Tag: #revenue

How do you know you are making money on your service contracts?

In my previous life I sold service contracts for a large OEM. Like many service executives, I was proud of profit margins in the range of 40-60%. But when I talked to my CFO, the numbers didn’t compute in the bigger organisational picture. Let me take you on a narrative of planned versus actual contract profitability and how I gained control over my margin contribution.

Reactive margin contribution

It is still early in the new fiscal year. I have good hopes of making my numbers. Of course I know I have a few ‘high maintenance’ customers. At the same time I have a few ‘cash cow’ service contracts. They will balance out, I’m confident. 

Fast forwarding to the last quarter of the year. Am I still that confident? Obviously I have more insights into my year-to-date cost. Did everything pan out as expected? What options do I have in the remaing weeks of the year to make my numbers?

What I am trying to say. No matter how good my predictions and projections were, actual performance has a tendency to differ from planned performance. Maybe less on aggregate level, but certainly on individual customer or contract level. 

I want to speak the same language as my CFO to better align with the corporate agenda.

It was my ambition to be more in control. Not to depend on reactive and aggregate margin contribution, but to be proactive and predictive on individual customer/ contract level. 

Defining the selling price

When I started selling service contracts I had to brush up my sales 101. How do I define the seling price of my service contracts. I had three paradigms at my disposal.

  • Selling price = Cost plus Margin (aka Cost Plus)
  • Margin = Selling price minus Cost
  • Cost = Selling price minus Margin

If I had full visibility on cost and I had the upper hand in the commercials, then cost plus would work for me. My reality was that cost was more of a guesstimate. Rearding the margin, we had internal margin objectives. But in the commercial arena we often had to give in. This led to the acceptance of the second equation. Margin was not a driver but a result. Margin was reactive. 

Expanding on the narrative in the first paragraph: in the last quarter of the fiscal year the CFO would become vocal using the third equation. If the selling price was an unalterable fact and the margins were falling low, then only available option was to cut my cost.

I want to get ahead of the game to deliver predictable margin contribution.

Influence cost while you can

I went back to my drawing board. How shall I construct my service contracts such that I can monitor all three variables: cost, revenue and margin? In addition I implemented the basic financial concept of planned versus actual and outlook in my service execution process.

After having had my service menucard conversation with my customer, I would cost all those entitlements, resulting in the sum of planned cost. When the contract went into service-delivery mode I would keep a tally on the actual cost. If actual cost develops in a bandwidth of say 10% or planned cost, I knew I would deliver on the expected margin.

Beyond the actual cost development, modern day service execution tools also provide visibility of future service activies. Thus you can create a cost outlook as well. Now you have all the info to make the right decision in real-time, protecting your margins.

Predictive margin contribution

Why all this fuss? Apart from my personal and service domain motivation, my CFO told me loud and clear: I dislike surprises, I want predictability. If only I could cater to the CFO’s wants, maybe I could get access to budget to mature my processes.

I knew I was probably the single largest margin contributor to my companies result. Maybe more out of luck than by design. If only I could invest in tools that would give me that control and predictability.

Better and competitive pricing

Beyond the CFO persona I want to highlight role and importance of the Service-Sales persona. Setting the selling price for a service contract is a subtle process. Price pressure is prevalent in pretty much every sales cycle. The Service-Sales persona needs handles to balance revenue versus margin contribution.

Asset owners want maximum uptime at lowest operational cost.

When my cost insights were on guesstimate level, cost plus did occasionally result in non-competive price points. When my cost guesstimate was too low, my margin took a hit. When I started monitoring the actual margin, I got a good idea if I had priced my service contract ‘fairly’. Deliberately I’ve put the word fairly between quotes. High margins may be good for my bottom line, but from a customer perspective high margins may not be sustainable. Margin insights were an absolute must have for me when renewing/ renegotiating my service contracts.

This article is published on Diginomica and Field Service Digital.

Managing Service Profitability in the Age of Digital Transformation

Co-author: Joe Kenny

It is an age-old dilemma for Operations Managers. Your CEO wants XX% revenue growth, your CFO wants XX% cost reduction, your CRO wants better references and higher NPS scores, and you are supposed to deliver all of this with zero additional investment, because – of course – you have been doing this for years with no additional cash, so why would you need it now?

To top all of this off, you had very little idea of where you stood, operationally or financially, at any given time. And this was due to the fact that access to real-time data, a current view into work in process, and accurate financial information was all impossible to come by.

Historical Challenges for Service Operations

I often speak at conferences and participate in webinars, and I often relate this anecdote – in March I would lay out my operational plan, based on the most recent P&L statement I had received (January’s), intending to address performance weaknesses I had uncovered. My team would execute the plan and in May I would receive my March P&L to see if the response to January’s performance shortfalls were successful or not. It was madness.

Now, layer onto that, the fact that 30, 60, 90-day invoicing accruals were also Operation’s responsibility, even though we had an AP department. This process greatly impacted both revenue and cost, as the cost of service was consumed, but the associated revenue may not have arrived in 90 days.

