Would you like to get more from your current resources?
Would you like to get higher billable hours from your technical talent?
Would you like to gain a distinct competitive advantage?
Join us for…
Leading and Managing Technical Talent:
Turning Technical Experts into Trusted Advisors
One-day Workshop
October 25, 2010
San Diego, CA
2010 Service Industry Summit
Technical experts [...]
As 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 [...]
My 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% [...]
As 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 [...]
Business 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 [...]
