Sales v Services: The Needless Battle

The battle between Sales and Services is driven by a lack of understanding that is easy to resolve.

"What we have here is a failure to communicate!"

When we close a new sales deal we ring the bell like we were just proclaimed conquerers of our domain. However, the reality is that we have only gained ourselves half a customer. A customer who wants to use our products but currently is not. Yet, months later when we finally achieve "customer acquisition", we do so with an air of regret for the painful journey. This is a mistake.

Don't read this as a gripe. I'm not jealous that sales gets to celebrates their wins. The issue is that within most organizations, the issue is that professional services (and other divisions) don't know how to celebrate their wins. This allows the sales celebrations to be so dominant that others begin to resent them. In psychology, this is called an external locus of control, where one party blames other parties for their own failings. When professional services blames sales for celebrating their wins, yet fails to recognize its own value within the company, it does itself harm.

The first thing professional services tends to do is "blame" sales for how poorly the deal was estimated, constructed, contracted, promised, whatever. We immediately cast the project as being "over promised" and don't want to take ownership of it. By doing this, we can then push the project issues back to the sales team as prove to everyone that the bell ringing celebrations were premature. We become passengers on a journey we should be leading.

Yet, in almost all cases, every deal is "over promised" to some degree because "selling" is a competition of subjective truths. It's a competition of promises that are yet to be proven true. Even if our intent is 100% pure our inability to know the full extend of a customer's complexity is bound to make some truths untrue. So while every new deal is worth celebrating, we must also recognize that it is almost surely already misaligned.

This means that professional services must proactively own the project and not feel betrayed when they discover misalignments. Likewise, sales must also recognize that to complete the implementation the professional services team is going to have to confront the customer about these issues. This is going to generate conflict. Unfortunately, in most organizations, the stage has now been set for a battle between the divisions.

A Little Respect Goes a Long Way

If we want a team to fulfill its role effectively, we need to accept the natural negatives that go along with it. The sales process is fundamentally flawed to the point that it's almost impossible to close a deal that aligns 100% with the product's capabilities. Likewise, we must also accept, that no professional services project, that begins with that flawed expectation, will ever finish successfully without some kind of customer confrontation. No product will ever be released without a bug. No support team will ever meet 100% of its SLA's. What each of these teams need is support for their difficult challenges, not immediate overrides based on another team's culture that doesn't existing within the same environmental constraints.

Instead, each team needs to respect that the other teams are fighting hard to deal with their challenges. Services must respect the fact that closing any deal on time and in the face of competitive half-truths is a challenge. Likewise, sales teams must understand that successful project delivery is a real feat. We take an imaginary concept of thousands of moving parts and slowly refine it into a fully functioning solution. Given that the initial vision may never have been aligned with reality, this is an incredible result. Mutual respect for each other's challenges means that we appreciate each other in the process of acquiring a customer rather than just closing them on a promise.

To achieve this within an organization, each team must its 100%. For professional services, that means taking the ownership of the project from the minute the deal closes. Walking into the customer and saying, in effect, "Sit down and listen to how I'm going to get you to the top of this mountain alive!" When we do this, we also create an environment where we can lead by influence. Without getting into the detail, this kind of leadership relies on a the premise that if I do my job really well, others will do their job really well. This kind of leadership is a positive for any multi-departmental organization.

SO WHAT?

For professional services, we must accept that success requires a lot more customer confrontation than many sales organizations have a stomach for. We need to support the fact that once we close the deal, there is a strong chance that confrontation will be required to ensure the journey stays on the right path. 

Some customers are prepared and ready to go and others simply don't understand how they got there. The range is broad, and thus, so is the force required to convince others to follow our lead. Empower the professional services team to use this force in a controlled manner and they'll get those half-customers live.

The only clear mandate for professional services in a software company is to get the customer live with the version of the product we have available today. That's it. 

While there are a myriad of other things we can add to this mandate, each one is just a distraction from the simplified mission. If we get a customer live and they are unhappy, we buy ourselves time to make them happy. If we wait around for product development to change the product then that fix, patch or new feature may never come. If a project stalls, it may never restart. So let's stop giving ourselves reasons to stop the customer from going live and focus on the goal of leading every one of them to the summit, even if it means dragging them there!

Nothing else is more important to a software company than a professional services team that's ready to help the customer complete its journey. We should be grateful that Sales has given gave us the opportunity, even if it is already misaligned because it's far better than having lost the deal and having no journey to lead.