Thought Leadership Archive

I’ve blogged before about the trap for service providers that listen to their salespeople and where that purchasing-oriented perspective takes a provider – to undifferentiated offerings, lower pricing, lower margins, standard offerings and low value. But there is a significant part of the market that is dictated by procurement/purchasing departments and, as a provider,

As we work with service providers developing new offers, we see a very common issue. A provider develops an innovative offering for one of its customers. Often that customer will have led the provider into it and then they evolve it over time. An executive shows up from the provider company and says, “Wow,

So often, clients tell their providers, “If you help us save money, we will spend that money on your services in other areas.” But what often happens when the service provider saves the money is that no funding for new initiatives is forthcoming. Instead, they are asked to do more initiatives to achieve more

In the services industry, the watchword is to listen to the customer. Providers tend to believe what their salespeople say about what the customer wants. However, salespeople really don’t understand the voice of the customer. As evidence, think of what the salespeople relate back to management about an RFP. Things like “We lost on

There has been tremendous discussion around the “gig economy.” You need look no further than Uber or Airbnb to see the successful use of this labor model and understand why its popularity is growing among entrepreneurs, employees, and employers alike. Here’s the real news: major service providers are starting to experiment with the model.

10. Technicolor splendor. Because of the growth in video conferencing, we’re going to eliminate our travel budgets and do everything through video conferencing. 9. Lightning strikes twice. Apples and Androids have gone too far and the Bring Your Own Device model is unsupportable. So we’ll go back to company-issued PCs and phones so we can

With apologies to George Orwell and his novel “Animal Farm,” I think Napoleon the Pig’s famous quote (“All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others”) has important applicability and insight for the services industry. The industry is changing very quickly. Customers are open and eager for transformation and to

DevOps offers a tantalizing opportunity for the service provider industry. On one level, it’s perfect. It allows service providers to get closer to the business, deploy automation and provide an integrated services stack with greater wallet share. There are even clear indications that it can be applied to a legacy environment as well as

Management consultant and bestselling author Peter Drucker wrote, “The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.” That is, indeed, true for service providers, as new technologies increasingly adopted this year are a catalyst for change in nearly all aspects of the services business. Here are four

For those of us who follow immigration reform, particularly with a view to how it would affect the services industry, the latest proposed legislation coming from Senator Grassley out of the U.S. Senate is troubling. If his proposals become law – and one might imagine they would have some possibility, given he’s the chairman