Why you need to adopt the right technology to create a more efficient services sales process.
As the services portfolio evolves, so too should the go-to-market model that sells it. But the selling of services in an organization is unnecessarily complicated, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. And when done poorly, it has downstream impacts on the business as a whole. Oftentimes organizations lack the proper tools and information to be efficient and effective or have the wrong teams responsible for the selling of services, add-ons, or renewals. A sales person tasked with closing new businesses cannot dedicate the necessary hours to supporting a renewal or a services attachment, especially if they are still utilizing inefficient technology to try and do so.
Based on industry data, sales and embedded professional services teams burn an average of 600+ hours/month on manual tasks associated with getting to signature on a statement of work.
Download the full whitepaper, “A Seat at the Table:
The Case for Making Professional Services a Strategic Function”
This lack of productivity has a direct impact on revenue. According to Gartner in a survey conducted in 2020, 58% of sales managers report they struggle to accomplish all the tasks they have been given in the time allotted. And 52% state they have to work around organizational processes in order to get their work done. This burden, caused by internal processes, can negatively impact a sales manager’s overall quota attainment by 18%.
Operationally, companies seem to rely on spreadsheets and document templates to manage this important business. Additionally, companies utilize manual, non-systematized, non-scalable, and oftentimes unsecure processes to fill in the gaps.
The typical services sale might be familiar: sales people are limited in time and under-motivated to sell something that does not drive a high commission. Operations and customer support people are burdened with having to manage customer expectations due to an improperly quoted services deal. Revenue leads and executives have to sweat the margins on a deal, because there isn’t a process or system in place to ensure that a software + services deal is properly quoted and margin-positive for the business.
In order to help unlock the full capabilities of your services organization and guarantee that you’re delivering the right experience to your customers, you need to improve the upfront services sales process.
Technology can help.
Given the importance of services in driving value for companies, the consumerization of business processes & systems, and the impact automation is having on transforming how work gets done, companies like WorkRails are changing how services are sold for both buyers and sellers.
Technology can help companies standardize services, integrate them with CRM and PSA systems, and align internal and external stakeholders through guided selling tools, leading to a level of automation and scale that most would have never thought possible when selling something as complex as software services. The time to build custom SOWs and generate proposals can be reduced to minutes and hours from weeks and months.
What could your team accomplish if they had nearly 600 hours back per month to accomplish the tasks they were hired to do…
For more detail on why your business needs to upgrade the services selling process download our whitepaper, “A Seat at the Table: The Case for Making Professional Services a Strategic Function”.