Impact of Digital Transformation

Fast forward to today, and service operations managers have been given a lifeline—digital transformation. Digital transformation can be like a light switch, illuminating what is happening in real time, allowing service operations leaders to adapt to circumstances immediately. They can reallocate precious resources instantly, validate payment status and credit status prior to service delivery, and see and understand the impact of operational plans in real time.

Digital asset and service management platforms can provide real-time performance measurements, both foundational and top line. This includes data round first-time fix rate, mean time to repair, mean time between failures, and equipment uptime. With this data, operations managers can organize and drive for peak utilization of labor resources while ensuring that the training and quality of work are optimal. This then increases the efficiency of their organization and lowers the cost to deliver excellent service.

With today’s technology, service operations are finally on par with our commercial partners and can see and act on upsell, cross sell, renewals, and service contract extensions instantaneously. In addition, we can support sales by identifying and helping them target competitors’ equipment for targeted replacement. We are the eyes of the commercial team on the customer’s location.

Newfound Financial Control

Utilizing a digital solution allows for real-time tracking of labor, parts consumed, travel, and any other costs associated with a service call, regardless of whether it is a T&M call or in support of a warranty/service contract entitlement. This is a key advantage that enables service operations leaders to manage labor and parts expenses far more granularly. In addition, they can evaluate the revenue associated with the service provided to validate if the pricing is correct based on their revenue and margin targets.

This ability to understand the Cost to Serve on an asset or entitlement agreement in real time is a huge step forward for service operations. It gives them the data they need to truly align entitlement pricing, cost control, operational efficiency, and productivity to accurately manage and forecast their performance and address fundamental issues that are obstacles to achieving their own performance objectives.

The evolution of equipment and asset service management platforms has greatly assisted service operations professionals in attaining the insight, visibility, and control that their commercial and financial counterparts have enjoyed for decades. As asset and equipment maintenance and service becomes a larger part of most organizations’ revenue and margin contributions, it is important that they equip teams with the technology that enables them to better manage and control their operations.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on November 2nd, 2021 and Field Service News on October 19th, 2021.

Asset Data Remains Largely Untapped For Driving Revenue Growth

New study finds asset equipment data is key to bridging the gap between sales and service

PLEASANTON, CALIFORNIA – October 19, 2021 – Valuable data collected from servicing equipment assets remains largely untapped, unused and under monetized, offering rich potential to sales and marketing, according to new research conducted by WBRin collaboration with ServiceMax, Inc., a leader in asset-centric, Field Service Management software and Salesforce, the global leader in CRM.

The study, “Building a Bridge Between Sales and Service with Asset Data”, surveyed 100 field service leaders across the US and Canada from a variety of verticals, including manufacturing, information and communications technology, the semiconductor industry and utility sectors.

While all the organizations surveyed currently aggregate and analyze data from their field service operations, only 22 percent trust their field service data completely, indicating lack of confidence in their existing systems or procedures. And more than one-third of respondents can’t connect their field service management solution with their CRM. As a result, organizations are missing opportunities to provide better service to their clients and generate new revenue streams by monetizing data, such as personalizing marketing campaigns, driving more revenue from usage insights and analytics and demonstrating ROI in sales conversations.

While asset data remains largely under-used at present, the study also revealed that almost half of respondents (44 percent) plan to adopt or update their asset data analysis solutions in the next 12 months —including remote and virtual service support tools, asset data analysis solutions, IoT devices and sensors, and others. Likewise, at present, only 27 percent are currently utilizing their field service solutions for field service analytics, while in the next 12 months, 57 percent will deploy this capability.

“The research shows growing recognition and demand for closing the asset data gap,” said Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer for ServiceMax. “This gap exists between an organization’s current service revenue and the maximum revenue it could achieve when every unit sold could have a higher service contract attached to it. By using field data to optimize revenue and drive product innovation, product, service, sales and marketing organizations can maximize their asset performance. This critical insight is relatively new and empowers service leaders to easily shift to outcome-based business strategies that fuel growth in an age where service is now a differentiator.”

The research also found that 43 percent of organizations admit they need to improve their asset uptime and availability, lending further weight to the need for better service data and service delivery.

The full report can be downloaded here.

Salesforce and others are among the trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.

About ServiceMax

ServiceMax’s mission is to help customers keep the world running with asset-centric field service management software. As a recognized leader in this space, ServiceMax’s mobile apps and cloud-based software provide a complete view of assets to field service teams. By optimizing field service operations, customers across all industries can better manage the complexities of service, support faster growth, and run more profitable, outcome-centric businesses. www.servicemax.com

Media Contact:

Nicole Guzzo
nicole.guzzo@servicemax.com

How to Use Service Marketing to Grow Service Revenue

Over the last five to ten years, a growing number of Chief Service Officers (CSOs) have been assigned a service revenue growth target—a trend recently confirmed through research by Noventum, which found that more than 85% of product manufacturers have set a growth target for their service function. As this trend gains steam, we think it’s worth examining how CSOs can achieve service revenue growth and what they can learn from the sales side.

If you ask a salesperson to grow revenue, they will ask for two prerequisites:

  • More and newer products with more features at a better price point
  • A marketing budget to target the addressable market

What does a CSO ask for when receiving and accepting a service revenue growth target? For many CSO’s, growing service revenue and using service marketing is unchartered territory.

