The notion of a 100-day plan is simple but effective. It’s essentially a plan of action to help guide you through the crucial first months of an executive-level or leadership position. Here, we’ve put together our own checklist to help you pave the way towards a long and fruitful career in a professional services leadership role from the outset.
Coming into a new role leading a professional services team right now is tricky; as economic forces are causing significant rethinking in how SaaS firms approach growth and profitability, boards and investors are looking to professional service function to deliver growth targets in a way that is scalable, efficient and economical. The most common question for a new head of professional services is ‘How can we maximize ARR without losing money?'
While Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you can’t be expected to achieve this overnight, there is a newly injected urgency into this request in the current business climate, giving you no time to waste.
This guide will help you make the most of your first 100 days in your new role featuring a roadmap for services that balances customer centricity, financial discipline and being people first.
Days 1 - 50: Stop, look, listen and learn
The first phase of our 100-day plan for your new professional services role is crucial. Your first 6-7 weeks in a new leadership position should be a time of assessment, understanding, and analysis.
Step one: Get to know your Customers
Although it's inevitable that you'll know your team well before your customers, we suggest that speaking to customers should happen alongside those internal conversations. This puts you in the best position to add value quickly, as you can build a more objective and customer-centric view of what challenges and opportunities exist in the professional service function, and know the right places to focus on.
You should be spending time listening to your customers from day one and get answers to the following:
What is working and what is not working for them in terms of your product and service offerings?
What is the business model for your customers? How do they generate revenue?
How do they describe the value of your solution to new hires / their boss?
What data do they generate from your product that helps them make decisions in their role?
Don’t just speak to your existing customers - look to speak to churned customers and to ICP businesses who are not customers for a more rounded picture of the situation.
“I'd say there are 5 key things to focus on in the first 30 days: 1: People - get to know each and their strengths and development areas. 2: Demand - understand your demand engine - what drives your PS business. Product lines, strategic or product services, what are your growth lines, what is declining, etc. 3: Operational Maturity - are governance processes in place, and are they effective, are there playbooks and delivery methodologies or do these need to be established, is resource management required, etc. 4: Customer Centricity - are the professional service team and their services delivering value to customers? Where is success visible and where needs to improve? Are there opportunities to do more? 5: Financials and KPIs - revenue, margin, utilization, CSAT - targets, actuals and where intervention may be required"
Jonathan Williamson
/ Group PS Director
Advanced Software
Step Two: Get to know your business
Next, you need to meet with the entire C-Suite to fully understand the business strategy and the mission statements of the overlapping departments, with a particular focus on:
Understanding the growth strategy from the CEO and how professional services are enabling the strategy.
Unpack the cost base and financial targets in terms of profitability and margin. Meeting with the CFO to understand the drivers (key cost input being people) and the levers to pull from a revenue and pricing perspective.
Speaking to the leader of the Pre-Sales/Sales engineering team to understand their role and how it currently dovetails with PS and CS in the overall sales process. When and how does PS engage during the sales cycle?
Reviewing the sales process with sales leadership and account executives to understand what the methodology and where professional adds value in the sales process, as well as understanding conversion rates and services attachment rates. It will also be helpful to understand AE comp plans and how they are incentivized (or not) on PS.
Speaking to the head of channel partners / alliances to understand the ecosystem and relationships with partners - particularly if you have partners delivering on your behalf.
Meeting with the Chief Customer Officer who increasingly owns the whole post-sale organization including services, CS and Support.
Your VP of Customer Success will be one of your key partners for collaboration, and getting to understand how these two teams partner together and what those transitions look like is key.
The first 100 days of a new role as a services leader are different from other roles - we are often trying to rebuild a plane in flight rather than on the ground. This puts a premium on spending time with the team, with peers across the organization, and - most importantly - customers, to understand what value means to them. TEAM - Always be Closing....recruiting. A services organization's lifeblood is amazing teammates and leadership team. Whether recruiting new teammates to the company or simply the existing team to your methodology/charter/mentality, getting the right people in the right seats is priority 1. PEERS - Services in a SaaS company has natural allies (Solution consultants, often CS) and some natural tension (Sales at times.) Learning how the sales team is compensated, what CS experiences have been with customers transitioned from your team, how finance does rev rec, what types of repetitive tickets support is seeing helps build empathy and positions you to be an ally in winning the market. CUSTOMERS - The best intel and strategy you will get in the first 100 days are customers you are actively working with or have recently finished. "Perception is reality" and the ability to talk live to customers, review CSAT/NPS scores, and anything to get into their perspective makes all the difference."
Peter Wride
/ SVP Professional Services
Gainsight
Step Three: Get to know your team
From here, your focus should move to more internal considerations, by meeting and consulting internally.
Before speaking to the team, it’s valuable to have knowledge of the organizational structure of the team and its design, and what a typical team looks like for an implementation, as well as understanding what the current career path looks like in the professional services team.
You will want to now turn to your team and continue to listen, in order to understand:
What are their goals?
What do they like and dislike about their role?
Review incentives for the services team. Are they measured on launch times, utilization, implementation CSAT - do these incentives align with your mission for services?
Ask for their understanding of the operating professional service model and see where outlines differ throughout the team.
Where do they see areas of improvement in the PS Organization?
What are the formal goals / KPI's / OKR's of your employees?
Are they aligned with the goals of your customers?
Step Four: Get to know your Operation
You also need to have a firm idea of the operational model that the team is working towards by the end of the second month:
Take part in the process of how information is passed between sales, PS and CS to look for areas where the teams are aligned well, and any points of failure in handovers.
Understand and observe the delivery process at its various stages in your existing project portfolio to get a picture of the end-to-end process as is.
Learn how the customer support function operates and co-operates with PS.
Understand the roles and responsibilities you need, taking into account your operating model.
Understand how you are performing on the key metrics for service delivery. These include operational metrics (Utilization rates and implementation times), Customer-centric metrics (NRR, TTV, CSAT) and financial metrics (Revenues and Margins) - we recommend using our Professional Services KPIs blog to know what you should be tracking and how to find it.
"The other point I would make is that you need to understand your professional service team's purpose within an organization - are they there as a profit generating arm (drive for high margin and high CSAT), are they there to enable customer acquisition (cost center, or low or no margin, with focus on on-boarding customers, TTV etc.) or are they balanced in between. Knowing this will determine where focus needs to be with respect to any change or improvement initiatives"
Jonathan Williamson
/ Group PS Director
Advanced Software
If change is needed, you will need to evaluate the appetite and aptitude for change within the department. If the department seems resistant to chang