You must have read about the latest acquisitions in the IT services market. As large companies swallow up smaller companies (in some cases, the smaller one is trying to digest a large acquisition), or a slew of small companies consolidate, some trends emerge that should influence your services positioning: Acquisitions raise the barrier to entry: [...]

Why on Earth would you want to run a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey? If you are basing your client relationship on just “satisfactory” benchmarks from the past engagements, you’ve lost the game already. A “satisfied” customer is probably just waiting to jump the relationship when a new vendor comes along with a better pricing or [...]

As services go, American Express has built a brand for itself in offering consistent customer delight. A while ago, I upgraded to the Platinum card for $450–not sure why I did, though. After a couple of months, their service desk called me to offer 4 nice benefits: A Premier Pass card that allows me access [...]

I am wondering at the way SAP has scrambled to put up the new site. The logo has been tweaked to look (ugh!) Web 2.0 or modern (doh!). The content management system shows jargon code after the URL, and on the main news segment in the home page, you see broken HTML tags left unchecked. [...]

The other day, we were pitching for new business within an existing client. Not surprisingly, the client’s finance team (or procurement) took a machete to our pricing, asking us to reduce the proposal quote by as much as 30%. Their reason: our cost of sales was zero, and repeat business required a discount. I was [...]

Doctors get it. They have designed their websites to be all about you! What are you suffering from? What are your possible treatment plans? How do their facilities add to the care they will give you? And yes, finally, a page that show off their team credentials. In stark contrast, look at the top 200 [...]

Today’s IT departments in enterprise clients depend on the contract consultant market to help roll out projects. The first quarter of 2011 has seen a significant increase in IT spending, and IT vendors are scrambling to expand teams and fill in the contract positions. An ideal situation, we think. BUT, here is how they have [...]

In an awesome post at TechCrunch, Mark Suster writes about the travails of services companies attempting to build products. He raises very good points about margins, sales cycles, VC funding processes, and ease of doing business. Over the years, the services businesses have become more aggressive in their product-building plans for some reasons Mark may [...]

Over the past few years, working with IT services providers, software product companies (ISVs), and staffing companies has been a rewarding experience for all of us at Purplepatch. Though very different in each case (services and products), there are some lessons from product firms we found useful in applying to services firms. Products need services: [...]

You’ve just heard that a client has put out an RFP for a project roll-out. And, sadly, your firm hasn’t been invited, though you know your team has all the skills, your portfolio includes a similar client project, and your client knows you have the possible capability. In my interviews with the sales heads at [...]