Maintaining Profitability Through Periods of Unpredictable Demand for Your Services

Services businesses are at a challenging time in the industry and need a direction forward.

Services firms run on maintaining tight profit margins and keeping a workforce that can respond well to the constant changes in clients needs. Whether clients suddenly need a massive project for a new business initiative or simply want maintenance work on their online presence, a services firm will need to have their team constantly at the ready so they can start at a moment’s notice. But what happens...

5 Ways to Avoid Cutting Your Workforce

The year 2020 was a challenging time for businesses around the world in nearly every industry. The COVID-19 pandemic brought sudden changes to daily work life and reduced revenue in ways that have left organizations scrambling for solutions. In many cases, layoffs have been the go-to solution for companies looking to reduce costs and maintain margins. However, downsizing your workforce is not the only way to reduce costs and, in many cases, may create more complications for teams who...

The Critical Role of Sales Engineering in Product Success

Sales engineering is about more than helping to close deals, it’s about creating a long-term relationship with clients and setting them on a path that ensures their success and the success of the product or service being purchased. Are we here to sell software? Or are we here to help our prospects achieve the best possible outcomes? Maybe they don’t even know the full potential until we show them the way.

How to Create a Project Budget That Works

Every successful services business has a deep understanding of project budgets and what it takes to create an accurate budget and stay on target. While this may seem straightforward there are many complicating factors that must be taken into account regarding a project’s budget and keeping it on track. Success for a company demands a well-rounded knowledge of how to create a project budget that is realistic, achievable, and ultimately in service of healthy profit margins.

How to Build a Remote Sales Strategy to Win Over Prospects and Achieve Your Goals

The shift to remote work across nearly every industry around the globe has fundamentally changed the sales process. From the first engagement with a prospective client to completing the transaction, sales teams must now execute without the many benefits that come from face-to-face in-person interactions.

The Business Collaboration Checklist

Are you looking for ways to improve your company’s collaboration efforts?

Ensuring effective communication across an organization, especially during a time when a large portion of workers are distributed and primarily communicating with one another online, is critical for a company’s success. Creating great collaboration takes time and focused effort whether your organization has experience in remote work or not.

The Evolving State of Professional Services

Whether we are ready for it or not, the digital workplace has arrived. During this current crisis, businesses and individuals around the world have learned to depend on digital technology to survive. Getting comfortable with using cloud-based technology to collaborate, communicate, and coordinate essential projects using a distributed workforce once had a steep learning curve, but now is common. For many firms, this represents an enormous opportunity to emerge from economic uncertainty with...

How to Improve Customer Experience Through the Five C’s - Part 1

While the titles may have changed and adapted to industry trends over the years, all of us who work in services delivery are ultimately in the business of serving our clients and managing their customer experience (CX).

In a very telling statistic produced by our customer and partner, Qualtrics, 80% of CEOs believe their companies deliver a superior experience - while in reality, only 8% of their customers agree. Qualtrics has dubbed this the “Experience Gap.” It’s clearly a huge problem and...

What Are the 4 Most Common Challenges for a Scaling IT Services Organization?

Whether your IT services organization is an internal department working to support a larger business or a standalone company, growth is a consistent goal and a measure of success. But with growth there will inevitably be complications and challenges unique to your business.

What to Look for in Easy-to-Use Project Management Software

When most companies are looking to implement new project management software, their first question is “what project management software is the easiest to use?” Most of us know that the benefits of a project management software tool can be great—from maximizing efficiency to increasing profitability—but if the software isn’t easy to use, then no one will use it.

In an Increasingly Competitive Market, Professional Services Firms Need a Focused Approach

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the professional and business services is one of the fastest-growing segments in the industry. As a result, services organizations are clamoring to adapt to meet the needs of both their clients and the rapidly evolving spectrum of services for project-based work.

Resource Planning - Art vs. Science

There is an age-old debate within the professional services community about the best way to optimize resource utilization. Specifically, how do you maximize utilization of your existing resources, identify a shortage of specific skills and people, as well as the need to bring on additional people, and smooth out demand when you have peaks and valleys across client projects?

In short, how do you best match supply and demand?

The Top 6 Pressures Facing Services Firms Blog Series: Increased Competition

The services industry is experiencing new types of pressures that are changing businesses around the world. In this blog series, we will examine the six major pressures facing services firms today, their causes, and how you can successfully respond.

What the Numbers Say About Mobile’s Place in B2B Marketing

The history of business-to-business (B2B) marketing is a brief but winding one. Beginning as early as the 1920s, companies created targeted advertising in trade publications, urging other companies to purchase their wares. Mail-order catalogs followed these advertisements; and, eventually, enabled by the internet, today’s demand-generation marketing funnels arrived, ready to absorb website traffic and hopefully leave behind business leads.

Learning to Say Yes to the Right Projects

I often ask in my presentations on project management a question of the audience; “How many of you get to choose the projects that you manage?”

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