The Role of Professional Services in SaaS Companies
Professional services teams have a significant influence on how any SaaS product is adopted by customers — and on how efficiently they use it. Deployment processes are complex and professional services consultants need a wide range of skills to be successful. Today, we’re going to discuss professional services with Andrew Barton. Andrew is Vice President of Client Success at Wrike, heading the professional services and customer success organization for the EMEA, APAC and LATAM regions. He has 22 years of experience in the tech industry with more than 15 years in professional services, mostly at Hewlett Packard Software and Ernst & Young.
Artem: So what’s your opinion about Professional Services (PS) in modern SaaS companies? Are they optional or a must-have?
Andrew: I’m assuming here that PS and Customer Success are different teams and skill sets. It depends on many things — a key one being the product or offerings of the company in question. For example, there are SaaS platforms that have a more event-based consumption behavior, where the product is self-explanatory or more plug-and-play. In such cases, users are often enabled by intuition, in-product guidance, e-learning materials, and perhaps a short call with a customer success manager.
On the other hand, for SaaS companies where the product or the solution becomes a core part of their day-to-day work, more user enablement and product onboarding is needed. This typically requires a level of subject matter expertise that is found in the organization’s professional service teams. Good examples of this would be implementing a CRM, Service Desk, or a Collaborative Work Management platform. It’s not always true, but often there is a correlation between the typical level of usage across an organization — or how embedded the product is in their solution and process landscape — and the level of services that are needed to achieve good adoption. Obviously, the more embedded the solution is, the greater the scope for automation and workflow integration.
Artem: So if we talk about the second example — when the product is not “plug-and-play” and needs professional services. What are the negative consequences of not getting them?
Andrew: Leveraging PS will help get the customer to value much faster. Additionally, if they don’t leverage PS, there is little chance of getting the full value the product has to offer, regardless of how simple or complex their use cases are. This often occurs when a promoter of a particular solution moves from one company to another and feels they “know it all” so can purchase the solution and roll it out with or without help. There are a number of reasons why this can add costs: firstly, the use case of two companies is very rarely the same and it’s even less likely that the new company has the same solution and process landscape as the old. Secondly, the PS teams tasked with onboarding new customers will have the most up-to-date best practices from the customer base and field. Add new functionality on top of that and ask yourself: ‘How can this champion really get the most of out it?’ Lastly, for now, the skills required to train users are very different to those needed to design the architecture, integrate, and onboard a new piece of technology.
Artem: Could you tell me what you feel are the key fields of responsibility for a PS consultant? I mean, if you needed to write that section of a job description from scratch, what would you mention as being part of a typical day?
Andrew: If we speak specifically about responsibilities, then I consider the PS consultant is responsible for supporting the sales teams with more complex opportunities. Also, being one of the few people that are continually involved in pre- and post-sales. It’s fundamental that the expectations are well managed through this sale and services “hand-off.” This is often done by the PS team alone or with a customer success manager. Other responsibilities follow on from there: The consultant must work well with the customer to ensure the solution is implemented as agreed. They can be responsible for the profitable and successful delivery of the project in question. A further responsibility can be continual communication and feedback between the vendor and customer during the adoption or onboarding phase of their journey. This would include — but not be limited to — the sales, support, product, and engineering teams.
Artem: What are typical metrics used to measure if a client or customer was successfully onboarded?
Andrew: There are many different types of metrics. It’s common for SaaS vendors to use a mix of customer satisfaction metrics such as NPS and actual active usage of the platform during or post onboarding. In addition to these, successful onboarding can also be tracked by how fast it has taken a customer to get to value, or through measuring the achievement of a predefined business outcome. A great example comes from a business strategy consulting company in Europe who recently bought Wrike for project management, portfolio management, and resource management. The business outcome defined prior to the PS engagement was to reduce the spend on subcontractors by 10% in the first year. This was achieved through much clearer transparency into the services sales pipeline by integrating Wrike and the CRM, improved resource management, and workload distribution as well as the automation of repetitive project management tasks. Though these types of outcomes are more difficult to define because every customer is different. Including these latter examples will significantly improve the accuracy of the onboarding success metrics as well as create very strong advocates of the product or platform.
