PS should get ready for their tour of duty with your new boss the CRO
I have felt a great disturbance in the Force as if a million voices cried out “WTF are we in sales now?”
Over the last years professional services has focused on better alignment with sales. Much of this was to level set to stop deals getting thrown over the fence, plug value gaps, avoid 0$ PS to “get it over the line” or simply to not bite the hand that feeds us and gets us to PS Rev & Margin quota.
This evolved into documenting the impact of services on ARR, GRR & NRR with examples I’ve heard from mid-market and public SaaS companies:
-> 12% conversion rates on deals with PS attached
-> PS consumption to ARR growth rates where account growth is 115% higher with PS than without
-> Faster time-to-value of 30 days sourced $125m in expansion sales
Gartner’s software buyer study also stating that 30% of decisions are influenced by the services implementation.
And finally…. spoiler alert: PS costs are a cost of sales line on the P&L and impact gross margin.
It wasn’t just sales that was paying attention to this but the exec team, the board and your investors.?And with Customer Success having their crisis of faith and getting blown up all over the place, there is a change afoot which is PS being moved under the CRO.
Here is the 101 sales starter guide and over the coming weeks I’ll post more tactics.
??? Keep doing everything that you were doing in terms of comms and enablement - you are in the same org but you aren’t yet in the same tribe.
?? Look to improve incentive programs for both sales and PS on services.
? Improve pre sales time tracking and ideally track against the opportunity so you can better analyse effort by deal sizes and across different segments, industry, ARR value etc.
?? No dedicated PS sales or Services Sellers, better get presales time taken off any util or PS Gross Margin targets - if you are giving sales 5-10% of billable time to sales then that needs to be carved out.
???? Put yourself and managers through the sales training, learn the sales process and methodology and these are two different things. The process is NOT the pipeline stages and the methodology is NOT the process. Sales aren’t constantly shouting “Medic!” it’s MEDDIC… although it may feel that way.
?? Re: point above, if you understand the process and method, congrats you may know more than the sales team!
?? You aren’t trying to get a seat at the table anymore, you have it.. Sort of, what are you going to say? Most AEs don’t understand “time-to-value” but customers do! AEs do care about how PS can impact their win rates and deal values… start there and work back.
Finally sales is hard and whilst you’ve joked / cried about why AEs can’t position PS? You are about to find out just how hard and complex it really is and you’ll see the underlying fear that stalks every sales person: if I don’t hit my target, I lose my job.
Welcome to the Show!
