4 Client Retention Strategies for Professional Service Firms
Service-based clients can differ wildly from purchase-based customers — especially when you want to build lasting relationships with them to create repeat business. That’s why client retention can be so different from customer retention.
Here, we’ve compiled four expert tips for how to retain clients that we believe are specifically helpful to service-based businesses.
1. Highlight the Human Component
While customer-based businesses often focus on selling the value or quality of a product, client-based service businesses can promote themselves as people who provide professional services with top-quality expertise, experience, or connections. The relationships between your organization and its clients helps ensure they’re happy enough to keep using your services.
As Joey Coleman, author of the book Never Lose a Customer Again, likes to say: “The fact is, whether you are B2B or B2C, the core of the conversation is that your business is H2H — human to human.”
Positioning your organization as humans delivering premium services to other humans can quickly change your clients’ perceptions of who it is they’re doing business with in the first place. This can give you an advantage that keeps clients invested in your business relationship beyond numbers and deliverables.
2. Focus on Clients Individually
The second “human” in the human-to-human strategy is your client, but typical customer retention metrics may leave your clients feeling like just another number. A capable professional services automation (PSA) system can help your organization focus on the client’s needs from front end sales to back end office management. Besides using powerful tools to keep clients at the center of your business, Mark Klein of Loyalty Builders Inc. explains client loyalty with a macro vs. micro concept. Rather than focusing on customer retention — a high-level or macro idea that looks at your entire client base as a whole — loyalty is a micro metric that highlights the value of each client individually.
Klein’s company evaluates every customer with a risk score, which focuses on the customer’s likelihood of making a purchase within the next 12 months. Your metrics may be based on your client’s likelihood of using your services again within a certain period of time. These measurements allow Klein’s company to incentivize customers, rewarding customers with higher loyalty, and making offers specific to each customer’s preexisting buying behaviors. Viewing each of your customers as individual assets will allow you to market to each of them in a way that maximizes the relationship — making everyone a winner.
3. Ask Tough Questions About Client Relationships
It can be easy to evaluate client relationships in terms of the rapport between contacts, but Mike Schultz, Co-President of global sales training company RAIN Group, recommends looking at the actual business value your company provides for each client. He suggests organizations ask a series of tough questions about their clients, including whether the client views you as a partner, and what your client would say if a rival service suggested your client replace you.
If you find the answers to these questions show that you’re an essential partner, you’re in a good position to retain clients long term. If the answers aren’t what you had hoped, you now have goals for where you want the client relationship to be. That may include developing the relationship to the point that they would never consider replacing you with another service company.
4. Keep Your ‘Why’ Close
An intuitive way to further develop the connection between your organization and its clients is to keep your company’s “why” at the forefront of your business. John L. Evans, Jr., Executive Director of Knowledge Labs Professional Development, explains that an individual’s “why” may be what leads to “purpose beyond self,” but that for an organization, the “why” leads each employee to “create extraordinary moments for clients” — something clients will see when it’s apparent your employees aren’t just going through the motions.
If your organization has a mission statement or even an unspoken but deeply held vision, make sure employees know what values should drive their service delivery for your clients.
If your organization doesn’t have a compelling “why,” get started on one by evaluating what your organization has set out to accomplish.
If your employees don’t know why they’re fulfilling your service orders, your clients may not know why either.
Conclusion
Retaining clients for a service-based business may require a different strategy than retaining a purchase-based customer, but the end goal is the same: keep your clients coming back for more.
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PSA Integration Guide: Run Your Business On One Platform
Do you miss project deadlines more often than you’d like?
Is your data unreliable and all over the place?
Or do projects keep going over budget despite your best efforts?
If you’re struggling to predict and achieve your revenue targets in addition to any of the above, it may be time to consider PSA integration with your other business tools.
Let’s dive into professional services automation integration basics and best practices to help you streamline every aspect of your business operations.
Professional services automation (PSA) integration is the process of integrating a PSA and other business applications into one streamlined system.
This integration optimizes processes, increases efficiency, and reduces costs. It also allows business owners to automate manual processes.
By integrating all of the applications into one system, it eliminates the need to manually switch between them, which can save time and reduce errors. Additionally, having all of the applications in one system makes it easier to monitor performance across all of the applications and identify areas for improvement.
For instance, if a company has its sales and marketing applications integrated, it can track the customer’s progress from lead to sale, and identify areas where the sales process can be improved.
To get an idea of what a PSA can do, here is a deep dive into the features and functionalities of Klient PSA:
Benefits of PSA integration for services businesses
To take full advantage of the features and functionality offered by a Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution, it is highly recommended to integrate it with the other applications your project teams and business are using.
While a robust PSA platform on its own can bring much-needed efficiency, integrations with other business tools your organization is already using can help visualize and manage all aspects of your company’s projects.
Research has shown that the highest-performing services organizations excel in their use of integrated technology solutions.