What’s your marketing budget?

Up to 2012, I managed my service operations at Bosch as a cost center. At that time service was the single largest margin contributor to the company. In 2012, I received service revenue growth objectives. Simultaneously my role transitioned from the service domain to the sales domain. In my first conversation with the chief revenue officer, I was asked: “What marketing budget do you need?”

Having run service operations for 25 years, my automatic response was to first focus on achieving excellence for the existing service delivery capabilities. After a crash course in sales and marketing, I revised my strategy. Sell first. Secure the revenue. Use the revenue to finance the maturing of your delivery capabilities.

The result: a quadrupling of service revenue in five years. How? By focusing on two items:

  1. Using the voice of the customer to develop a services portfolio
  2. Setting up service marketing for the installed base

Developing a services portfolio

Back in 2012, I was so focused on service delivery, it never crossed my mind to challenge my services portfolio. My sales colleagues explained to me that a portfolio with sufficient choice is the basis for revenue generation. We then set on a course to create a services portfolio with selectable features and differing price points. Our goal was to create an “a la carte” menu card.

The true test was to come. Would our customers buy the items from our menu card? This is where we realized our need for a true marketing function. A function to help us frame the value messaging and to reach out to the target audience.

Setting up service marketing

First, we looked at the value promise our company made to its customers. Is that value promise pertaining to owning the product and/or is it about using the product throughout its lifecycle? How does our menu card of lifecycle services fit in? And how do we facilitate product owners in making the right service lifecycle choices?

In setting up a marketing function for service, we used our sales colleagues as reference. In the world of sales, key metrics are Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Market Share. Marketing uses these two parameters to spearhead campaigns. In the world of service, these two metrics can be substituted by Installed Base penetration and Attach Rates.

Total addressable market

Suppose you have installed base visibility of 100% and all those units have an attached service contract. Suppose all those contracts are of the type gold-service. The sum of that equation is your maximum achievable service revenue. You could label this as your service-TAM. If your organization also services units of competing brands, the service-TAM will be bigger.

Market share

Your current actual service revenue is the compound result of two factors – your ability to drive installed base visibility and attach rates, in combination with the attractiveness of your services portfolio.

The gap

As mentioned in an earlier blog Mind the Gap, the delta between your service-TAM and your actual market share is your revenue gap. This gap encompasses your target audience for service marketing. The larger the gap, the bigger your compelling reason to review your services portfolio and to establish a service marketing function.

Targeting your audience

Service marketing has one big advantage over sales marketing: with a field service management system focused on asset-centric business models, marketing will have the perfect data set to drive targeted campaigns:

  • Knowing where your installed base is
  • Knowing the state of the asset and how the asset is being used
  • Having a record of the maintenance history
  • Knowing what engineering change orders and modernizations have been implemented
  • Visibility to the current service contract and entitlements

As one of our customers told us:

“We operated a model of sell and forget. Now we sell and service. We have invested in installed base visibility, attach rates, our services portfolio and service marketing. We are now on a deliberate and conscious path of service revenue growth.”

Setting a budget

Knowing what I know now, I would respond differently to my former chief revenue officer. I would request a service marketing budget to revisit my services portfolio and to initiate targeted marketing on my revenue gap.

I would not hesitate to commit to service revenue growth targets, knowing the service delivery organization had an asset-centric field service management system.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on August 25th, 2021

Using trigger points to manage your service business

Sometimes it feels like being a jack of all trades when managing a service business. On the one hand you act like a firefighter, on the other hand you know service is strategic to your business’s future earnings. That said, how do you elevate your job from the reactive to the proactive? Establishing trigger points may be the key ingredient to manage your business on an 80/20 basis. Thus, giving you the focus on interventions that matter.

Define success

When do you know you are doing a great job? In speaking to many service executives, it is not always clear what the norm is. “We want to increase service revenue by 20%”. Why 20%? Why not more? Why not less? In my blog Mind the Gap I tried to establish a norm for a maximum service revenue. In a blog by Shawn LaRocco he defined a norm for Cost to Serve. Both blogs have in common that success is put in a perspective of a norm.

Triggering the outliers

A facilities management customer of ours is processing 15,000 – 20,000 workorders per month. In the past they had a team of 30+ people in the back office validating and correcting all debriefed work orders. Based on gut feeling and experience there was a belief that 80% of the work orders did close within a bandwidth of ±5% of expectation. By formalising that bandwidth through trigger points, they now have a tool to filter the volume and start managing by exception.

Timely intervention

Apart from managing your workload on a 80/20 basis, trigger points serve as an early-warning system allowing for timely intervention. You don’t want to pay penalty cost for a missed SLA. Instead, you want a service job to be flagged if its progress jeopardises SLA attainment. E.g., a break-fix job needs to be completed within 4 hours. After 3 hours you could ping the technician to ask if completion is still on track. If not, you could provide the technician with support and/or contact the customer with a heads up.

A trigger point is thus a floor or ceiling boundary on a metric triggering an event. Using workflow, you can route the event to the mitigating personas in your organisation.

