I love to create reductionist mission statements for various departments in a company. These are designed to be ultra-compact and potentially provocative. My two favorite examples thus far:
I like to make them based on real-life situations, e.g., when someone running a department seems confused about the real purpose of their team.
For example, some police-oriented HR departments seem to think their mission is protect employees from management. Think: “Freeze, you can’t send an email like that; put your hands in the air and step away from the keyboard!”
I think otherwise. If the HR team conceptualizes itself as “helping managers manage,” it will be more positively focused, help deliver better results, and be a better business partner — all while protecting employees from bad managers (after all, mistreating employees is bad management).
Over the past year, I’ve developed one of these pithy mission statements for professional services, also known as consulting, the (typically billable) experts employed by a software company who work with customers on implementations after the sale:
Professional services exists to maximize ARR while not losing money.
Maximizing ARR surprises some people. Why say that in the context of professional services? Sales brings in new ARR. Customer Success (or Customers for Life) is reponsible for the maintenance and expansion of existing ARR. Where does professional services fit in? Shouldn’t they exist to drive successful implementations or to achieve services revenue targets? Yes, but that’s actually secondary to the primary mission.
The point of a SaaS business is to maxmize enterprise value and that value is a function of ARR. If you could maximize ARR without a professional services team then you wouldn’t have one at all (and some SaaS firms don’t). But if you’re going to have a professional services team, then they — like everybody else — should be there to maximize ARR. How does professional services help maximize ARR? They:
- Help drive new ARR by supporting sales — for example, working with sales to draft a statement of work and by building confidence that the company can solve the customer’s problem. If you remember that customers buy “holes, not bits” you’ll know that a SaaS subscription, by itself, doesn’t solve any business problem. The importance of the consultants who do the solution mapping is paramount.
- Help preserve/expand existing ARR by supporting the Customer Success (aka, the Customers for Life) team, either by repairing blown implementations or by doing new or expanded implementations at existing customers. This could entail anything from a “save” to a simple expansion, but either way, professional services is there maximizing ARR.
- Help do both by enabling the partner ecosystem. Professional services is key to enabling partners who can both provide quality implementation services for customers and who can extend the vendor’s reach through go-to-market partnering.
Or, as our SVP of Services says, “our role is to make happy customers.”
I prefer to say “maximize ARR without losing money” but we’re very much on the same page. Let’s finish with the “not losing money” part. In my opinion,
- A typical on-premises software vendor drove 25% to 30% gross margins on professional services. Those were the days of one big one-shot license fees and huge multi-million dollar implementations. In those days, customers weren’t necessarily too happy but the services team had a strong “make money” aspect to its mission.
- A typical SaaS vendor has negative 10% to 20% gross margins on services (and sometimes a lot more negative than that). That’s because some vendors subsidize their ARR with free or heavily discounted services because ARR recurs whereas services do not.
I believe that professional services has real value (e.g., I’ve worked with several amazing services teams) and that if you’re driving 0% to 5% gross margins with such a team that you are already supporting the ARR pool with discounted services (you could be running 25% to 30% margins). Whether you make 0% or 10% doesn’t much matter — because it won’t to someone valuing your company — but I think it’s a mistake to shoot for the 30% margins of yore as well as a mistake to tolerate -50% margins and completely de-value your services.