Should Software Vendors Also Sell Professional Services? YES!

This conversation started with Stewart Mader and continues with Bill Ives. While most of our customers run the easy installer and are up and running readily, many benefit from our front end advice as well as more formal professional services engagements. This exchange offers two simple benefits that are strategic to the customers and to the software producer (and, in turn, to the customers).

1) Customers benefit from our best practice knowldge: Inasmuch as pure emergence is perfectly good ideal, a balance of structured collaboration and collaborative creativity is the Yin and Yang that combine to support success.

I spent some time with a prospect recently who installed TeamPage and started establishing workspaces with no problem. His first few steps were to make a workspace for each competitor. In just a few moments of discussion, we agreed he would be better off with a Market Research workspace containing a tag for each competitor. Despite anyone's judgement as to what % of collaboration success is attributed to Technology vs. People, getting the technology right and configuring it in such a way that meets rather than defeats a need is a Door 1 pre-requisite.

There is no question that our contribution to customers like ShoreBank, the Department of Defense, and a European Pharmaceutical Group made a material difference to their respective success with the platform.

2) We learn from working with customers: Besides building best practice knowledge with each successive customer deployment, closely working with customers helps to peel layers off an onion that reveals their needs and issues as well as a treasure-trove of ideas with respect to how we should develop solutions that meet those needs.

Sure, you can tactically improve your software by observing user behavior, looking at click streams, and analyzing system generated bug reports, but strategic improvements require intimate knowledge of customer's business problems, user issues, system environments, and complementary tool sets. Working on projects with customers helps to look and think well outside the box to deliver solutions that work.