Becoming Services-Led: The Secret To Outperforming The Competition By 3x

By Scott Marshall, ConnectWise

What if you could triple your bottom-line profit? Sounds too good to be true, right? I thought so too, honestly, but it’s not. Some service-led partners are already outperforming their peers by 3x. What’s their secret? I sat down with Paul Dippell, CEO of Service Leadership, Inc., for a look into the performance and methods of these high-performing companies in a recent webinar.

What Does Services-Led Mean?

Paul Dippell defines being “services-led” as still a predominantly product-centric business that approaches the marketplace and the sales process with the service offering at the forefront of the discussion.

It is the most profitable and differentiated form of the product-centric business model moving you from a transactional product-based relationship to a value-added services relationship that yields more traction, pricing power, and stickiness with your customer base.

Dippell made the following distinction: You are product-centric when your product resale revenue is greater than 60% of your total revenue. The services-led dimension can still apply, but:

• Not all product-centric firms are services-led
  Picture this as a spectrum. A product-centric firm with little to no revenue from services is on the far end of product-centric spectrum.