There are many ways to drive sales in a services business. The hardest is to convince a new prospect to hire your organization to perform new work. Once you have a client, though, it is far easier to:
Extend and expand contracted work to provide even greater value.
Find and develop new opportunities to deliver value in other parts of the same organization.
Find similar organizations that would benefit from doing what has been successfully done already.
Most service organizations dramatically under-play opportunities to deliver more value to existing clients and to deliver for new clients what has already been successfully delivered for another.
Click the figure above to view a graphic that shows how to juxtapose the roles of New Account Sales, Project Management, Account Management, and Solution Offering Management in a way that provides a solid foundation for steady revenue growth.
An organization exists to solve a problem for people that have that problem. Organizations that seek to perform and grow are wise to be thoughtful about what problem to solve.
Specifically, it is easiest for an organization to grow if the problem it solves is Important, Pervasive, and Persistent. It also helps if the solution addresses a problem that is Nearby to other problems and/or that is a Small part of Bigger Problems. Finally, the solution needs to drive a price that is Rational given its Costs and the Value it drives.
Every customer likely has many problems but is constrained in how many can be addressed at once by limited resources such as: time, money, and manpower. The best practice is to sort problems in priority order based on the lift in performance that comes with a solution and the drag on performance if not solved. Resources are then focused almost exclusively on the top few leaving others to be addressed down the road. Continue reading How to decide what problem to solve.→