Thanks again for the feedback. – Fred

I strongly believe the “value-based” professional services model is gaining lots of traction in the industry.

As early as 2000, our company was bundling professional services — installation, deployment, assessments, consulting — into commoditized product sales. We decided to go forgo this strategy and go to a more efficient “multi-vendor, vendor-agnostic” fee-based model.

This model and our Professional Services philosophy has always been to serve our customers first with a variety of “value-added” services so they can design, build and integrate more efficient and reliable networks.

Professional Services is not a product — it’s all about selling people, processes and tools. In essence it’s your knowledge and expertise you are trying to sell to your customers.

What this illustrates is that the line between products and services can often have dozens of shades of grey. The most important issue is that you, and your client, understand exactly what value you are providing and that you, as the service provider, leverage that understanding to price your services accordingly and leave no doubt in your client’s mind about what they are expecting as the result of your efforts.

And I promise my next post won’t cause any brain cramps!

Thx – Fred

I only have confusion to add to this discussion. As a marketing firm, we approach our business as a service company – we offer consultation, we research before working on products, we offer advice – things like that. But then our service is also to create things, whether a press release, an e-newsletter, or a new ad. So would those be paid services still, or products? A press release isn’t like a new car – it’s not something you can wrap your hands around *really*. But it’s not really a service either.

Gah. Total brain cramp I’ve never thought about before