Purpose:

Many B2B companies are realizing the importance of expanding their offerings to solve adjacent problems for their customers. This has spurred interest and the formation of embedded professional services (PS) businesses. Embedded PS organizations should serve as the tip of the spear and connective tissue that enables you to grow customer spend and form intimacy with your customers. Playing that strategic role requires the PS business to be financially successful. The levers that make an embedded PS business successful are often misunderstood because of how it operationally differs from the rest of the organization. Many successful, pure play PS businesses leverage a similar set of best practices that are unique to PS organizations.

Benefits: Through implementation of PS best practices, companies can:

• Better integrate PS into the comprehensive organizational model to drive desired outcomes,
• Improve overall organizational profitability, and
• Scale PS and enhance the growth ability to meet the demands of the greater business.

Critical Success Factors:

To be effective, companies must understand that operating a PS business is a significantly different undertaking than the company has experienced in the past. To leverage best practices, you must maintain a holistic perspective of the business and review all PS components including solution creation, design, implementation, structure, deployment, and staffing models.

Tools:

Operational tactics, integration methods, training and development