While many professional services organizations use financial management, CRM, and PSA solutions to efficiently plan, sell, and execute services, those that perform the best drive even better results through the integration of these core applications.
Information should be integrated so that it can be seamlessly passed from one application to another (for example, from CRM to PSA to ERP). This allows organizations to have a single source of truth, with information constantly updated to provide an accurate view across functions and processes.
Financial executives can ensure revenues and costs are aligned while service delivery can focus on productivity and quality.
By integrating CRM, PSA, ERP, and any other tools your business relies on, you allow your Sales team to see what resources are available and the status of projects to provide more accurate information to clients.
Service delivery teams can see the schedule of upcoming projects and details of the client relationship to be proactive with communication, change orders, and resource scheduling.
And the Finance department gets an accurate picture of revenue and costs to ensure they are kept in balance so cash flow is improved and business plans and forecasts are accurate.
Features to look for to simplify your PSA integration
Not all PSA platforms are created equal. Some make it easier than others to sync apps and assets together.
Let’s cover 5 important features to look for if you want to execute a successful PSA integration.
1. Accounting connectors
Look for a PSA in which accounting software, such as QuickBooks Xero and Sage Intacct, can be directly integrated.
This will allow every minute of billable time to be accounted for.
As a result, you’ll be able to generate invoices automatically and bill clients directly.
2. Integration with your CRM
Does the PSA you’re considering integrate with your current CRM? This is one of many integration features that are a necessity to keep customer data and contact information up to date.
This integration also allows for more efficient and automated marketing campaigns.
For example, if you run your sales team using Salesforce, consider a PSA that’s native to Salesforce.
Make sure the tool handles bi-directional integration as well. The benefit of choosing a solution that’s native to your existing platform is that bi-directionality is already implicit.
3. Connection to the cloud
The cloud model appeals to more organizations because it requires less upfront investment and has no ownership costs. As such, it can make PSA integrations much simpler.
So if you want to run your business on the cloud, make sure to choose a PSA that’s hosted on the cloud as well.
But you also need to make sure the solution you choose meets your IT resource and functionality requirements.
4. Security
Cybersecurity is no joke, which is why you need to look for a secure PSA when considering all your options.
Security measures should include encryption, two-factor authentication, and user access control.
It’s also important to look for a PSA that is regularly updated and patched to ensure it’s always up to date with the latest security protocols.
Lastly, look for a PSA that has a track record of successful security audits, such as SOC2.
5. Configuration types
Your business has unique needs. The right PSA for your business will have the capacity to be configured exactly how your organization requires it.
It also helps to look for a PSA that not only has flexible configuration possibilities, but also comes ready with out-of-the-box templates and tools to shorten your time-to-live.
How to successfully integrate a PSA
Many professional service organizations choose a great PSA, only to fail during the integration process.
Once you’ve chosen which PSA you want to integrate (and which apps you’ll need to integrate it with), here’s how to handle the implementation for maximum success.
1. Assess your business needs
Before you undertake a PSA integration with your other tools, you need a full picture of your business needs.
Which use cases should be addressed? What type of data will you need to collect? What are the potential risks and how can you mitigate them?
Knowing every business need inside and out will allow you to configure your PSA in the most efficient way possible. It’ll also help you prioritize where to train your team first.
For example, what type of time tracking do you need, if at all? Do you need a ticket integration to manage customer requests? What type of project management tools will your service delivery team need?
2. Survey past client requests
Don’t just look at your internal requirements – survey what your past and existing clients have been asking for, too. Look through service tickets, but feel free to send out new surveys to get a complete picture.
This will help you identify what your clients need and want from your services as well as what your PSA and its integrations will need to accomplish.
You can then use this information to ensure the PSA configuration is tailored to those needs.
For instance, let’s say clients frequently ask for more visibility on their projects. If that’s the case, you’ll need to configure your PSA in a way that allows your services team to provide this visibility.
You’ll have a much more exceptional customer experience when you take the time to get this right.
3. Assign a champion
For a bit of context, there are three ways to onboard with Klient PSA. One of these ways is through Klient University.
Whenever a newcustomer joins Klient University, the customer organization assigns a Champion. A champion is a key individual from the organization who has deep knowledge, understanding, or technical skills in a specific area of a business or Salesforce technology.
They are subject matter experts who demonstrate mastery in their particular domain, whether that’s Adoption, Delivery, or Technology within a company’s Salesforce environment. They are leaders in their respective fields who will be given tasks or “homework” that aligns with their area of expertise.
This enables them to contribute their unique skills and knowledge to streamline and ease the initial configuration of Klient.
With that being said, no matter which PSA you choose to implement, consider appointing a specific Champion to spearhead the effort. This will ensure someone’s accountable for the success of any given part of the integration project.
