Bridge the Sales to Service Gap through the Cloud
Six steps to get started
by Todd Bursey, General Manager, PSA at FinancialForce.com
Professional services executives understand that accurate, current information about all aspects of your business is critical for decision-making that affects key metrics like utilization, backlog, cash flow and win rate. But if you’re like many professional services organizations, that information lives in four or five — or 10! — different systems (or spreadsheets). Every operational question requires a time-consuming scavenger hunt for answers.
Here are some internal problems that may exist as a result. Do they sound familiar?
- ”What is really in the pipeline?”
- ”Just got a call from the client that the services team is heading down the wrong direction.”
- ”You can’t meet the delivery schedule because of recourse conflicts?”
- ”But I promised the client something different!”
- ”What do you mean, you ran out of those key components?”
- ”Accounting is not billing at the proper rates.”
- ”The business analyst is not getting back to me in a timely fashion.”
- ”Should we hire more staff or keep the brakes on?”
The disconnect between sales and service delivery
Like waiters selling meals that chefs aren’t prepared to make, professional services organizations (PSOs) are consistently caught in the trap of committing to customers services they may not be able to deliver. This “over the wall” effect can lead to free work, missed go-lives and hot customer situations. This also results in an additional burden on the support teams trying to compensate for poorly set expectations. All of this affects margins as the costs pile up.
On the other hand, if services teams get involved upfront with the sales team during the sales cycle, you can reduce or even eliminate those downstream costs while setting expectations correctly. There is also a nice side benefit. The team starts to work together toward one common goal: satisfied, referenceable customers.
The problems caused by disconnected teams are best described in Service Performance Insight Research’s (SPI) May 2011 report, “The New Revenue Growth Engine – Sales and Service Alignment.” [pdf file] According to SPI, the most common breakdowns occur in proposals, pricing and scoping, forecasting and staffing and services execution: “Gulfs between sales and service typically emerge in the choppy waters between functions — where the overly optimistic sales tide meets the risk-averse services shore.”
In the past, disconnected processes and technology have exacerbated these differences between departments and have prevented organizations from keeping the customer at the center of the business. Multi-system environments create separate departmental views of the customer relationship.
The required bidirectional flow from sales to services and back to the rest of organization is stymied by siloed enterprise applications that make the services team an afterthought. Despite many claims over the years, on-premises based enterprise resource planning (ERP) suppliers have failed to sufficiently bridge this gap between sales and services.
Aligning sales, services and finance with the cloud
The shift to cloud computing ideally suits professional services firms, not just because of the technology, but because the cloud can bridge departmental gaps. Services teams are inherently distributed, and one of the best ways to share information is through the cloud.
This provides PSOs and supporting functions — like operations, sales and the executive team — with one holistic, real-time view of customer success from anywhere and from any device. Cost-effective and IT friendly, the cloud opens new opportunities for services teams.
Although PSOs are among the first industry groups to start taking advantage of the cloud for customer relationship management (CRM), few are fully leveraging the cloud to better align sales and services processes — even though studies indicate the best-performing firms realize significant advantages with integrated systems and teams.
In its PS Maturity Benchmark Report , SPI Research says that companies with integrated CRM and professional services automation (PSA) systems reported higher bid/win ratios, project margins, utilization and revenue per billable consultant. The report goes on to state the value of integrating finance applications, too, “Every leading (best performing) organization has invested in a PSA solution, and these organizations are twice as likely to have integrated their PSA application with their core financial application. This level of integration between their PSA and core financial applications provides excellent visibility to resource scheduling and project profitability so they can respond quickly to changing requirements while delivering best-in-class margins.”
