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Maximizing Product Success: The Strategic Advantage of Service Partnerships
Maximizing Product Success: The Strategic Advantage of Service Partnerships
Core to our growth and ability to deliver world class solutions to our customers has been the partnerships we’ve cultivated with our key product partners. Products such as Pulumi and Maxio have been outstanding long term partners that boost our capabilities, ensure predictability in delivery, and fill in professional services gaps to their offerings at no cost to them. The success of these partnerships led us to want to share some thoughts on why your product team should consider a partnership with Elevate.
Traditional and academic thinking on the topic has often encouraged business leaders to choose a path of either being a product or a service, especially in the early stages of maturity. That’s not to say there aren’t companies that choose to do both and succeed, but it can often be comparable to running two companies at the same time… a task that can be arduous to say the least. They’re separate business models with very different compositions, incentive structures, financials, etc.
But as a Product company that often doesn’t obfuscate the need to have a services component to your offering. You may be close to a deal, but the prospective client doesn’t have the capacity or the skill to onboard your tool. Or maybe they need to integrate your product with one of their internal suite of tools that currently isn’t an out of the box offering of your product. Or in some cases, a prospective client is considering a full digital modernization as part of their onboarding. In all of these cases and more, a professional services offering can get you to these deals and create long term relationships.
Over our years working with clients to roll out partner solutions, we’ve identified some key benefits to working with Elevate as your preferred services provider. We’ve captured them below as things to consider as you confront how your company addresses your services component.
There are a litany of early- and mid-stage companies who failed because they let their development team get sidetracked by the needs of a potential “big” client. They take their best engineers off of the product roadmap to onboard the client, weeks or months go by, and the core of the product suffers because attention has been diverted. In the best case you land the client and are able to recover over time. In the worst case, you lose the client and perhaps your company with it.
This is where Elevate comes in. We can manage that relationship and provide them with white glove service in rolling out your product and configuring it to their needs. You leverage our knowledge of your tool to get to a successful result while maintaining the velocity of your product roadmap. A win-win-win for you, for your new client, and for Elevate.
A successful partnership is one that works both ways. Your team brings us new clients and we as Elevate do the same. At no cost to you, a strong services partnership can drastically expand your sales reach. We’re onboarding new clients all the time and our existing clients are consistently looking for modern solutions to improve their products. We also highly prefer to work with products we know and trust. This allows for accurate estimates and predictable deliveries that lead to happy clients and strong margins. Where appropriate we also get involved with co-marketing activities. We partner on webinars, events, conferences, etc. to promote the partnership in a joint manner.
There is no doubt that the business models of a services company and a product company are different. And with that, expectations on margins are different. Products that achieve large valuations often gain those because of their ability to scale exponentially. Services will boost your top end revenue, but almost always will squeeze your margins. Something that is likely to be unappetizing to your investors. Leveraging a trusted service partnership with Elevate allows you to reap the benefits of services while maintaining your product margins and keeping your investor base happy and seeing the returns they’re looking for.
It’s one thing to successfully land a deal, but it’s a whole other thing to ensure that the client onboards and uses your product successfully. The last thing you want is a mistake by your new client to lead to a failed launch and the loss of a long term customer. Our team learns your product inside out, doing hands on implementation and taking training where available. The simple act of doing multiple rollouts brings pitfalls to the forefront and allows us to avoid them. In short, our team brings consistency to your rollouts and enhances the customer experience.
Customer satisfaction management has become a focal point of being a successful product company, especially in the SaaS world. And for good reason. Especially when your revenue is driven by consumption. Elevate can supercharge your efforts in this regard. We have a long and consistent track record of cultivating long term relationships with our customers. We adopt their vision and maintain correspondence with them jumping in where necessary to ensure that their solutions are leveraging your product correctly and to successful outcomes.
Wrapping Up
It’s natural that a product would need services to accompany it. It’s also reasonable that a product company would want to stick to what it does best. Finding ways to achieve services outcomes while maintaining a product focus can make or break a company. And a great product / services partnership can be the catalyst for exponential growth and long term success. If you find this resonating for your current situation, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us and we can dig into the operational aspects of making a partnership successful!