4. Ensure adoption throughout the organization
You can implement a PSA in your organization and integrate it with every possible tool used by your team. But without proper adoption, a successful implementation is unlikely.
That’s why you need an adoption plan in place, typically spearheaded by your Champion.
Bolt Data is a Klient PSA user as well as a Salesforce partner. Despite using Klient PSA (Professional Services Automation) for several years, Bolt Data’s teams gradually deviated from the platform and reverted to using spreadsheets, which led to data inconsistencies and time-consuming manual processes.
To solve this issue, the team decided to reboot the entire implementation of Klient PSA. Part of this process involved a collaboration workshop so that champions within Bolt Data could understand every feature.
Furthermore, the entire Bolt Data organization adopted Klient PSA thanks to training and adaptation support from their champions and Klient experts.
Due to the attention given to adoption during the reboot, both the executive leadership team and Sales department embraced the system. All employees benefit from accurate information and spreadsheets are a thing of the past. Now Bolt Data has a 360-degree view of operations, pipeline, staffing, and revenue.
This example illustrates the difference between a strong adoption plan and a lackluster one.
How Klient PSA Makes Integration Simpler
Built 100% natively on the Salesforce platform, Klient Salesforce PSA is a platform that delivers and supports real-time connections with the applications that drive services businesses, ensuring a customer-centric solution and the most valuable professional services experiences for clients.
With direct integration into accounting software and ERPs like QuickBooks, Xero, and Sage Intacct, every minute of billable time is accounted for. Invoices can be automatically generated and managed, and clients billed directly.
Integration with other commonly-used business solutions like Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, etc., will set every team in a services business up for success, as each will benefit from increased visibility and streamlined operations management that contribute to faster ticket closing, higher customer satisfaction, and dramatic jumps in productivity.
But that’s not all – Klient PSA also comes fully loaded with proven recipes that our team has created after decades of experience in the professional services industry. This means you can build your business on top of a proven foundation instead of starting your implementation from scratch!
Replace all your tools to run your entire business on Salesforce with Klient PSA
Say goodbye to operational chaos, unorganized tasks, and scattered data. Run your entire business on a single professional service automation platform native to Salesforce!
Professional Services Automation (PSA) VS Project Management Software
How does Professional Services Automation (PSA) differ from project management (PM) software? And how can you choose the right comprehensive solution to run your business?
Here are a few key differentiators between PSA and PM.
1. PSA Puts Customers at the Center Instead of Projects
With project management software, the emphasis is on projects. PM software helps you track tasks and collaborate so employees can keep up with their day-to-day work. Your customers may see the end result of your internal team’s work, but that could be incidental. A PM tool could be purchased solely for the benefit of your employees, regardless of how it affects your customer experience. Professional service automation (PSA) puts customers at the center. The focus is on optimizing the client’s experience, not just on tracking individual tasks.
Because the system has multiple touchpoints with the customer’s experience, employees have greater access to customer information across the board, while customers feel more taken care of across the entire scope of your business.
2. PSA Connects the Front Office to Sales and Service Delivery
Beside providing your customer with an better end-to-end experience, a PSA system provides your employees with much better visibility across the entire service delivery pipeline. The front office, the back office, and every service employee in between can see what the other departments have contributed to the customer’s account, whether that’s contact information, projects working and delivered, or expectations for future services.
3. PSA Integrates Seamlessly From CRM to Accounting
Many PSA or PM systems can integrate with your CRM. But many of them also aren’t easily set up, a problem that usually results in service delivery being run separately from the CRM. A great PSA will include a strong PM feature set and integrate closely with your CRM. Klient Software is built natively within Salesforce, meaning integration isn’t a concern — it’s built to run together from the outset.
From the moment a customer is entered into the CRM as a contact, everything can run seamlessly with the PSA.
4. PSA Generates Revenue
Professional services automation systems are particularly helpful for generating revenue, for a few reasons. If you have billable hours or services and you’re using a Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) system, having a PSA system to help you adjust profitability, margin, bookings, and revenue on the fly can lead to easier and greater revenue increases.
Additionally, SPI Research recently conducted an ROI study on professional services automation. The results found that a $200,000 investment in software and implementation could lead to nearly $23 million in increased revenue and reduced costs, based on a firm of 172 people — an ROI of 115 times the initial investment.
5. PSA Includes Many Other Modules Beyond Project Management
Professional services automation isn’t just different from project management — it encompasses it. But PSA also encompasses many other services and modules. This includes (but is not limited to) time entry, billing, invoicing, CPQ, proposals, document management, expense tracking, calendar management, revenue recognition, forecasting, and customer communities.
Because PSA includes so many more options than just project management, it’s capable of replacing many more systems than just PM.
Conclusion: PSA Is an End-to-End Service Delivery Solution
The right PSA system for your organization can provide or replace a PM-only tool while providing many additional solutions for your business. And because all of these tools work together within one PSA, everyone at your organization will have greater access to your customers’ information.