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To align your sales and delivery sides of the business, make the necessary and inevitable move from spreadsheets to a more integrated cloud platform. Keep the following seven requirements in mind to ensure a successful cloud-based CRM and PSA integration:
Todd Bursey is general manager of FinancialForce.com’s Professional Services Automation business. Bursey joined the company as part of FinancialForce.com’s acquisition of the PS Enterprise solution from Appirio, Inc. and leads the company in the area of Professional Services Automation (PSA). He has spent four years at cloud solution provider, Appirio, in sales and consulting roles before heading up the PS Enterprise business. Bursey holds a B.S in civil engineering from the University of Arizona. |
Cloud-based solutions solve these problems. They eliminate the integration barriers, provide a single view of the customer and supply access for consulting teams regardless of where they work or live. The combination of improved communication, operational visibility and fully integrated cloud technologies helps eliminate departmental disconnects and better manage the full spectrum of people, projects, customers and financials.
There are two basic approaches to implement a cloud-based solution:
1. Devolve custom application programming interfaces (API) along with a management dashboard to incorporate your current platforms to manage each element and make that available to your stakeholders.
2. Take advantage of today’s technology and use a single-platform, cloud-based solution that already integrates CRM, PSA and financials onto a single cloud to achieve control and availability.
No matter which approach you choose, here are some suggestions to get you started.
1. Kill Excel. Have you ever wanted to answer a simple question — for example, “Do we have a backlog?” — and had to look at four different systems or Excel spreadsheets? Multiple, disparate, out-of-date spreadsheets don’t cut it. It’s time that the PS industry stopped trying to run business on Excel. Today’s PSOs need a single dashboard to get full operational visibility into how the organization sells and delivers things. This will keep everyone honest. Online solutions of IT resources previously nixed due to budget constraints and lack of resources are now possible, quick and affordable, thanks to the cloud.
2. Extend information access to everyone. Cloud-based solutions help you move away from data silos and extend the right data to the right people whenever they need it. Information like time, cost, engagement progress and quality should be accessible throughout the entire client lifecycle, from initial bid through project completion and invoicing.
3. Avoid letting CRM turn into an information island. The introduction of Salesforce CRM (with approximately 33 percent market share in PSOs and growing)* will deliver process improvements and better customer visibility only if used smartly in conjunction with other key business systems. Although cloud-based CRM systems are a step in the right direction, companies don’t want to repeat or exacerbate the fragmentation and spreadsheet problem they’ve been complaining about all these years. (*Source: The New Revenue Growth Engine – Sales and Service Alignment. [pdf file])
Today, many services organizations run a hybrid — and therefore fragmented — environment with CRM in the cloud, accounting and PSA on traditional on-premises servers and the usual mixture of custom spreadsheets running on laptops and desktop systems. Cloud technologies can turn your CRM and PSA data islands into a peninsula that connects back to your organization. Now you can run all your applications in the cloud.
4. Assign ownership of business processes and metrics. A balanced scorecard needs to take into account three key areas: customers, financials and teams. Too often, companies assign key performance indicators — like utilization, win rate, customer and team satisfaction — in a vacuum.
Integrating cloud-based CRM and sales force automation (SFA) solutions help create a centralized record of real-time data, making ownership and accountability of project and organizational metrics more viable than in the past. By assigning ownership and measurement of cross-functional business processes and making sure tasks and goals are realistic, you’ll get more project clarity and enhance performance.
5. Keep your teams happy. With access to a single vantage point of the business, consultants can see what the sales team is working on, adjust and ramp skill sets to match demand and get more involved in supporting the success of sales. You will have a better chance of meeting customer expectations and keep your consultants and your sales team happy.
6. Get social! Cloud-based applications have social media apps built-in like Salesforce.com’s Chatter. Social media apps can tie together sales, consulting and finance team’s conversations around customers and projects. For instance, employees can follow Chatter streams created for projects, eliminating long email threads and unnecessary (and unbillable) conference calls. Chatter streams attach to projects, so you have all the “offline” conversations in one place.
It takes more than team-building exercises and company barbeques to make sure sales and services deliver on common goals. It takes full transparency and integrated processes so both sides can support key initiatives ranging from a single client engagement all the way up to the strategic initiatives of the firm. The result is more value for your customers and a competitive edge. That’s the power of the cloud.
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