HOW TO SHOW THE VALUE OF SERVICES.
- Robbie Burnell
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
The Core Disconnect Services Leaders Must Confront
In being a key partner to the Services Delivery Alliance (SDA),, a network just shy of 1000 leaders across delivery, professional services and implementations, we hear a consistent fear: I can’t show the value of my services team. In challenging that issue, we’d like to understand WHY this is being stated, before approaching HOW to solve it.
But before exploring the main argument, it’s important to name the structural reality at the centre of the problem.
The metrics disconnect
Services teams optimize for utilization, billable rates, delivery margin, and project timelines.
Executives optimize for ARR, ACV growth, NRR, retention, and gross margin.
Both are valid. But they exist in different languages. When delivery performance isn’t connected to commercial outcomes, those in services appear operational rather than strategic.
Structural consequencesWhen services data lives separately from revenue data:
CFOs can’t quantify contribution.
CROs can’t see influence on deal velocity or expansion.
CEOs default to treating services as a cost centre (still!).
Not because services are lacking in their impact in these areas, but because it lacks visibility.
Career consequences
Leaders who are seen as operational get measured on efficiency.
Leaders who prove revenue influence get invited into strategy.
That gap determines budget, headcount, and influence, plus longevity with the business
HOW TO SHOW THE VALUE OF SERVICES - THE HARD TRUTH
So, the leaders across services delivery don’t have a performance problem. Most have a visibility problem.
Many professional services, implementation, onboarding and PMO teams deliver exceptional work. They are running a business within a business. Projects are completed. Customers go live. Teams run lean. Margins are managed carefully.
And yet, when internal budget conversations happen, services is still questioned.
Why?
Because CFOs and CROs don’t see their world in delivery performance, rather they see revenue outcomes. Executives don’t doubt services is delivering; they doubt (or can’t quantify) what that delivery is doing to revenue.
Yet it is services that should be connecting the two (revenue > delivery).
This is the uncomfortable truth: if you cannot clearly demonstrate how delivery impacts ARR growth, retention, expansion, and sales velocity, the business will fills the gap with its own interpretation and those interpretations vary.
Where delivery is undoubtedly healthy services are viewed as a fulfilment layer after the sale, positive, but it subtly caps your influence. You’re respected - just not central to strategy.
Services are a bottleneck, the team that determines how fast you can sell; this doesn’t mean they undervalue you. It means they see you as something that needs to be “managed” or “worked around.”
Services are a margin drag, with finance often evaluates it through a narrow lens: delivery margin, cost to serve, headcount intensity…a cost-centre.
Services are a post-sale function, a view which dilutes the perceived commercial weight of services as its own discipline.
A support function, again, respected but ultimately positioned as support rather than growth.
So when services can’t translate delivery into 'revenue language', the business will create a narrative, not because executives don’t value services but because they can’t quantify its commercial impact.
THE REAL COST OF INVISIBLE SERVICES
Underinvestment
If services are seen as delivery overhead rather than a revenue engine, funding becomes conservative.
Headcount approvals slow down. Tools are seen as 'nice to have'. Hiring is reactive, not strategic.
Meanwhile, sales continues to expand the business because revenue contribution is obvious.
This creates a dangerous cycle: services becomes resource-constrained while demand grows, increasing pressure on delivery teams without increasing influence.
Missed Revenue Opportunity
Services has a direct hand in:
How quickly customers realise value
Whether they expand
Whether they renew
Whether they advocate
But if that connection isn’t measured, it isn’t prioritised. Pre-sales involvement may be inconsistent. Expansion opportunities may go unnoticed. Implementation quality may not be tied to retention outcomes.
The business loses revenue without realising the source.
Exclusion from Strategic Conversations
Strategy discussions tend to revolve around growth levers:
Sales productivity
Pricing
Market expansion
Product roadmap
If services can’t demonstrate its impact on revenue outcomes, it isn’t positioned as a growth lever. So it gets brought in late or not at all, and decisions get made without delivery insight.
Career Stagnation
This is the part few people say out loud. Leaders who run efficient delivery functions are respected. Leaders who influence revenue are promoted. If you are consistently seen as “the person who runs delivery well,” your scope stays operational whereas if you are seen as someone who drives retention, expansion, and deal success, your role becomes strategic. The difference isn’t capability, it’s visibility.
WHY CFOs and CROs DON'T 'GET' SERVICES
It’s easy to say finance and sales leaders don’t understand services but that framing misses the point. CFOs and CROs are not ignorant, they are commercially focused, they have to be. Therefore they prioritise what they can measure in revenue terms.
Put simply, a CFO looks at gross margin, CAC payback, revenue predictability, profitability.
…and similarly a CRO looks at pipeline conversion, deal size, sales velocity, expansion.
If services is reporting on the usual suspects (utilisation, delivery margin, billable rates) there’s a gap. This isn’t to say those metrics aren’t important but they don’t tell a revenue story and from a CRO’s perspective, the critical questions are:
Does services help us win deals?
Does it speed up time to revenue?