That means more profitable client engagements, increased customer retention, and more revenue over the life of the customer, just by using the right PSA system.
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What is a PSA Software also called Professional Services Automation?
Maybe you’ve heard the term “professional services automation” and wondered, “what’s that?”
In this article, we’re going to explain what professional services automation (PSA) is, who it’s for, and how to evaluate your options when considering it for your business.
A Simple Definition of Professional PSA Software (Professional Services Automation).
Here’s a simple definition:
Professional Services Automation (PSA) software is project management and resource management software rolled into one easy-to-use platform.
PSA systems are designed specifically for the needs of professional services organizations, including consulting teams, accounting firms, and anyone who sells billable hours as a service.
How Is Professional Services Automation (PSA) Different From Project Management or Enterprise Resource Management Tools?
Professional services automation is much more robust than either project management (PM) or enterprise resource management software.
In fact, modern PSA systems include both PM and resource management, relieving you of the need to have multiple systems to plan resources and track your tasks.
Instead, everything is done in one place.
Who Uses Professional Services Automation (PSA) Software?
Traditionally, PSA software has been used by consulting groups, lawyers, and similar professional service teams. In recent years, IT services firms similar to Custard Technical Services, marketing agencies, and architecture, engineering, and construction companies have also begun adopting PSA to organize their projects and workflow.
When PSA is implemented well, nearly everyone within the firm will use the PSA software.
What Does PSA Software Do?
PSA software brings data and workflow into one well-organized system. The system replaces multiple systems often used throughout an organization to track tasks, data, sales, and pretty much anything else that involves interaction with a customer or sales prospect.
For example, many firms replace all or some of their current systems for:
Accounting
Calendar management
Collaboration
Document management
Expense tracking
Invoicing
Project management
Proposals
Resource management
What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Professional Services Automation?
Advantages
In general, the biggest advantage of a PSA system is empowering leaders to manage and measure the services delivered by their team.
Executives should be able to see where accounts stand and what areas need improving — including what services are most profitable for the business.
In addition, managers and service providers should be able to reduce the time they spend in spreadsheets — since reporting becomes automated. By extension, PSA can often boost margins by reducing the time spent on non-billable work.
Organizations that are growing are often great candidates for professional services automation. As headcount goes up, manual tracking and reporting processes often break down, causing service breakdowns and a lack of visibility for executives.
A great PSA tool will keep your best people out of spreadsheet paralysis. Instead, they’ll be empowered to make business decisions with full visibility into the operations of your business.
Disadvantages
Some PSA solutions lack critical features that help tremendously in the day-to-day operations of a service business.
Project management, for example, was left out of many PSA systems years ago. That meant businesses reverted to tools such as Microsoft Project to manage their work.
Feature gaps like these cause confusion for your sales and service delivery teams. Since they’re working from different tools, neither has full visibility into what the other is doing.
Will a PSA Software Work with My CRM?
Most PSA systems offer integrations to the major CRM systems, but they are often difficult to set up and run. In practice, many services teams operate PSA and CRM systems separately. Too often, that means the information in the CRM never becomes available to the rest of the team. If you’re using Salesforce as your CRM, Klient PSA Software is a fully-featured PSA system built 100% native on the Salesforce platform.
Since Klient runs natively within Salesforce, it creates end-to-end visibility to everything that’s happening with prospects and customers.
Anyone using any of the CRM or PSA functionality will have a full view of the activities and notes for the accounts they work with.
Is Professional Services Automation (PSA) Software Right for My Business?
If your organization delivers billable work, you’re a good candidate for professional services automation.
Recently, SPI Research conducted an ROI study for professional services automation. They found that a firm with 172 people could expect to spend close to $200,000 in PSA software and implementation, but that they would see nearly $23 million in increased revenue and reduced costs.
That’s a 115-times return on investment for professional services automation.
The 3 Essential Benefits for Services Companies Using PSA Software
Effective PSA systems are designed around delivering three key benefits:
1. Increasing Billable Hours
Professional services automation (PSA) helps service companies increase the number of billable hours they can sell with their current staff. It does this by reducing the amount of coordination, manual reporting, and firefighting that is common in service organizations. With fewer non-billable projects to worry about, your team can focus on work that is profitable.
2. Automatic Tracking of Work
When using a good PSA system, when a consultant performs an hour of work against a project, that hour is logged and then automatically charged to the customer’s next invoice. This happens automatically—without anyone in accounting having to consolidate a report to make it happen.
3. Client Project Success
Most importantly, PSA systems help you achieve better successful client outcomes — the biggest key to growing your service business.
What Criteria Should I Use to Evaluate Different Professional Services Automation (PSA) Tools?
