Growing Your Business Using Services Ready Offerings
This is part one of a two part post. In this post, I discuss how Microsoft Partners can leverage Services Ready offerings to increase their services revenue and improve customer satisfaction.
First, let me introduce myself, give a quick overview of offerings, and share some success strategies I discovered working in the field with Services Ready offerings.
I work for Microsoft Services as a consultant. I spend most of my time working with our largest customers developing SharePoint solutions for their most challenging information problems. I have been involved with the Services Ready program since it began as a small pilot program. I contributed technical content for some of the first offerings and then served as a technical reviewer for several other offerings. For the past year, I have developed and delivered SharePoint offering training to Services Ready Partners. I have also co-engaged with partners to help mentor their use of the offering materials.
An offering is a prepackaged set of intellectual property that helps a consulting team sell, scope, plan, and deliver a customer solution. This intellectual property includes:
- Detailed content that helps the engagement manager plan, scope, and manage the offering.
- Content that helps delivery consultants build their technical readiness.
- Templates that help to create customer deliverables.
In addition to the field-tested delivery materials, offerings contain a rich set of sales materials. Sales collateral includes positioning and messaging framework documents, value propositions, customer presentations, and customizable datasheets. This offering-specific content saves your organization time and money, because you do not have to invest energy and resources developing accurate sales content. This means that your sales team can quickly start building a delivery pipeline.
A major benefit of prepackaged offerings is that they are predictable. Microsoft experts have developed, tested, and reviewed all Services Ready offerings. Since offerings are field-tested, a Services Ready partner can present customers with a solution and be confident that the offering will be successful.
Customers often have a particular problem or a specific goal they would like to achieve. What they do not know are the details involved in developing the solution. They want to know the specifics. Such as how much effort is required and how long it will take. Because Services Ready offerings are repeatable and pre-packaged, those details are readily available to you. This enables you to stay focused on goals and end results rather than slogging through execution details.
Sometimes a customer does not know precisely what they need. They know they have a problem, but they are not sure how to address the issue. Rather than spending time negotiating back and forth, trying to extract what they are looking for, I provide them with sales content for specific offerings. After reviewing sales collateral that details an offering, the customer often has an “Ah Ha” moment when they recognize the solution they have been looking for. After the end goal is agreed on, we can effectively plan the next steps. This dramatically shortens the sales cycles.
Offerings channel the conversation and focus on the results of the project rather than the details of the effort involved. Is the customer wondering what it would take to deploy a search engine? We have a packaged offering for that: Enterprise Search Technology Planning. The outcome of the Enterprise Search offering can include a proof-of-concept search deployment and a detailed plan of the next steps to implement a production search solution.
Notice that in all these scenarios, the conversation doesn’t digress into task and effort details. Instead, the discussion focuses on the value and outcome of the project. This gives the customer confidence that they can successfully complete the project on time and within the budget.
Leveraging Services Ready offerings improve your bottom line in these five ways.
- Your development costs for both sales and delivery content are dramatically less than creating and testing the solution from scratch.
- Your time investment during the sales cycle, pre-engagement negotiations, and deployment process is reduced significantly.
- Because you are able to leverage prior experience, your team is trained and resourced to deliver a successful engagement in a cost effective manner.
- Because the offering is pre-packaged, you are able to create realistic customer expectations that your team can fully deliver.
- A satisfied customer is likely to do more business with you in the future. One successful engagement leads to additional engagements.
In my next post, I’ll discuss building your business with complimentary offerings.
Cheers,