Value = Result minus Expectation

Many years ago, the value of trigger points was eloquently explained to me by university professor Meindert Flikkema. He stated that every event has both an expectation and a result. If somebody gets more than expected, then that person is happy … and vice versa.

In the context of running my own service organisation at Bosch I tweaked Meindert’s equation and added the concept of a bandwidth around expectation. Similar to the above example of ±5%, I strived to manage my operations inside the bandwidth. Inside the bandwidth I let the business run on automations. If I managed well, that would account for 80% of my workload. The outliers I routed to my attention queue. Over time trigger points would help me focus on what really matters for both my customers and my CFO. I’ll use the business driver contract profitability to illustrate the value equation and its impact.

Contract profitability in action

Suppose a customer wants to buy a full-service contract with a scope-of-work containing preventive maintenance, capped break-fix events, calibrations, software maintenance and an included set of spare parts and consumables. Using a CPQ-like tool the scope-of-work totals to a calculated cost of $75,000, a calculated revenue of $100,000 and an expected margin of 25%.

Throughout the lifecycle of the contract executed service activities will impact the cost you accrue. If those cost exceed the $75,000 you have either over-delivered or over-run on your calculated cost. Your CFO will see a less-than-expected margin contribution. If your margin is significantly more than the expected 25%, then either you are over-charging or under-delivering. Your customer may get a feeling he/she is not getting value for money. 

Tipping the trigger level should make you curious. Challenge both expectation and result. Do you have a clear understanding of cost-to-serve? Are you taking the life cycle of the product into account? Did the product owner accept your mid-life-upgrade proposal?

Pro-active

As service leader you don’t want to be told about under or over-situations by your CFO when it is too late for corrective intervention. Similarly, you don’t want you customers to churn. Trigger levels act as an early-warning system before you accrue irreversible cost or impact customer expectation negatively.

  • It’s November. Show me all contracts at 80% of calculated cost. Let’s see what service activities we can push out to ‘save’ this years’ margin contribution.
  • It’s July. We anticipated six break-fix events for a full year. We’ve already had four. We want to flag future break-fix service requests to inform the customer service agent and technician to be stricter.
  • It’s September. The year-to-date contract margin spikes at 35%. Upon investigation you find that a contracted and scheduled calibration activity has been cancelled by the customer. Instead of treating this as easy money, you engage with your customer to pre-empt contract renewal conversations.

Managing intelligent

As long as we have unplanned downtime, firefighting will remain an element of a service leaders’ job. Service execution tools are a great help to facilitate the transaction and collect service data. The true value manifests itself when you use transactional data in combination with trigger levels. Trigger levels give you that early-warning to become pro-active instead of reactive. Trigger levels add direction to your decision making. And better decision making makes you more intelligent and more strategic. Not only inside the service domain, but across your organisation.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on July 27th, 2021

Why Are Sales Leaders Taking Over Service?

For a couple of years now, I’ve been writing about the convergence of Sales and Service. Service, with all its touchpoints during the operational life cycle of a product, has a tremendous capacity for value creation. To reap that value, Service needs a little more Sales DNA. Likewise, Sales needs a little more heart for Service. With a shift from revenue contribution to margin contribution, we see Sales ‘taking over’ the Service Revenue agenda.

You Now Report into Sales

A true story. I’ve had extensive experience running service departments. In all those years my main objectives were focused on service delivery and operational excellence. Over time, I saw an increased interest in service margin and service revenue. When my former organization updated my business objectives with a service revenue target, that goal came as part of a package deal: “you now report into Sales.”

Initially, I did not understand how reporting into Service or Sales when having a service revenue target would make a difference. At that time, the prevailing current was that revenue generation was the prerogative of Sales. Service was seen as a delivery engine focussed on operational gain.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed a dynamic between Sales and Service when it comes to the ‘claiming’ of business case benefits. Lately, a CEO put the reasoning into works while we presented the business benefits of a digital and service transformation project to his executive team. The CEO attributed productivity and cost savings to operations and service. He associated revenue targets with sales. When our business case showed significant revenue benefits through improving installed base visibility and attach rates, sales were the first to claim credits and ownership. For sales, these two improvements translate into touchpoints and conversion. This duo is the bread-and-butter of the sales process.

Bridging Sales and Service

Though sales leaders may be taking over the revenue growth agenda, we all know there is a huge difference between selling products and selling services. The engagement model is different. The buyer role is different. The appraisal of Capex versus Opex has a different impact on decision-making, etc. Most of all, it’s a simple numbers game. Sales revenue is big numbers, service revenue is smaller numbers: Guess who will be seen as the hero?

Any CFO can tell you that services, despite carrying a lower revenue amount, often have a significantly higher margin contribution. What if we were to start incentivizing salespeople with a margin contribution target rather than a revenue target? Great idea? Too radical? Maybe such a move could swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. If all your salespeople were selling services, you would forget you need an initial product sale to make the model work.

So we are back to an earlier blog post I wrote about the importance of Sales and Service Working in Collaboration. The initial product sale is like an ‘entry ticket’ to selling adjacent services. Using the analogy of a theme park, say Universal Studios or Legoland, once you are inside and start spending money, that’s where the EBIT is made. It is the achievement of ticket sales to get you inside. It is the effort of the entertainers to keep you inside as long as possible…and spend money. Are both roles different? Yes. Is one role more important than the other? No.