If you’re ready to evaluate PSA software for your business, here are 10 criteria we’ve written about before that you can use. These should help you evaluate your options:
1. Project Management
Modern PSA systems include a robust project management system as part of their feature set. This has not always been the case, however, as many earlier PSA systems didn’t include PM as part of their offering. Look for a PSA system that has PM tightly integrated into the rest of its functions, giving you full real-time visibility for all stakeholders — including your services and sales teams, plus your partners and customers.
2. Integrations
Now more than ever, service teams need to coordinate their work with the rest of their organizations. By embedding a PSA system into a CRM solution (such as Salesforce), you can put sales and services side-by-side in one platform. Sales opportunities can transition directly into projects for the services team — even before the opportunity has been closed in the Salesforce pipeline. Transitional PSA systems lack this tight integration with the CRM, which creates a lag between the excitement of the sale and the delivery of the service. Financial integration is also key to modern PSA systems. Billing, invoicing, and revenue recognition should all be seamless.
3. Services CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)
PSA software should be able to seamlessly adjust to complex changes in configuration, pricing, and quotes for your services. For example, a project might initially be for time and materials with a revenue recognition policy based on the percentage of a project that’s complete. If a change order happens to add a fixed fee component to the service, the PSA system should be able to easily adjust profitability, margin, bookings, and revenue — along with any new requirements.
4. Resource Planning
Today’s PSA applications manage sophisticated resource planning requirements, including planning based on:
Target utilization
Availability
Task-level planning
You should be able to search and compare qualified resources by skills, role, location, and rates with an intuitive and visual appealing comparison tool. Some PSA applications are able to source external candidates in addition to internal resources with a built-in staffing and applicant tracking solution.
5. Utilization
In recent years, PSA systems have become much better at supporting utilization. New features include:
Target utilization thresholds
Determining what types of time-off should or should not impact utilization calculations
Reporting on utilization by project, practice, region, and roles
PSA solutions today also include an integrated time off solution to accurately manage and account for time off with scheduling and utilization.
6. Project Billing
Core to PSA is the ability to track and bill projects accurately. This has become more complex as service offerings have evolved. Modern service companies must juggle billing by:
Hourly
Retainers
Managed services
Microservices
These new types of contracts go well beyond the traditional time and materials services offered in the past. In addition, services organizations are increasingly working with third-party vendors and consultants as part of the delivery team. Today’s PSA applications support these complex billing scenarios and vendor payments.
7. Project Accounting
PSA systems track real-time financial performance including bookings, billings, and revenue for each project sold and delivered to a client. Without this, companies lack visibility, which can lead to poor decisions, missed adjustments, and (at worse) reduced margins. Today’s PSA solutions offer full support for project financials, billing, and revenue recognition in one unified solution, tightly integrated with your accounting solution.
8. Extensibility
Earlier PSA applications were not able to manage unique services offered by service teams and projects. Today’s PSA systems give you the flexibility to create offerings in various industries and verticals, tailoring your solutions to the needs of your clients. You can easily create custom fields, build workflow notifications, and set approval process on-demand within modern PSA systems. You can also create user-defined reports, dashboards, and custom applications — all to help you achieve better customer outcomes.
9. Collaboration
Through collaboration, services organizations can tear down the traditional boundaries between teams and increase customer success. Popular tools including Salesforce communities, Slack, and JIRA are staples for many organizations to collaborate on project activities. Robust PSA applications offer seamless integration with these applications, giving users full visibility as they collaborate on a project. This helps ensure all stakeholders have what they need to deliver their part of the project.
10. Accessibility for Users
Finally, earlier PSA solutions were designed as top-down planning tools mostly for use for by managers. The majority of work was done outside the system. Modern PSA applications provide an intuitive experience for all stakeholders across all devices. This helps ensure widespread adoption, collaboration, better profitability, and more customer success.
The Payoff: Increased Customer Success & Profitability
The value of PSA systems comes from their ability to help companies deliver successful client engagements profitably, increasing customer retention, and growing top-line revenue over the lifetime of the customer.
The right PSA system has the potential to create significant positive results for your clients and company.
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The 4 Benefits of Effective Resource Planning for Service Organizations
In almost every services deal, the salesperson has to answer the question:
“When can you deliver this service?”
It’s often a difficult question to answer. Sometimes the sales rep will just say: “Our average delivery time is three weeks.” Or the rep might step away to call a scheduler or project manager and ask when the next available openings are. The entire thing can quickly grow into an administrative headache for many salespeople.
That’s where resource planning comes in.
The Value of Effective Resource Planning for Service Organizations
Resource planning is simply the process of managing your available resources. In a service organization, that means figuring out who’s available when, and if you have the right staffing levels to meet demand.
Do this right, and you’ll see:
Faster delivery of services
Better client satisfaction
More sales
Better cooperation between your sales team, your service professionals, and your administrative staff
Make Your System Visible…
The best advice we can give you about resource planning is to make your system visible to everyone who’s involved in selling and delivering your services. That means your salespeople, administrative staff, service professionals, and managers should all be able to see who’s available when, and what obligations each employee is currently assigned.
