The demand for business services continues to grow, but so do the challenges. The business landscape is complex and service providers mirror this complexity with a proliferation of different business models, propositions and marketing approaches.
Many business service and outsourcing firms struggle to balance ambitious growth targets with profitability as their clients push back against price increases. Their biggest challenges include commoditisation, price pressure and increased rigour in tenders and purchasing processes.
Through our position of analysing a wide range of business models, we can benchmark performance on a cross-sector basis, allowing us to advise management teams and investors on a business’s key sources of differentiation.
Business services companies provide a broad range of offerings to customers, ranging from accounting and legal to administrative services to facilities management and more. While companies in this sector are diverse, they often face a common set of issues and challenges as they look to grow sales and improve profits.
Some of the common questions we hear from our business services clients are:
How can we target segments and understand needs in environments where multiple decision-makers influence the sale process?
How can we build winning value propositions which can be tailored to individual decision-makers within the business?
How can we achieve best-in-class sales effectiveness with our key account and field teams?
Which mix of sales and marketing channels is best positioned to cover the diverse range of small to large businesses?
How do we measure the opportunity and manage sales pipelines, taking into account buying trends and long selling cycles?
We help business services companies create winning strategies, design effective organisations, and create efficient B2B sales capabilities.
Henderton has advised a range of organisations operating in the professional services sector, providing strategic, insight-led sales, marketing and proposition development services for clients leading the field in law, architecture, accountancy, finance, IT, outsourcing and more.
We become part of our clients’ teams, working closely with them to deliver the right mix of activity to achieve tangible business outcomes including:
Strategy development: market research and opportunity assessment, business analysis and consultancy.
Brand and digital marketing: brand positioning, content marketingValue proposition design: proposition differentiation and value-based selling strategy.
Sales approach: developing a scalable sales advantage (either through route-to-market or sales enablement), and segmentation of businesses and decision-makers.
B2B sales and marketing: sales organisation strategy and design, territory design, incentive compensation and reward programme design, and sales operations and reporting.
Technology: using technology to enable more profitable and scalable service delivery.
Operational scalability: establishing best-in-class operational processes, to allow effective scaling and disruptive pricing.
If you would like to learn more about our experience, please contact our practice team.
We have extensive, international experience advising both management teams and investors in fast-growing business services providers, including:
Gap analysis: identifying strengths and weaknesses in pricing, sales and the bidding process.
Product development: developing and pricing new products and service offerings
Strategic orientation: creating key guidelines of the go-to-market approach.
Go-to-market strategy: tailoring a channel strategy to a new business line.
Revenue model: developing offer models, optimising offer templates, and defining rules for creating and dealing with standard price lists.
Price setting: developing a concept for value-based pricing, setting up rules for price calculations.
Price increases: supporting price increase campaigns (for small and mid-sized customers, and key accounts).
Sales enablement: defining the B2B customer journey with white papers and sales collateral.
Bid preparation: workshop-based support to prepare for large sales opportunities
Want to learn more about how we can help you grow?
Henderton acts as independent, trusted advisors to innovative companies throughout their growth lifecycle.
Get in touch and understand how we can help you achieve your objectives.