Building a Portfolio of Lifecycle Revenue Generators

We can transpose the analogy of a theme park to the world products and services by illustrating two common situations:

  • Product sales over-promises: Making it hard(er) for service to sell attached services. In effect, you’re trading high-margin contribution activities for a lower margin contribution.
  • Services portfolio not appealing enough: Making it hard(er) to generate service revenue and providing customers with reasons to churn.

Both examples should compel any product/services company to rethink their revenue generation and margin contribution ‘building blocks.

More and more sales leaders are understanding that revenue generation spans the entire lifecycle of the sold product. The realization that the post-sales value proposition has a symbiotic relationship with the pre-sales value proposition, triggers sales leaders to claim control of the services portfolio and the lifecycle go-to-market strategy.

Now you are thinking: is this the job description of a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)? Yes, you are close. When a buyer applies a concept like total cost of ownership (TCO) in weighing a purchase, then the response on the sales side converges in the responsibilities of a CRO.

Is it bad for Service when Sales leaders are taking over? I believe not. I think Sales and Service have different but complementary skills to drive the revenue growth agenda. Sales DNA finds Service Heart!

This article is published in Diginomica on June 9th, 2021 and ServiceMax Field Service Digital on June 17th, 2021

Mind the Gap

At Maximize we discussed the topic of Enhancing the commercial maturity of your services business. In that conversation we spoke about ‘the Gap’. The Gap between your current service revenue and the maximum revenue you could achieve when every unit sold would have an associated ‘gold’ contract. This Gap is rather simple to calculate, and it won’t surprise me if the size of the Gap becomes a compelling reason to act.

The Gap

Why is it so important to acknowledge and quantify the Gap? If we don’t want to be like Alice in Wonderland, we need to know both our point of departure and the desired future state. 

We see more and more service executives having a revenue growth target. In the grand scheme of both service transformation and margin contribution, this makes perfect sense. As much as it makes sense, a growth ambition of eg. 20% is ‘only’ directional and not linked to a potential. To make your service revenue growth ambition actionable you need handles; metrics to monitor, levers to pull. The benefit of defining the Gap is, it is SMARTspecific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound).

Let me illustrate this with the analogy of market share. Suppose you say you want to grow your market share by 20%, it makes a huge difference if your current share is 10% or 70%.

Where sales use market share, in the service domain we can use a blend of installed base visibility and attach rate. If you know where 50% of the units sold are installed, and of those units 60% have an associated service contract, you’re addressing 30% of the ‘market’. If those service contracts are a blend of warranty, bronze, silver and gold, your actual reach might be 15-20% of total addressable service market (TAM).

The above example is providing you with two things:

  • A compelling reason to act
  • Three mitigating handles

Compelling reason to Act

Let’s do some role play.

Suppose you are a service executive. You have a steady service revenue stream growing at the same rate of product sales. Your new management tasks you to grow faster than product sales, you need to grow your service revenue by 20%. What is your first response? How? Why 20%? The Gap will help you evaluate the feasibility of your new business objective. The Gap can also help you include other stakeholders in reaching your objectives. Think about sales leadership and portfolio development.

Suppose you are the sales leader. You work hard to maintain and grow market share. Growing market share by 20% is, to put it mildly, challenging. That challenge will only get bigger when your CFO changes the paradigm to margin contribution. To understand the dependency between sales and service I’ll flip to point-of-view towards the buyer of your product & services. From an asset owner’s perspective between 8-12%[1] of the life cycle cost are related to the purchase of the asset. The remainder is associated with maintenance and operational cost. This insight should trigger you and your CEO/CFO to rethink where you want to create your margin. It’s less about the one-time sale & margin of a product, and more about being able to create customer lock in throughout the life cycle of that product. Long-term contracts will deliver recurring revenue and margin contribution. The Gap is the quantification of what you are missing out on compared to a life cycle approach.

Suppose you are responsible for the product & services portfolio. Today you have a mix of warranty, bronze silver and gold. Each of those offerings has a different revenue/ margin contribution. Of course, you’d like all asset owners to buy your gold contract. The size of the Gap may be an indication to what extent your current portfolio aligns with the needs of the asset owners. Once you understand that an asset owner is more interested in using a product than owning it, your current service portfolio may need an upgrade.

Three mitigating handles

To mitigate the Gap, we’ve identified three handles:

  • Installed Base Visibility
  • Attach Rate
  • Service offering

The first one, installed base visibility, builds on a variant of Peter Drucker’s quote “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. You need to know where your assets are, and in what condition to be able to sell associated services. The bigger the Gap, the bigger your motivation should be to invest in an asset life cycle database. Documenting the As-Built, As-Sold and As-Maintained. And yes, this may be more work when your organisation sells products through an indirect sales channel. The Gap may justify the investment.