Does it improve retention?
Does it create expansion opportunities?
…and from a CFO’s perspective:
Does services protect ARR?
Does it improve gross margin over time?
Does it reduce churn risk?
If the answers are 'yes' but unsupported by data, they remain assumptions and assumptions don’t drive investment. We’ve had multiple SDA members tell us “Oh I know the answers are yes, but I can’t show that to senior leadership”.
THE METRICS THAT EARN THE SEAT AT THE TABLE
If services want to be seen as a strategic growth engine, it has to link what it does to what the business cares about. That doesn’t mean abandoning operational metrics but rather connecting them to commercial outcomes. Here’s where that linkage becomes powerful.
Attach Rate → ARR Growth
When services are consistently attached to deals, it increases deal size and improves onboarding success.
But in reality this story runs deeper:
Higher attach rates also drive higher initial ARR.
Structured implementations increase the likelihood of long-term retention.
If you can show how attach rate correlates with ARR quality, you become part of the growth conversation.
Time-to-Value → Retention
Time-to-value is not just a delivery metric. It’s a retention lever. The faster customers see value the more confident they feel in their purchase and the better embedded your product becomes. It also prevents the early churn risk. Linking onboarding speed to renewal rates reframes implementation as a revenue protection function.
Delivery Quality → Expansion
Strong delivery builds trust which optimizes the conditions for better revenue outcomes, namely upsell, cross-sell and advocacy. If expansion revenue is higher among accounts with strong implementation outcomes, that’s not a coincidence, it's an influence.
Pre-Sales Involvement → Close Rate
Services often plays a [quiet] role in shaping deals. From scoping correctly to building confidence in the customer and thus reducing risk likelihood and perception. Yet these are the impacts that often go unmeasured. If deals with services involvement close faster or at higher values, that’s not operational support, that’s revenue contribution attribution needs to reflect that.
HOW TO SHOW THE VALUE OF SERVICES - A THREE LAYER FRAMEWORK
Efficiency
This is the foundation. It’s what services already measures well.
Utilisation
Delivery margin
Project timelines
Resource capacity
These metrics show operational health. They matter, but they don’t, on their own, prove strategic value.
Revenue Influence
This is where the story starts to change. Here, you connect services activity to commercial signals:
Attach rates on new deals
Pre-sales involvement in complex opportunities
Time-to-value trends
Implementation completion rates
This shows that services are not just delivering, they are influencing revenue outcomes.
Revenue Impact
This is where perception shifts permanently. Now leaders need to link delivery data directly to financial results:
Accounts with faster onboarding → higher retention
Accounts with strong delivery outcomes → higher expansion
Deals with services attached → higher ACV
Services-supported deals → faster sales cycles
At this level, services becomes measurable in revenue terms, not just as a cost to manage, but as an engine to optimize. Once that connection is visible, conversations change.
A STRONG COMMERCIAL CLOSE
Most services organisations are already impacting the revenue needs of their business. Hopefully the core message of this piece is highlighting how many leaders do themselves and their teams a disservice through the lack of visibility. From the more obvious success factors when delivery teams influence customers outcomes, bring the renewal/expansion or if new deals close smoother.
But all too often the data that proves this is fragmented, with sales data living in the CRM but delivery data living in PSA tools (or a spreadsheet). Then financial outcomes live in finance systems. When these worlds don’t connect, the revenue narrative breaks resulting in services getting reduced to utilisation rates and project margins. The leaders who change this dynamic aren’t just better operators, they are translators to the C-suite and then become part of the C-suite. A measure of whether you’re doing this well already is can you walk into a boardroom and say:
“Our attach rate added $X to ARR growth.
“Reducing time-to-value by X improved retention across these services and segments.”
“Our involvement in X deals increased ACV on complex deals.”
That’s when services moves from cost centre to growth partner and that shift doesn’t come from better delivery in isolation but rather from connected visibility across sales, delivery, and finance.
If you cannot prove revenue impact, your data is living in silos, it will be impossible for you to influence strategy if outcomes aren’t attributed to services and you won’t be able to expect investment if the services contribution can’t be quantified.
The future of services leadership isn’t just about delivering well, it’s about making the commercial impact of delivery impossible to ignore.
So how do you get to impact the revenue in your services function, and how can you prove your revenue influence?
PrecursiveAI is helping delivery leaders achieve just this by providing the AI agents that can turn the screw on revenue, helping companies surface opportunities they didn’t even know were there, and by being the data that connects services to revenue to the forefront, accurately displayed on the dashboards your CFO and CRO will want in their monthly board packs. We’re playing our AI functionality close to our chest as we believe we’re the first PSA that truly has such functionality. If you’d like to explore this in further detail, we have two routes of action you can take.
Book a demo of our tool directly today and see yourself how the above can be achieved.
Book a scoping call to see your suitability for an in-house, free, AI workshop in partnership with the Services Delivery Alliance, to benchmark your AI maturity in your services function and understand the easy levers to pull with AI tools that can help with your services productivity, delivery and profitability.
Comments