The Purpose of Professional Services at a Software Product Company

The ultimate purpose of offering services at a software product company is to further the adoption of your software. Whether you are thinking through building a new services team, restructuring an existing team, or expanding into a new region, there are a number of different factors to consider in order to make the decisions on how to do this.

There are two main reasons a services team is often critical to adoption:

Your Software Isn’t Intuitive:

Whether your software is extremely complex or whether you are rapidly growing, often software isn’t intuitive for every type of user that is trying to use it. A services team can help offset this by helping your customers learn how to use your platform or to perform the work for them.

The Customer Just Wants the End Result:

Sometimes the customer is very busy, sometimes there aren’t any resources available, sometimes your software platform offered them everything they wanted – but they don’t have the desire to learn something new, customize it, etc. In the end, the result is the same: they need you, or one of your partners, to do the work for them.

The Purpose of This Blog

I have worked at a diverse array of companies in terms of size, product, and stage and have seen some of the possibilities of what works well. The purpose of this blog is to help you learn from the experiences my colleagues and I have had. Some of the topics I plan on covering in the life of this blog are:

• Different financial models
• Services and the Partner Ecosystem
• Services Revenue as Percent of Overall Company Revenue
• Remote v Onsite Services Team
• Mentoring v Doing
• Services Org Structure
• Relationship with Sales