Artem: In your first comment, you have separated PS and Customer Success. In that situation, do the metrics of Customer Success and Professional Services intersect from time to time?
Andrew: Whereas the metrics might not always be the exact same, they will be geared toward the common goals of adoption, expansion, and retention, which is measured by Recurring Revenue. Many companies have complex customer health score definitions that take many individual metrics into account. Unfortunately, these are not always accurate in the early stages of the customer lifecycle when PS is engaged. But If we were to look at one single metric that both PS and Customer Success will look at — it may be active platform usage by the target user group as these are fairly predictive indicators of customer health, and eventually retention and growth.
Artem: When does a PS team need to work in collaboration with other members or departments of the organization as a whole?
Andrew: PS consultants and teams spend a large majority of their time in the field and working closely with their customers. The knowledge and insight they gain in the field are invaluable to their organization as they grow. As I mentioned above, the feedback and communication channels between PS teams and Support, Product Management, Engineering and indeed Sales are commonplace. Everyone wants to hear about the challenges the PS teams face in onboarding complex use cases and projects to ensure continual improvement of the offerings and hopefully give them a competitive edge. As I mentioned before, the PS team will regularly support the Sales and Sales-Engineering teams involved in the pursuit or pre-sales phase of complex opportunities.
Artem: So to be clear, they can even interact with the prospects prior to a deal being sold, right?
Andrew: Absolutely — very often in fact. Its widely acknowledged that the PS team will accelerate a deal closure and sometimes even help increase the deal size. This is due to their wide knowledge of success stories and subject matter expertise which leads directly to a higher level of trust from the customer.
In addition, this also allows the PS team to stay engaged through the initial services delivery phase, ensuring continuity in the account and overall improved customer experience. You will often find companies that invest in their customer success managers and have them also part of the final sales motions or early PS onboarding phases.
Artem: What are the three main qualities of an efficient deployment consultant?
Andrew: Of an efficient deployment consultant or a good one?
Artem: Hmmm. Both! And it can be a mix of skills or personal qualities. Whatever you would like to name.
Andrew: A good professional services consultant will typically have excellent communication and listening skills, a structured approach to work, and be somebody who can build trust at the same time as managing and controlling expectations and outcomes. If I can sneak in a fourth and fifth, I would have to include a degree of empathy and fast learning ability can also be very valuable and important qualities.
Artem: You have vast experience in Professional Services. How does that affect your approach?
Andrew: I have some experience and have been fortunate to work with some very successful global services leaders, but in this age everything is changing so fast that I focus on continual learning and applying a combination of my experiences and new insights into the everyday challenges and opportunities that we are presented with.
Artem: Finally, in your opinion — has the role of a Professional Services consultant evolved in the last five years or so?
Andrew: Yes, it has. But summarising it is tricky. There have been many influences. Ten years ago the concept of integration and the technical delivery of integration between solutions was often very difficult, even between solutions provided by the same vendor. This was partly due to the technical challenges and the effort involved in development and integration. But it was also due to customers pushing vendors to implement a solution that would suit their own, often old, internal processes and systems — instead of adopting what we would now call “industry best practices” with hybrid or cloud-based solutions.
With the ever-evolving standardization of process, application, and technology integration, there’s definitely been an evolution from a technically focused role to a role that understands business needs, change management, and some basic technical skills and cloud technology knowledge. Picture a skills spectrum that goes from “technical” on one side, to “business/strategy” on the other. Looking at the average consultant skill profile, I feel it’s gone from very “technical” to somewhere in the middle, with a more broad skill set taking in change management, process consulting, and business understanding.
My personal view is that SaaS vendors need to drive transparency, agility, automation, as well as clear business outcomes for their platform to be successfully adopted. To be differentiators in the market, they need to enable their customers to innovate and disrupt standard operating practices. One differentiator that helps achieve this is a high level of service quality and expertise driven by their services teams.
