5 Ways to Grow Your Services Business with PSA

Mar 18, 2019 | Consulting industry, PSA Growth, Salesforce PSA

If you’re building a service-centric business, delivery to your clients is at the core of what you do.

It isn’t just about product inventory or what object you can create — you’re providing a service, one you hope customers feel they can’t get anywhere else.

To keep your clients happy and coming back for more, one of the best ways to increase revenue and reduce costs is to implement a Professional Services Automation system. (We’ve previously written about SPI Research’s study showing PSA services dramatically increase results — check that out here.)

If you need a few more reasons to consider implementing a robust PSA system in your organization, here are a few ways the right PSA can improve what your customers receive and how your employees deliver it.

1. Increased Utilization

Growing your service business is easier when utilization of internal systems improves. When your company adopts an end-to-end PSA system, teams across the entire business will have easy access to a tool that helps them track and manage their portion of delivery. Modern PSA solutions include improvements to target utilization thresholds, intuitive time-off calculations, and reporting by project, practice, region, and role.

A system exists for a reason, and adherence to it will ensure your internal teams are working at full capacity while giving leadership a better picture of what goes on for each customer’s service delivery.

2. Better Sales Projections

The more your organization uses a PSA system, the more information your leaders will have to plan for where your organization is heading. A service organization can implement a PSA solution that envelops the following facets of the business:

• Accounting
• Calendar management
• Collaboration
• Document management
• Expense tracking
• Invoicing
• Project management
• Proposals
• Resource management

When leadership has full visibility to all of those functions from one convenient system, projections and planning become much simpler to forecast.

3. Higher Productivity (and Billable Hours)

There are a few ways a service organization can grow billable hours with the implementation of a PSA solution. For one, employee time spent tracking projects and hours can become simpler when using PSA — so they have more time to actually spend delivering on projects. More time spent on projects means more billable hours. For another, communication about each project becomes simpler when various departments across the organization are all tapped into one central system. Communication is easier, and less back and forth needs to be done since each department has direct access to customer information. This reduces the need for questions in the first place and allows each team to get right to work. Finally, visibility increases across the organization for each customer’s projects. If there is a problem, firefighting becomes much more pinpointed. Bottlenecks become apparent when each project is visible across all departments, saving time and resources to get it back on track.

You want your teams to spend their time working on services for which you can bill your customers — make resolving issues as simple as possible.

4. Better Win Rates and Happier Customer Conversions

The visibility and access inherent with a PSA solution can also contribute to the success of your sales team. Krow Software is built natively on Salesforce, giving your sales team a host of advantages that comes from the end-to-end integration of PSA. Leadership will be able to pinpoint which services are most profitable (and therefore be able to target which services should be sold). And, salespeople will have greater visibility into prior customer successes, contributing to a greater understanding of what makes your organization’s services great. This will give them the ability to more accurately sell your services, setting better customer expectations and positioning the prospect-to-customer transition for success.

Your prospects will then be able to transition seamlessly to customers without the gaps that are present when using multiple software systems.

5. Happier Employees

When a system is easy to use, the end users benefit. In a service organization that’s utilizing a PSA system, the end users who benefit are your employees. Rather than siloing each department into their own software or project management system, having one centralized automation system for tracking prospects, conversions, customer projects, and even accounting makes the job of each of your employees that much simpler. When employees are happier, your organization becomes a better place to work, giving recruits and applicants even more reason to want to work for your company. This can lead to faster, higher-quality growth as your organization expands its human resources to meet increased customer loads and expanding service offerings.

Everyone wins when PSA is implemented well, including the organization.

Conclusion

Growing your service business can be accomplished in various ways, but you can take a huge leap forward by adding a PSA solution to help you manage your organization from the inside out.

Get more information about the #1 PSA for fast-growing companies here.