The second and third handle go hand-in-hand. Once you have visibility of the installed units, you can start targeting those with your services portfolio. Important to realise, not the product specifications and characteristics are leading in the service offering, but the use-profile of that product. For the same product, wear and tear can be completely different, based on how the product is being used. This realisation emphasises the need to collect data throughout the operational life cycle of an asset. If sales says, ‘each touch point is an opportunity’, service can extend that paradigm with ‘each data point is an opportunity’.

Is it doable?

Absolutely! A target of 20% service revenue increase may sound abstract when you get it. In this blog we tried to break that task into manageable pieces. Standard service metrics will allow you to monitor installed base and attach rates. Introducing the Gap helps you to quantify your revenue growth potential. The Gap will create both the compelling reason to act and the arguments to convince other stakeholders to jointly work on this revenue growth target.

Please share your victories with us.

[1] Source: Insight… Accenture and total cost of ownership (2012)

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on May 11th, 2021 and Field Technologies.

Maximize Virtual Round Tables – Recap

On the Maximize agenda we offered set of 12 round tables spanning a range from covid implications to asset centric business models. From technician skill profiles to commercial maturity. These topics fuelled a wide range of conversations. In this blog we’ll try to give you a taste. Want more? Have a look at the Maximize recordings here: https://www.servicemax.com/maximize/

From short trial to longer-term innovation: lessons/ practices from COVID that will persist

A little over a year ago we learnt about Covid-19. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We’ve been through it all. Covid-19 drove a number of changes in the way service was delivered and consumed. Organisations quickly deployed new solutions and digital technologies to enable their workers to continue to deliver service to their customers. 

In this round table the participants shared what changes are merely short-term adjustments or disruptions to the normal and which ones are longer-term innovations that are here to stay.

No surprise employee safety, compliance and remote service are high on the list of the more permanent changes. The underlying business issues were there all along, only Covid-19 amplified and accelerated the change.

What Covid-19 has also shown us, disruption has many forms. So better prepare to be agile and resilient. As a final thought: how is your organisation going to handle the backlog of push-out work orders? How are you going to prioritise while meeting your contractual obligations?

Recommended Maximize sessions:

  • Keynote: Making your Service Business Resilient with ServiceMax
  • Business Transformation: Listen to Your Assets: The Benefits of Using Asset Data for Business Outcomes

Recommended readings:

  • Transforming Field Service When the “Field” Has Changed (March 11th, 2021)
  • The Year Ahead for Energy: 3 Paths to Success Post-Covid-19 (March 9th, 2021)
  • 8 Considerations for Your Remote Support Program (February 4th, 2021)
  • How Will AR & VR Impact the Future of Field Service Management? (December 22nd, 2021)

The technician profile: changing role, changing skillsets – where do we find them?

Assets are changing. Service work is changing. The nature of customer relationships is changing. Has the technician skillset changed to match the evolution of service taking place? 

We ask a lot of our technicians. We ask them to be our brand ambassador. They want to be a hero on site. Maybe then best ‘gift’ we can give technicians is empowerment. To give them tools allowing them to engage with the right information at their fingertips. With a right balance between autonomy for the technician and control for the manager.

Is that possible? Sure. The discussion showed plenty of examples of how the combination of state-of-the-art service execution tools and empowerment drives adoption … and thus the projected business results. Once people see transformation in action, the mindset will follow leading to an intrinsic motivation.

Recommended Maximize sessions:

  • Keynote: Building Resilient Relationships. Being a Technician during the Pandemic
  • MaxTalk: Save my Bacon – Remote Assistant in the Field

Recommended readings:

  • 2021 Predictions for Chief Service Officers (December 15th, 2020)
  • Technician Advice to CSOs: 3 Interesting Takeaways from Our Inaugural Tech Talk Event (August 25th, 2020)

Enhancing the commercial maturity of your services business

Now most service organisations have a revenue target, we found it interesting to have a conversation on commercial maturity. You seemed to agree. We had a great turn out at our round table and engaging conversations.

Why is commercial maturity so important? Because margin contribution stemming from operational excellence is not enough. Organisations feel the pressure of margin erosion and commoditisation. In parallel there is a constant drive for growth. And with more vocal customers it is adamant to constantly ride the waves commerce.

We asked the participants to self-assess their current maturity using a poll. Defining a low maturity as a predominantly product focussed organisation selling services as an afterthought. On the other end of the scale, we positioned companies where both sales and service revenue generating activities are managed in unison over the life cycle of the product/ equipment/ asset.

To make the maturity assessment tangible and actionable we’d given the participants a simple calculation exercise. Suppose you have an installed base visibility of 100% and an attach rate of 100% ‘gold’ contracts. Meaning all installed products have an associated all-inclusive service tier. How much revenue would that amount to? Do we have your attention? 

Now compare this figure with your current services revenue. The goal of this exercise is to define the ‘gap’ and to use the gap as an instrument to drive your commercial maturity journey. 

Of course, we know that not all asset owners will buy the gold tier. More likely we have a mix of warranty, part sales, installations, break-fix, field change requests, inspections/ calibrations, preventive maintenance and availability services. Each of these services has a different revenue and margin contribution. If you want to maximize your revenue, you’ll have to revisit your current services portfolio and how you present these offerings.

