerging with consulting and professional services marketplaces.
Recognizing this shift is crucially important for business leaders globally.
Professional services marketplaces can streamline the process of finding and engaging with expert consultants and consultancies, enhancing any business's operational and go-to-market efficiencies and capabilities.
But, we understand business leaders and service providers both have real reservations when it comes to embracing "services marketplaces."
In this article, we address the top five fears and demonstrate how MeasureMatch, a premier on-demand professional services marketplace, mitigates these concerns.
Client & Service Provider Fear
Clients and service providers worry that services marketplaces may operate like old-school freelance platforms, fostering a "race to the bottom" environment with diminishing service value due to competitive bidding.
Clients, while budget-conscious, are also wary of a marketplace environment that may be characterized by excessive bargain-hunting (by other clients) and unrealistic lowballing from service providers.
MeasureMatch addresses these issues head-on.
Only 50-60% of client applications and business requirements are accepted. This ensures that our platform caters only to business leaders with confirmed budgets and relevant needs - and to service providers only interested in pursuing opportunities from clients with confirmed budgets and relevant requirements.
Service providers must also meet [increasingly] stringent matching requirements to qualify for pitching, ensuring that only the most suitable and capable professionals are matched with clients' requirements.
Additionally, all MeasureMatch marketplace service providers must meet a minimum daily rate in order to participate, which is one of several core matching signals.
And, lastly, all full-time employees are scrubbed from the platform and during the application process. This helps to ensure clients are only presented with profiles and pitches from focused and dedicated consultants and consultancies - their reputations are on the line, and so is ours!
Coupled with an average initial contract value of $10,000—growing 50-100% annually—MeasureMatch prioritizes quality over quantity, promoting a balanced marketplace that respects the value of both clients and service providers so that a “race to the bottom” environment never materializes.
Client Fear
Related to the fear above, another concern is the potential inundation of pitches from providers with questionable qualifications.
At MeasureMatch, we address this by approving only 5-10% of service provider applications - only the very best are welcomed to participate.
A growing number of the service providers participating in our marketplace are formal partners to leading cloud software organizations (e.g. Salesforce, Microsoft, Snowflake, Hightouch, dbt, Tableau and many more), providing a double-verification of capabilities.
Moreover, we ensure that each service provider adheres to clear performance and behaviour guidelines, underpinned by our terms of service, and a star rating and review system for added accountability (and celebration).
We are also aggressively optimizing our AI-based matching of service providers, not only taking into account clients’ business requirements, but also by analyzing a dizzying number of technographic and firmographic signals. This allows us to make more precise matches, reducing the volume of pitches and increasing the relevance of those received, ensuring an efficient and high-quality process for our clients.
More than 95% of contracts in the past 12 months have been rated 5 full stars, accompanied by beautiful reviews like several earned by teams like Jason’s below:
Client Fear
Dedicating the time to write potentially complex business requirements is challenging, may result in attracting inappropriate service providers and wasting a lot of time, or that’s the fear anyway.
To mitigate this, the MeasureMatch marketplace purposefully asks for only a short description of service requirements. From there, our team rapidly provides edit guidance together with clients so Statements of Work (SOWs) are extra clear for service providers (sub 24 hour turn-around).
The marketplace also has ChatGPT-4 integrated to assist clients in preparing comprehensive business requirements. It's not uncommon for a $25,000 or $50,000 engagement to start with business requirements written with 10-15 words.
MeasureMatch Enterprise may be for you.
Client Fear
Many worry about the potentially high cost of professional services engagements.
More precisely, clients often mistakenly think that a large, out-of-reach budget is required to achieve substantial gains with a consultant or consultancy.
MeasureMatch’s marketplace is structured to empower clients to set a budget (starting from £/$/€ 1,000) and get as much work done for that sum. While service providers can propose additional services for a larger budget, they're encouraged to prioritize clients' needs and align with the specified budget.
Client & Service Provider Fear
Transparency and pricing complexity can be significant concerns for many clients and their prospective consulting or professional services partners.
MeasureMatch addresses these concerns by providing a full, clear breakdown of platform fees in our Help Center, and the fee model is fully transparent in proposals and contracts.
Additionally, the marketplace’s fee structure is designed to reward loyalty - the more clients spend, and the more service providers earn, over a rolling 12-month period, the lower the platform fees become.
Ok, that’s a lot, but it’s important to spell it out.
MeasureMatch is designed to provide a seamless, transparent, and high-quality experience for clients, consultancies and agencies navigating the world of professional services marketplaces.
James Sandoval
Founder & CEO
MeasureMatch
We're continuing to see clients served by amazing teams bursting with entrepreneurial spirit, deep professionalism and game-changing skills and services.
"The MeasureMatch platform is easy to understand and the simplicity of the layout lends itself to quickly submit business and service requirements, and get on with evaluating potential service provider partners."