When you build a resource management system that’s visible to everyone, it provides four key benefits:
1. It Gives Your Sales Staff Better Information
A good system will allow your sales reps to see what resources are available at any given time without having to check with anyone first. That way they’ll be able to answer a prospective customer’s “what’s your timeline?” question any time it comes up. This helps your administrative and services teams too. They’ll have far fewer last-minute changes and rescheduling requests for “important customers.”
2. It Holds Everyone Accountable
Any system will fail if your employees don’t use it, and a common complaint within organizations is that their reports don’t seem to match reality. Inaccurate reports usually happen when employees aren’t entering data into your company’s project management or CRM tools. And that happens when people aren’t being held accountable for using the tools they’ve been given. When you make resource planning visible to everyone, it will be more likely your employees will enter the data they should. If they don’t, everyone will see it, including you and your management staff, and you can take action to correct the issue.
3. It Makes Everyone’s Obligations Visible
Ever been asked the question: “Does your team have enough bandwidth to take this on?” Many managers will simply say, “yes,” without truly knowing whether their team can to take on a new project at that moment. This leads to “drop everything” and “fire drill” situations. A good resource management system will help prevent those types of fire drills. You’ll have easy access to your team’s current workload, and you’ll be able to say with confidence what impact “dropping everything” will have on other projects. Letting everyone see each other’s current assignments also makes it easier for your sales team to overcome scheduling objections. For example, telling a new customer: “We’ll get back to you to schedule a time,” isn’t a great way to inspire confidence. Instead, it’s better if your sales reps can pull up a schedule and say—with confidence—“It looks like we can be there on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. Which would work better for you?”
4. It’s Easier to Track Results
Business decisions are much easier when you know you have good data. It’ll be easier to find information and simple to create reports you can use to track performance. If you’re a manager or decision maker, you have much to gain by developing a resource planning system everyone will use.
Benefits of an Integrated Approach
Resource planning doesn’t have to be complicated, but it is a topic that deserves a bit of planning on your part. When you do it well, it will make everything in your company run more smoothly, and customers and employees will both benefit from the process. Something as simple as integrating your project management system with your CRM tool can go a long way toward improving your sales results.
If you’re a Salesforce user, we invite you to see what Klient’s next-generation PSA software can do for your project management and resource planning needs.
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G2 Tech Website Rates Klient Has A Momentum Leader!
We are very pleased to announce Klient PSA has been selected as a leader in the Fall 2018 PSA Momentum Report from G2 tech website.
The Momentum Grid identifies products that are on a high growth trajectory based on user satisfaction scores, employee growth, and digital presence. The Momentum Grid highlights each product’s Momentum score on the vertical axis and the product’s Satisfaction score on the horizontal axis.
These scores are based on G2 Crowd’s Satisfaction and Momentum algorithms. Products with a top 25% Momentum Grid score* are shown within the shaded area.
Klient PSA is now built 100% Native on Salesforce!
New innovations provide the most comprehensive and modern solution for professional services organizations with one unified platform.
Klient Software, a leading provider of professional services automation software delivering an intuitive and modern solution for professional services organizations today announced the latest release of Klient PSA, built native on the Salesforce Platform, Klient PSA is currently available on the Salesforce AppExchange.
KlientPSA provides service organizations with a complete, modern professional services platform that is quick to set up, easy to learn and can be customized to meet their needs today and in the future. New innovations in Klient PSA include:
1-Slack Bot
Now teams can manage projects and services directly from Slack. The new Klient Bot for Slack allows users to view projects and tasks, drill into project and task details including project profitability and financials, create new project and tasks, as well as enter time worked against projects and tasks directly from within Slack. The Klient Bot for Slack uses both the Force.com and Heroku platforms to seamlessly connect to Slack.
2-Project Forecasting
A new forecasting engine enables customers to forecast project revenue and compare against actuals for all types of revenue and costs delivering real-time insight and analysis into current and pipeline services revenue and margin. CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) – new features for services proposals, quotes, and contracts with this release include bi-directional synchronization with Salesforce opportunity products and price books to automatically create services quotes from opportunities and projects details together, enhanced support for mark-ups and discounts, and the ability to create contracts automatically from proposals and projects.
3-Enhanced Scheduling
New enhanced scheduling delivers the ability to manage services projects with sophisticated auto-scheduling capability such as effort based scheduling, automatically determining task and project durations based on the percentage of effort available across one or more resources. The scheduling abilities is similar to that of an advanced construction scheduling software that ensures that entire teams stays on track.
4-Mobile Responsive
The enhanced mobile timesheet includes a new timer feature to easily start, pause, and stop the timer while working on projects and tasks, automatically creating time entries upon completion. Microsoft Project Integration – the ability to seamlessly import and export Microsoft project files, automatically creating projects in Klient including the calculation of task durations, dependencies, lag days, priorities, and more.
