Professional Services: Overcoming the ‘Do Nothing’ Option
What do we mean by doing nothing? It’s essentially maintaining the status quo or deferring a decision. In this post, we explore why clients often choose inaction over adopting professional service engagements, and how you can effectively address this challenge.
Businesses selling commodity products typically have one advantage: their customers rarely have the option of doing nothing.
If you are selling connectivity, your customers will not have an option to do nothing. They will either be reaching the end of a contract that requires a new service to be active by that day, or they may have new premises that need connectivity when they move in. Either way, you will win the opportunity or lose it. If you win it, you will start getting things in place to light up the service on the service commencement date. These contracts can be easily forecast. This is not a slight on these sales. They still require presales effort, thought, and an understanding of what the client is trying to do.
Why Clients Choose ‘Doing Nothing’ in Professional Services
As a business moves to offering professional services, things get more complex. Notably, when offering professional services, clients always have the option of maintaining their current state—choosing inaction over change. This might not seem logical to you or your team. In most cases, you know you’re right, you know what ever the thing is your proposing will bring value to your client.
This might be the implementation of a new tool, replacement of a legacy system, a new capability, or a professional service to realise the potential of an existing investment. The Microsoft 365 eco-system is a great example of that. Investing in the Microsoft 365 E5 ecosystem unlocks a treasure trove of services from advanced productivity and collaboration tools in Teams, to device management, advanced threat protection and vulnerability management, benefits that directly translate into measurable productivity gains and cost savings for your clients. Yet all of this needs configuration, communication, training, changes to operational processes, and potentially an element of vendor displacement.
Your wider management team, who will contribute to any opportunity, includes:
- The sales executive managing client engagements.
- Pre-sales specialists who technically qualify opportunities and develop tailored solutions.
- Delivery specialists tasked with ensuring each deliverable provides measurable ROI and tangible client value.
This is a lot of moving parts in the development of a professional services opportunity. Yet, regardless of the quality of the proposal, the decision makers within your clients management structure, always have the option of doing nothing.
I’ll use the example of an aging VoIP platform. A client may be seeking options to replace an aging phone system, that is out of, or nearing end of support. With this, the, the client may be looking to undertake some transformation, for example, integrate telephony with Teams. This will improve user experience, remove capex, and probably lower op-ex. At the end of this, there is always the option for a client to turn around and say, “no, we’ll live with the risk”, or “we’ll tie ourselves into another support agreement for 3+1 years”. As the party looking to provide services, you will know, the client would benefit from your services, seeing a real return on investment.
There may be multiple reasons for this, the solution may exceed budget, timelines may not align, or, the client may not trust you. Becoming a trusted partner is not something a client will do just because your business has the badges, references and LinkedIn recommendations. Becoming a trusted partner takes time, relationships have to be built, you have to demonstrate credibility and not rush it.
My evangelism for Viva Amplify does not automatically mean I can be a trusted advisor, I have to earn that right, by demonstrating the value and return to my client. You can do this in multiple ways, and will use a blend of:
- Demonstrate where you have done this before, potentially using an approved case study
- Share experiences of other clients that have had similar challenges, use a reference if you can
- Show options to deliver outcomes, with pros and cons for each, a bronze, silver, gold, and a counterfactual
This will allow your client to make informed, considered decisions.
Conclusion
Windows 10 will be end of life and not receive any updates after October 2025. It’s not your job to convince your client they need to upgrade to Windows 11 and throw out perfectly good hardware because it doesn’t have a TPM 2.0 chip, it’s your (the account management, presales, architecture, project management teams) job, to set out the facts, work with your client to help them understand the impacts of their options and demonstrate the value you can offer.
Notice the use of the term customers in the commodity sales example. Customer engagements are transactional, and as I moved to the consultative engagement this changes to client. They are terms that are often used interchangeably. In reality they are completely different. Clients engage in ongoing, long-term relationships characterised by trust, personalised attention, and continuous interaction. Clients seek professional advice, tailored solutions, or specialised services.
The real win is not selling a service, a product, or a single engagement. The win is changing a customer to a client that will, overtime, trust your professional judgement.