Defining Consistent Offerings

• Define your offerings: Focus on the high-value, high-demand solutions first!

  • What problems are you solving with the offerings you are selling?

    • Are there specific solutions, products and/or deliverables you provide to meet the business problems? If not defined, start there. 

    • You want to speak the customers’ language. Often a business process flow with specific pain points and problem statements will resonate with the customer. 

  • Define a scope for the offering to help drive consistency in the delivery.  If you start with a standard scope, you can start with a standard set of roles, hours, rates for each resource and build from there.This will translate into a project plan or a list of key project tasks for the Professional Services delivery team to utilize to deliver the project sold. Using a consistent project plan/task list in the sales cycle and in the delivery cycle will help be enabling the customer and the project team delivering to the customer to have clear direction from the start. The project team delivering the solutions and services to the customer should be empowered to revise the plan based on what is learned in the delivery cycle from formal requirements gathering and discovery exercises. Often the customer resources engaged in the sales cycle do not have the in depth knowledge of the day to day challenges, pain point and business process flows that the resources engaged in the professional services project will have. This can lead to project requirements shifting from the requirements defined in the sales cycle. 

  • Take the defined scope and build out formal scope language including:

    • What is included in the scope for the offering. This will help your delivery teams and customer understand what is included in the scope to enable them to better manage that scope and identify potential areas of opportunity for change orders and upsells. 

    • What is excluded from the scope of the offering. This will help your delivery teams and customer understand what is specifically excluded from the scope to enable them to deliver specific items or outcomes as defined in the sales cycle. Understanding exclusions from the scope will enable everyone involved to focus on the main priorities of the services delivery and avoid scope creep, gold plating and excessive timelines. 

    • Expectations of the customer and your organization. This will help both the customer and the delivery teams have a clear understanding of what is necessary for all parties to ensure that the services delivery is successful. If there are items or decisions that you know the customer needs to provide at specific areas or times in the delivery project, clearly defining them up front will aid maintaining progress in the delivery and help the customer understand what is expected from their team. It also helps the customer identify the resources they need to either gather processes, documentation or make decisions throughout the delivery project. 

    • Assumptions related to the delivery of the scope. For instance, assumptions regarding third-party software that your solution will integrate with, or resources needed to be available in order for the solution to work properly. This will help set boundaries regarding what people, processes, data, etc. may be necessary to ensure the delivery project and it’s outcomes are successful. 

    • This scope language should be utilized in a standard Statement Of Work (SOW) for the product(s) being quoted. The SOW helps to clearly outline all aspects of the delivery project for each offering.

• When it comes to delivering an offering, define a consistent set of activities that are to be carried out by consistent roles. This will enable you to ensure that you are quoting the appropriate resources to deliver an offering. 

  • Do you have these consistent activities defined? If not, start with those as they set the foundation for the quoting and delivery of an offering.  

• Take the consistent activities (tasks) and baseline a level of effort (LOE) for each task. This LOE should be translated to hours of effort. This LOE will become a budget that the delivery team will manage throughout the delivery project. The delivery team should be enabled to revisit the budget throughout the project based on items discovered in formal requirements gathering, verification and design. If additional hours are needed during a delivery project, a change order may be needed. You should be aware that customers do not typically budget for additional hours or funds needed to complete a project. This is why it is important to clearly outline the scope, exclusions, assumptions and resources needed up front in the sales cycle.

  • Add contingency hours to accommodate variances in schedule and customer needs. We recommend 5 - 15% depending on the size and scope of the project. 

• Once you have the tasks and a level of effort, define a standard timeframe in which you are confident the scope can be delivered on. 

  • Add a contingency in the time it takes to deliver so you can start by under promising and focus on delivering on time or ahead of that time. 

• Determine what tasks and activities can be automated or packaged. If there are standard workflows, metadata, document templates, etc. that can be packaged for customer segments or industries, it will be beneficial to document them and package them as a baseline implementation framework.

When building a quoting practice dedicated to selling professional services solutions it is important to think of the long-term scalability of the business. You want to focus on the solution offerings that are the highest value and are in highest demand. Thinking of the bigger picture rather than one-off deals is key to building the business in a sustainable fashion.

The resources selling the services should know the language, common pain points, resources needed to deliver, and the base set of hours/level of effort needed to deliver the services. 

Ideally, you want resources selling and building professional services quotes who are familiar with:

• The customers you are delivering services to: This enables them to have an understanding of the typical customers that will be utilizing your services and solutions. This includes understanding the business processes, pain points, common challenges and successes that your services and solutions can help them with. 

• The industries you are selling services to: This enables them to understand the industry-specific use cases, challenges and sub-processes your services and solutions will help them with. 

• The solutions you are delivering: This enables them to sell services and solutions that meet their needs while avoiding overselling and under delivering by selling benefits or specific use cases that the solutions or products simply cannot deliver. This also enables them to sell meaningful solutions that actually meet business challenges and core problems. 

• The upstream and downstream teams or business units involved in the customer journey: This enables them to set the other teams involved in the customer journey up for success by speaking appropriately to the responsibilities and capabilities of each team. 

You want a leader of the professional services sales team to have awareness and mastery of how the services and offerings compliment the products and tools being sold to the customer. This person should also have key relationship building skills to develop great relationships with the leaders of the Sales, Services, Product, Success and Support teams. They need to understand the piece of the customer journey that each team serves in order to bolster the customer’s experience to avoid the customer feeling as if they are being bounced around from team to team ultimately experiencing that they are working with different companies depending on what team they are working with. The Services Sales team and business processes should compliment the other teams processes involved in the customer journey.