Recommended Maximize sessions:

  • Asset360: How to Unlock New Revenue Streams with Warranty and Contract management
  • Business Transformation: How to Protect and Increase Your Service Revenue Stream with an Eye on Servitization
  • Business Transformation: How to Revitalize Your Service Portfolio for CEx and Growth

Recommended readings:

  • The key to Sales and Service working in collaboration (January 26th, 2021)
  • 5 Ways to identify new revenue streams in Service (November 24th, 2020)
  • Upsell leakage: Everything you need to know (November 19th, 2020)
  • How to sell Customers on the value of preventive maintenance (July 9th, 2020)

The installed base’s role in lifecycle management

Peter Drucker said: “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. We could say the same thing about the installed base. If you don’t know where your product is, in what condition and how it is being used, how can you excel in service? How can you serve asset owners over the lifecycle of the product?

A survey by Accenture stipulated that over the lifecycle of industrial assets approximately 8-12% of the cost is related to the purchase of the equipment. The rest is maintenance and operating cost. These numbers should convince any OEM to step up to the plate and offer life cycle services.

What do you do when you sell a significant number of units via the indirect sales channel, via dealers and resellers? Value chain actors that may shield their installed base data. The engineering change request may come to rescue. As OEM you have a legitimate reason to reach out to the asset owners, whether it is quality related or if the change enhances the capabilities of your product.

Recommended Maximize sessions:

  • Asset360: How to Unlock New Revenue Streams with Warranty and Contract management
  • Business Transformation: How to Revitalize Your Service Portfolio for CEx and Growth

Recommended readings:

  • 3 Steps to make engineering change management easier (March 2nd, 2021)
  • How to maintain and protect your brand as an OEM (December 17th, 2020)
  • Looking for Design-for-Service? Start here (December 10th, 2020)
  • How to sell Customers on the value of preventive maintenance (July 9th, 2020)

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on April 15th, 2021

Identifying new revenue streams in Service

It is no big secret that service revenue streams are profitable. Thus, it is to be expected that many CFO’s are the driving force behind your organisations’ service revenue growth ambitions. Especially when margins on product sales are dwindling. And indeed, we see the majority of today’s CSO’s having a revenue target. This is where the real transformation starts.

Having a cost-centre heritage practically all CSO’s know how to drive cost reductions in the service delivery process. Ask those same CSO’s if they know how to grow revenue, and the answers are less clear. Read on for the missing insights.

A small personal anecdote. In 2012 I was responsible for selling service contracts for a division of a € 60 billion family-run German company. Because my targets were revenue based, my role was moved from the service domain to the sales domain. The CRO asked me how I would achieve my goals and what marketing budget I needed. I said I would first build the delivery capability and then go for the marketing budget. How naive I was.

Voice of the Customer

How could I know what capabilities to build without understanding what customers really value? Without ever having put a lot of thought to my current services portfolio my service revenue stream was more a bookkeeping metric than a conscious business driver. Looking at my website under the services heading I saw the usual suspects; installation services, periodic maintenance, spare part sales and a helpdesk for break-fix scenarios. Remembering the words of the CRO; how did I market these offerings? Well, beyond the website, I didn’t. It made me aware that I needed the voice of the customer.

Customers expect assets to work

And when I asked, the answer was really simple; customers expect their assets to work. They want to maximise uptime while at the same time minimising operating cost.

The Preventive Maintenance story

May I make a guess? Preventive maintenance is a significant portion of your service revenue stream. But what if your customer starts questioning your rationale of ‘preventing’ and how those activities link to the achieved uptime? What if the procurement department of your customer pressures you to reduce the maintenance cost?

In our previous blog on how to sell customers on the value of preventive maintenance we have shown that value recognition of service delivery is moving from the actual execution to the insights you can provide. Sure, the service work needs to be done, but beyond fixing the asset, you have to ‘fix’ the customer. So, if you perform a periodic maintenance, try to shift your focus to the reporting and the interpretation/ communication of what the outcome means to the customer.

A customer may respond with:

  • Did you find any anomalies during PM and what impact do those have?
  • Do I need to reserve any additional budget to keep the asset going?
  • How can I improve the performance of the asset?

From fixing what breaks to knowing what works

Beyond reactive services

Considering revenue streams based on reactive type services are in jeopardy, the way forward is offering services that focus on the output and outcome of the asset. This implies that you have to change your paradigm from a product focus to a customer focus. At the core of your service delivery is not the product, but how your customer is using it. It makes a big difference if the same product is used intermittently at a 25% utilisation versus a 24/7 usage at 99.x%.

The key to selling uptime and performance-based services, is your understanding of the ‘cost of downtime’ of your product in the context of its use. Thus, we’re back at the voice of the customer.

I love penalty clauses

A ‘great’ way to engage in a value conversation with your customer is the topic of penalty clauses. I love them! Not because I, and my CFO, like to include the penalty liabilities into a service contract, but because penalties are a surrogate for something that is important to your customer. Try to discover the ‘why’ behind a penalty clause and focus on the mitigation of that reason. You may discover new types of services you can sell. 

