I’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 [...]
selling services Archives
Go Big or Stay Home
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010Align 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 [...]
10 Common Obstacles to Any Change
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010There are ten common obstacles that occur time and again when organizations and the people who compose them attempt to do things differently are outlined below…
1. Not tied to strategy.
2. Seen as a fad or quick fix.
3. Short-term perspective.
4. Political realities undermine change.
5. Grandiose expectations versus simple successes.
6. Inflexible change designs.
7. Lack of leadership regarding change.
8. Lack [...]
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 [...]
Enjoy Predictable Revenue Streams
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010Want to see a CFO’s eyes light up? Watch her face the first time she grasps an understanding of the predictable, repeatable sales that come from a services business built upon service and support contracts coupled with a finely tuned professional services capability.
This is pure joy to a bean counter. The services annuity stream makes life a whole lot [...]