5-Customer Communities
Project management enhancements for customers and partners to directly collaborate with project teams on the successful delivery of client engagements.
6-Integrations
A new integration with Sage Live financials built native on the Salesforce App Cloud delivering seamless integration of projects, invoices, and purchases directly between Klient and Sage Live. The Sage Live integration joins a growing partner network of integrations with accounting and productivity solutions including Sage Live, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, Slack, JIRA, and Zendesk, supporting real-time connections with the applications project teams use every day.
Take a Klient PSA free trial available on Salesforce AppExchange
New integration connects Slack’s messaging app for business with Klient PSA built on the industry’s leading cloud platform from Salesforce.
Klient Software, a fast growing professional services automation (PSA) vendor built native on the industry’s leading cloud platform from Salesforce today announced a new integration with Slack, delivering real-time communication and collaboration to customer services projects.
The bi-directional integration enables services professionals and customer teams to collaborate and communicate in real-time, providing one central location to all the tools necessary for successful project delivery. Features of the integration include the ability to create, update, and archive projects in real-time, creating Slack channels for each client project and automatically managing project teams as slack project channel members. Klient project tasks are synchronized with Slack when tasks are created or completed, updating Slack on the status of tasks and project completion.
Project communication from Klient using Salesforce Chatter is automatically pushed in real-time to Slack within the appropriate project channel. Users can also search and set reminders on project tasks directly from Slack.
“Clients are demanding real-time visibility into the status of projects, with a desire to communicate and collaborate at a moments notice when required,” said David Vanheukelom, CEO of Klient Software. “The combination of Slack and Klient is a game-changer for services organizations focused increasingly on project success as the key ingredient to lifetime customer value.”
The Slack integration is available immediately at no additional charge to existing Klient Software customers.
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About Klient Software
Klient helps companies transform service delivery and client success with our next-generation Project & Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution built 100% native on the industry’s leading cloud platform from Salesforce, delivering a 10x faster deployment than traditional solutions. Klient provides a single application to manage the performance & profitability of every project, delivering visibility across your business from marketing, sales, and support to services, operations, and finance.
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7 Ways PSA Software Helps Sales Teams Improve Their Results
Is your Sales & Delivery Team Aligned?
There are many ways to improve business results. Selling more products and services is the strategy many sales teams focus on. But don’t overlook the tremendous benefit you could see simply by improving your internal operations. In fact, these two things go hand in hand. As your sales team brings in more business, your consultants and service delivery team will have more clients and customers to serve. The more you sell, the more benefit you will see by improving your sales and service delivery process. Professional Service Automation (PSA) klient PSA software is designed to help you with this process. When implemented well, PSA software helps you deliver better results, while requiring less labor for you and your team.
Here are 7 ways PSA software can help you improve results:
1. Better Visibility for Everyone Involved
In many organizations, different departments use different systems to organize their work. For example, let’s assume your organization is like many service organizations: you have a sales team charged with bringing in clients, and you have a team of consultants who deliver your service. In this scenario, your sales organization might work entirely from a CRM such as Salesforce.com. And your consultants might work from a completely separate project management system. Because your two teams work in these two separate systems, your sales reps can’t see what’s happening with their accounts after the deal has been closed. In the same way, your consultants can’t see what’s happening with an account during the sales negotiation process. PSA software solves this problem. It ties your Sales team’s database together with your consulting team’s project management software.
Everyone sees the same data from a single database, and everyone can stay informed about what’s happening.
2. Real-time Visibility
Daily reporting is great, but it’s also just a “snapshot in time.” Sales situations change rapidly; what was true for an account yesterday might not be true today. That means reports you printed this morning might not be current by the time you have your management meeting later in the day.
PSA software works in real time. When you pull up an account, the data you see will be current in the moment, not as of last night.
3. Accessible Documentation (Both Previous and Current)
When using PSA software, everyone in your organization can see the full history of an account, not just the part their team was involved in. This helps everyone. If a sales rep takes over an account, for example, she’ll be able to see everything that happened with a client, including both the notes from the sales process and from the delivery of the service itself.
Unlike most CRM or project management software solutions, PSA software captures the full story of a client’s history.
4. Accurate Data
Gathering accurate data can be a major challenge, especially for managers. It some organizations, it is not unusual for sales managers to spend days hunting down the information they need to create a report. PSA software gives managers one place they can go to get the most up-to-date information. And the data they find will be both accurate and current.
Whether you’re trying to resolve a commission dispute or prepare a report for your executive team, PSA software makes the process much easier.
5. Standardized Reporting
When we work with companies, we sometimes find multiple people within their organization are spending hours every week manually creating similar reports. Eliminating the duplication of work will free up resources in your organization. But beyond that, PSA software can help you standardize the information that’s being presented to managers and executives across your company.
