REBOOTING YOUR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES OFFERING Cloud professional services is predicted to grow to $34 Billion in 2019 (CAGR 27%), and your firm may seek to pursue this emerging opportunity. Doing so can help accelerate adoption of your SaaS platform and its recurring revenue. Should you create or reboot your professional services offering? And if so, how? SaaS customers seek a full, often custom-tailored solution not just your software platform. Achieving full value often hinges on changes to the customer’s way of operating (process, people, tools) and style of management. Executive teams often fail to give their Professional Services business the attention needed. They fail to make the best choice regarding whether to offer professional services. Or they fail to execute successfully from a customer and enterprise perspective. The result: failure to achieve desired customer equity, operating profit or strategic intent and whether it’s succeeding.
Why Offer Professional Services? Accelerate solution deployment. One manufacturer offers professional services for its novel hospital clinical care professionals digital solution to achieve adoption that would not have otherwise happened. Software providers migrating customers from on-premises to cloud solutions provide professional services to speed adoption. Both bring business case, relevant expertise and implementation support to the digital offering.
21%
Create a significant line of business. In the early 1990s, IBM was a pure-play mainframe hardware and software company. Today, IBM’s Global Professional Services business represents a solid 21% of revenue. Attach revenue. When professional services are less critical to the digital solution’s success, providing these services may still be advisable. Adding professional services increases revenues often with a 20-30% gross margin that is appreciated by The Street as another form of value extraction.
Rebooting - Next Steps Assessing your unique Professional Services business situation with respect to the above should help you improve. Try it. Market Strategy Group has ‘stood up’ corporate Professional Services capabilities both large and small. If you would like to discuss your unique situation, we welcome a conversation. For more information, please contact Joel Krauss (joel.krauss@mkt-strat.com) or Alex Kruzel (alex.kruzel@mkt-strat.com).
What Impedes Professional Services Success? Confused purpose. Services businesses are extremely hard to keep focused. There is a tendency to serve in ways that deoptimize cure intention. It is easy to be viable and yet drift away from the reasons you offer these services in the first place. Giving too much service away - fee versus free. Distinguishing between sales support and professional services is key. It is tempting to make everything sales support and therefore free. Even some presales services might best be offered on a fee basis. Finding and enforcing the right fee versus free demarcation is essential. Disconnect with the core business. Your Professional Services capability is not a free-standing consultancy. Your firm’s PS providers have two clients: the internal enterprise and the customer. Balancing that delicate relationship is central to success. An imbalance can compromise the customer’s trust, your enterprise’s success or both. Lack of mass-customization. One-off totally customized solutions are tempting but unwise. Striking the right balance between replicable professional services and customization is key. Irrelevant service offerings. Every part of your business needs a new offering roadmap. Often the Professional Services offering grows stale and lacks customer relevance.