Building a Strong Professional Services Team

Building a Strong Professional Services Team

The Success key for Product Companies

Recently we visited a fairly new restaurant, knowing that it has one of the best chefs of the city. But soon the experience turned out to be poor, not due to food but, due to pathetic services and presentation of the food. The waiter was not able to understand our need, what customization we wanted and how to present it. I am sure many of us get similar experiences on multiple occasions and would never recommend anyone going there. Isn't it?

The same experience your customers get if your professional services are not up to the expectations, even if you have functionally-rich, technically-sound products. Most of the product companies focus on product development and feature enhancements but forget to nurture and groom their professional services organization. This result in poor implementation, timeline issues, lack of adoption and lose of customers at the end.

Professional Services plays a key role in implementing & deploying the products, integrating it optimally in existing landscape, making it usable and ensures overall adoption. As a result you get happy and referenceable customers.  

But the question is how to build a strong PS organization? And here are few tricks to do that:

1. Involve Professional Services from inception of engagement. It helps a lot in understanding the context, customer’s need and what was promised while selling the product.
2. Empower Professional Services to own implementation estimations and deliveries.
3. Build strong PS organization – Remember PS team has the responsibility not to just successfully implement product, but to successfully deliver engagement. It requires highly motivated, qualified, experience and customer-cantered team members. Define the roles and build a strong PS team.
4. Knowledge is the key for PS success. Groom PS team to know everything about your products. Remember even a great feature is of no use, unless it is implemented in right way.
5. Take inputs and feedbacks from professional services. Every implementation brings lot of new things. Professional Services team spent most of the time with customers. They bring the real feedback for you.
6. Integrate PS with Sales and Product teams. PS should play a vital role in future product roadmap. The customization done by PS team should be taken to product council to see the possibility of fitment with product roadmap. Similarly Sales team should integrate with PS to implement learnings for new prospects. 
7. Empower Professional Services with tools and processes. Consider PS as pure service model and execute projects with processes and tools. Adopt industry standard project management methodologies and lay down processes for smooth, timely and quality deliveries.
8. Embrace reusability and knowledge sharing within PS organization. Avoid reinventing wheels with every implementation. Although try limiting the customization, but ensure that you find the right channel to feed it back to product team

Remember selling of products is important, but proper implementation and successful adoption is equally important. A strong PS team ensures that the higher quality is delivered, the product is integrated well not to be replaced easily, the users adopt the product so the organization gets happy customers.