A story that has grown increasingly familiar – a product company, caught in the commoditization cycle, seeks a more attractive business model built around Professional Services. Embedded advisory services rose in popularity following the widely-publicized service transformation of IBM in the 90’s and Xerox in the early 2000s.  Now they ...

Every company wants to be able to charge more for their products and services. Today, with access to information at everyone’s fingertips, it has become more apparent that some organizations are able to charge more for the exact same product.  This is evident when comparing pricing for generic vs. brand ...

Too often, companies misdiagnose or have a hard time identifying the root causes of their biggest challenges, therefore their efforts to address these symptoms are either ineffective or too involved.  After more than 20 years spent working with some of the world’s largest and most complex PS firms, we find ...

Commoditization of products and services is occurring more quickly today than ever before, and nobody is feeling the pressure more than businesses that generate the majority of their revenue by selling into other organizations, otherwise known as Business to Business (B2B) firms. Commoditization occurs when products and services become indistinguishable ...

Renewable Differentiation allows companies to work above the Safety Line as an advisor, a solver of pressing customer issues, and to pull through the commoditized portion of customers’ portfolios. The following synopses describe how we have helped healthcare clients drive Renewable Differentiation to combat commoditization and power financial results. Access the Healthcare ...

This is the first blog in a series on the topic of Account Management. You may be wondering, “Why a series of blogs?”. The answer to this question is simple: Account Management is seemingly a straightforward topic yet time and again, we see Account Management being a misunderstood and/or sub-optimized business ...

As we work with embedded Professional Services (PS) organizations seeking to better play their strategic role in differentiation, pull-through, intimacy, and growth for the entire company, many wrestle with how to meet their near-term financial commitments to the business while transforming to this more impactful, strategic role.  For most organizations, ...

Roughly 70% of all strategic alliances fail.  For most companies, the concept of a strategic alliance makes sense and seems simple, so why do they consistently get it wrong? While partnership may sound straightforward, companies often commit four mistakes in selecting and executing alliances: They choose the wrong partners with misaligned ...