Here are some proven best practices of executives that have successfully guided the transition to seriously selling services:
1. Create a sense of urgency. When people are reluctant to do something, they will come up with every excuse imaginable to put it off. Change is time-sensitive, and prolonged hesitation only makes things more difficult. Leadership is needed to trumpet the cause [...]
Business Development Archives
Best Practices for Seriously Selling Services
Thursday, August 19th, 2010Go Big or Stay Home
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010I’ve seen a group of top management review, discuss, and approve tens of millions of dollars for new plants all within a single 30-minute meeting. I’ve also seen this same group of executives agonize over the course of several meetings and several months over spending $60,000 to launch a pilot services project that would validate the services assumptions and business model [...]
Align the Services Strategy with the Business Mission
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010As in any business, if you don’t get the strategy right, it is darn near impossible to get the marketing right, the selling right, or anything else right—stuff rolls downhill.
My research in the technology industry confirms this criticality and expands it to the realities of being embedded inside a product company. A key differentiator that separates top-performing services organizations [...]
The Biggest Challenges in Transitioning to Selling Services
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010My services research confirms the critical importance of understanding and addressing the product company culture. I asked this question, which produced the following data:
What was (or is) the single most significant challenge your organization faced (or is facing) in building and selling services?
58% Culture Change
8% Acquiring Capabilities
7% Selling
6% Marketing
5% Senior Management Commitment
4% Obtaining Funding
4% Intra-Service Conflict
2% [...]
Special Challenges of Transitioning to Seriously Selling Services
Monday, July 19th, 2010As already noted, big-time change targeted at making major improvements in organization performance is tough. Yet, making the transition to seriously selling services is often on a more difficult order of magnitude. Two factors drive this:
• The Invisible Factor. The first factor is the extreme difference between products and services. Products are tangible; they can be seen, felt, and easily [...]
Seriously Selling Services: Accept the Difficulty of the Task
Monday, July 12th, 2010Ponder Point: If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.
Let’s face it, for most product companies, getting serious about aggressively building, marketing, and selling services is a big deal—a major change. The troubling truth of the matter is that about three out of four major change efforts fail to achieve and sustain the desired objectives (Alexander, 2004). [...]
Selling Services: Tools & Techniques Workshop
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010Would you like to stop giving away or discounting services? Would you like to increase your revenues of both services and products? Would you like to build trust-based relationships that create loyal, profitable customers?
Join Us for:
Selling Services: Tools and Techniques for Top Performance
A two-day, hands-on workshop for everyone tasked with selling services.
August 12-13, 2010
Denver, Colorado
You’ll learn how to [...]
Create New Markets
Monday, June 28th, 2010Business consultants like to talk about adjacency strategy (Zook, 2004), the strategy of building upon an organization’s core competencies in one market to transport those capabilities to an adjacent, but different market space. For example, a company with specialized battery technology designed for the automotive industry could potentially attempt to build upon that battery expertise to develop and sell to the [...]
Differentiate Yourself
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010Depending on the maturity of your industry, your competitor’s strategy, and your competitor’s dealings with distribution, services can differentiate you in a really big way. The more complex your products, the more they cost the customer; and the more mission critical they are to your customer’s business, the more the value-packing promise of services. Leading services researchers note from their studies [...]
Handle Fewer Train Wrecks
Thursday, June 10th, 2010Sadly, sometimes products are positioned to the customer with these words coming out of the salesperson’s mouth: “Our products don’t break. You don’t need any additional services,” or “It is so easy to implement our software. Just read the manual and you can do it, no worries.” This is all a bunch of baloney, especially if you are dealing with [...]