My guess, it’s all about availability of the machine. Apply more curiosity and your customer will tell you when that availability matters … and when not. Even a 99.x% utilisation will have ‘black out’ windows allowing you to perform the necessary service activities without the stress over-dimensioning your service delivery organisation.

Sell first, then build delivery capability

Going back to my CRO. On a continuum of potential services, I could offer a full range from reactive to pro-active, from product to usage-based services. In the end, the determining factor is not me, the seller of the services. It’s all about the buyer of services. My CRO ‘cured’ my naivety. I first listen to my customer and sell what he/ she wants. Then, if I have a state-of-the-art and flexible service execution platform then I do not need to worry about the service delivery capability being able to catch up.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on November 24th, 2020

Finding Revenue Leakage in your Service Business – part 2

Do you know what your maximum service revenue potential could be based on the product units your organisation sells? Is your current service revenue less than this maximum? And, do you have a process to upsell service contracts into your existing installed base? One or more puzzled looks, chances are big you are suffering from Upsell-leakage. 

In the previous episode we have defined two types of leakage; Contract and Non-Contract leakage. In this episode we’ll define Upsell-leakage. Most likely upsell leakage will be twice as big as the other two combined.

Finding Revenue Leakage in your Service Business – part 1

Upsell leakage

As service organisation you’d like all your customers to buy your premium service. Some customers will buy ‘gold’ service level for their installed base, others will be happy with ‘basic’ service. It all depends on the use case of your customer and their propensity to value the services you offer. As use cases tend to change over time, you may want to consider setting up an upselling program using the touch points from your service delivery. 

If you don’t ask, you don’t give them the opportunity to say yes

Not having such a programme deprives you of revenue potential; being the delta between your current service revenue and ’gold’ service level.

Defining the upsell service revenue potential

To quantify upsell leakage we can use a mechanism known to Sales as TAM (Total Addressable Market). Suppose you sold 1,000 units at $10,000 each. Suppose a ‘gold’ service contract has an annual selling price of 12% of the unit selling price. This would put your service-TAM at $1,200,000 per annum.

Imagine your service department has 600 of those 1,000 units on their radar screen. The rest is sold via an indirect sales channel and/ or lost-out-of-sight. This gives an installed base visibility of 60%. Let’s assume those 600 units generate a service revenue of $400,000, split across:

  • 10% of units are in (OEM) warranty and don’t generate revenue (yet)
  • 50% of units have a bronze, silver or gold contract generating $240,000
  • 40% of units don’t have a contract and generate $160,000 in Time & Material (T&M)

With the above figures you currently reap 33% of your service-TAM and you have an upsell potential of $800,000. Monitoring this upsell leakage metric should give you the incentive to put a revenue generation program in place.

Metrics driving upsell leakage

In the numeric example we’ve touched on three metrics that impact and drive upsell leakage.

  • Installed base visibility: it all begins with installed base visibility. Units not on your radar screen will not contribute to your service revenue! This is easier to manage for units sold via your organisation’s direct sales channel, though it does require an effort to manage the life cycle from as-sold to as-maintained. For units sold via the indirect sales channel you’ll have to exert extra effort to get access point-of-sale data, maybe even ‘buying’ the data.
  • Attach rates: both warranty and contracts are attached to the unit, thus driving attach rates. Attach rates are ‘boolean’, they say something about having an attached contract, not about the amount of revenue you get through that contract. Attach rates start at the installation/ commissioning date of a unit. Either Sales makes the attached-sale at point-of-sale of the unit or the Service department drives the attaching post-point-of-sale. Driving metric for Service is to maintain a continuum of attachment throughout the life cycle of the unit. 
  • Service revenue contribution: Within the subset of attached contracts you’d like to have as much revenue contribution as possible, ‘gold’ service being the holy grail. Per service contract you could have any of the following revenue contributions:
    • OEM Warranty: 0% of Service-TAM
    • Enhanced Warranty: 33% of Service-TAM (only the on-top-of OEM warranty piece)
    • Extended Warranty or Basic service: 67% of Service-TAM
    • Gold: 100% of Service-TAM

In terms of merchandise, you can’t force anyone to buy something

Remedying upsell leakage

The overarching paradigm to growing service revenue is twofold: increasing your installed base visibility and making sure you have attached offerings to those units. 

Getting visibility on units sold via the indirect channel is slightly more complicated, but once you quantify the associated service-TAM with those units, you may have the ‘funding’ to ‘buy’ the data. This may even lead to revenue sharing models with your channel partners.

The last piece of the puzzle is using the visibility of the upsell leakage gap whenever you have a touch point with your customer. Note that the original (service) contract has been drafted many months ago by people whom are further away from the business, who could not 100% envision the service reality of today. You thus may end up in an entitlement conversation where the customer has an urgent requirement whereas the contract ‘only’ covers for the ‘basics’. The delta is an upsell opportunity. Either resulting in an upgrade of the service contract or maybe only upgrading an incidental work order. In case the latter happens more often, you have the data points to convince the customer for the former.

Now, understanding that upsell leakage is potentially twice as big as contract and non-contract leakage together, you may have found your compelling reason to start another revenue growth project.

This article is published in ServiceMax Field Service Digital on November 19th, 2020 and Field Service News on Jun1 1st, 2021