Advancing Your Service Product Management for Growth
Agile Service Product Management is vital to thriving in the digital age. It encompasses the critical role of service product managers in driving...
2 min read
Jan van Veen
Apr 3, 2023 11:49:20 AM
The ability to sell the value of your various advanced service offerings is vital to successfully monetising your (new) advanced services.
As you offer more advanced services, you will also have a broader portfolio of alternatives for your customers, allowing them to choose the best option in each development phase of their operations.
This leads to two essential requirements for your advanced service sales practice:
Although your (potential) customers have easier access to more information about alternative solutions and services than before, they still need support in their buying journeys – indeed, several buying journeys in a row.
Today, we still see two significant gaps between what salespeople tend to focus on and what (potential) customers need:
For sales to be an insightful and trusted advisor, we need to apply a suitable sales methodology and have in-depth knowledge about our customers' situation and their businesses.
Choosing the right sales methodology
It can be overwhelming to know about all the different sales methodologies, let alone choose the right one. Just to name a few:
There is a lot of overlap between these methodologies. They all have in common that they focus on:
However, to really have a customer-centric sales methodology, we should:
In essence, there are three different fundamental sales methodologies to choose from:
Enabling your sales teams with situational knowledge
All advanced sales methodologies assume salespeople have insightful conversations and gain deep insights into the exact situation of their customers. This requires more than a good process and good sales skills.
It also requires deep knowledge of the different types of customers, like:
Without this situational knowledge, your salespeople will see their sales conversations stagnate because they cannot respond to the answers they get and cannot ask the right follow-up questions.
New customers may not be ready for your most advanced service or solution. Probably:
That's why we need an ongoing process to guide our customers through their journey. This requires good:
Read more about the advanced service sales model here.
The past Service Transformation Summit on How to Monetise Advanced Services was ideal for discussing this with your peers.
Participants received:
You can find post-summit material on the Summit website.
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