This can be a major improvement for everyone involved and can eliminate the discrepancies in reporting that are often the source of many clarifying questions and emails within your organization.
6. Profit and Cost Analysis Per Project
How many hours did your sales team spend closing the deal for a specific clients? How many hours did your consulting team team spend in research, prep, and delivery once the sale was made? Finding clear answers to these questions is often a major challenge in many organizations. Sometimes it requires managers to ask around to see how much time and energy was invested in a client, along with some manual calculations or some work in Excel. Using PSA software to track profitability means you won’t have to do any calculating at all.
The profitability per client is tracked automatically and can be found easily in your standard reports—no manual calculations required.
7. Optimized Resource Allocation
Here’s a situation that happens all the time: One of your consultants is buried in work. She’s had multiple deals close in her territory in recent weeks. She’s working long hours to keep up. At the same time, another consultant is short on work. Nothing in his territory has closed in weeks. He’s staying busy with training or other administrative duties, but it’d be better if he were working with clients doing his job. PSA software can help you establish rules about who gets what work when, including how to handle resource needs like the one we’ve just described. This leads to a more efficient use of the talent you have on staff.
It also helps keep everyone busy, without leading to burnout.
What’s The Payoff?
More sales, better service, improved customer experiences: that’s the promise of PSA software.
Klient’s PSA software product is designed to help you achieve all these things—and more. If you’re interested in learning how Klient Software can help your company, we invite you to get in touch. We’d be glad to learn more about your business and projects.
Sincerely yours, Klient Team
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Professional Services Automation (PSA) is a project management and resource management software rolled into one easy-to-use platform.
If you’re running a service business, PSA is the most efficient way to organize both your sales efforts and the delivery of your client services, all in one place.
Who Is Professional Services Automation For?
PSA is for businesses of any kind that deliver client-facing projects. Examples include: Professional Services Teams, Consulting Firms, IT Contractors, Creative Agencies, Construction/Engineering Firms, Lawyers, Accountants, really anyone focused on client-facing service delivery.
What Makes PSA Different than CRM or Project Management Tools?
By now you might be wondering: how is PSA different than all the other project management or CRM platforms out there?
5 Benefits of PSA Software
Here are five key benefits for users of PSA software:
1. Specifically Designed for Services Companies
If you run a service business, you probably know the frustration of trying to “hack” certain software to make it work for a service business. Most sales and marketing software is designed around selling products. But to run a successful services business, you need more than that. You need a system that can track sales and the fulfillment of those sales, all in one system. What makes PSA unique is that it houses both your sales data and all your project related data including time entry, expenses, resource planning, invoicing and more all in one system.
That saves you from having to transfer information back and forth between your CRM system and your project management tool.
2. PSA Tracks Profitability, Not Just Revenue
CRM systems track a dizzying array of financials, but they’re usually only focused on revenue and sales. In a services business, profitability is more important than revenue numbers. CRM systems typically can’t see how much it cost to fulfill a sale. PSA software changes this, allowing you to see pipeline, revenue, and profitability.
That gives you a much better view of your business as a whole, not just the revenue perspective.
3. Data to Help Leadership Make Better Decisions
Leaders are always looking for good data. But sometimes that can be a challenge. There seems to be no shortage of data available, but only a small percentage of that data is meaningful or actionable for business owners or executives.
PSA software is designed specifically for service businesses, so the standard reports from PSA software are usually much more helpful to the leadership at service businesses.
4. Better for Repeat Business
For most businesses, it’s significantly cheaper to get previous customers to buy again than it is to acquire brand new customers. That makes sense when you think about it, but many businesses still focus almost entirely on new client acquisition. CRM software is fundamentally designed to support the “go get a new customer” approach. It’s all about getting new people into the sales funnel. PSA software takes a different approach. Because it so closely ties to fulfillment, PSA software makes it easier to remember that former customers would probably make good future customers too, if you only spent a little time trying to reach them.
5. Breaks Down Internal Silos
In most companies, the only team that logs into a CRM tool is the sales force. But when a company adopts PSA software, things change. The fulfillment team is now working out of the same tool as the sales team. Now the Sales team can instantly see the status of customer projects. The Services team can seen what the service pipeline looks like and plan resources accordingly.
By its very nature, this begins to break down the wall that sometimes exists between sales and everyone else in the company.
Is A Professional Services Automation (PSA) Good For Your Business?
Most CRM systems are built for teams that sell products. But as we wrote in a previous article, selling services is not like selling products. PSA is a better choice for companies that sell services. If you’re a Salesforce user, you can have the best of both worlds by simply adding PSA to your existing Salesforce CRM service. Salesforce is rapidly growing in popularity and has huge benefits for businesses.
We’d love to tell you more about how our product helps you do just that. Get in touch, or check out our product page if you’d like to learn more.
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