So, hi, everybody. My name is Chitra Adva Chaula. I'm the director of uh customer Success at Couch Space and Couch Space. For those of you who don't know about the company is disrupting the $40 billion database market, whether it's data platform that revolutionizes digital innovation.

It is built on the most powerful no SQL technology and offers scale performance and agility required by the most demanding of organizations including 20 of the Fortune 100. And in this session, I'm going to be talking about how you can make your customers successful by bridging the gap uh between your company's products um and your customer's needs and how you can apply that consultative approach to identify patterns and build service offerings.

And by doing so, how you can make um your customer success and services organization a differentiator for your company. And although this discussion is in the context of customers and customer success organizations, uh you can apply the overarching principles and practices to any industry and any functional area to work with your external and internal uh customers and partners as well. So hopefully it would be helpful um to a large percentage of the audience here. So without further ado, let's get started. And before talking about consulting services, let's spend a few minutes actually talking about what it means to be a consultant, right? Because you really cannot build an effective consulting services organization without good consultants. So a consultant is a person who is engaged to give expert advice to people in a specific field. The expert advice could be related to that field or it could be related to solving a specific issue or plugging a gap, whatever that may be. So irrespective what a consulting engagement is expected to lead to is a change from a current state to a desired state by following the advice or taking the help of that consultant. And why do organizations employ consultants?

Well, for a few different reasons, uh it could be to get confirmation and get an objective assessment that they are on the right track. It could be to hand over some tasks to specialists um and to again, you know, and, and you'll probably get tired of me saying it, but it is very important or to plug some gaps in their capabilities and plugging gaps or seeking external help. By the way, uh is not a negative reflection on the company. It's actually the smart thing to do in many cases where those areas are not the core competencies. For those organizations. For example, a refrigerator manufacturer might not want to build an exhaustive internet of things platform just because they want to launch a line of connected refrigerators that would not be a good use of their time and resources versus just partnering with an external vendor or a partner to build those connected services.

Uh Another reason why um organizations hire consultants um is something that, you know, many of you in the corporate world might be very familiar with. It is to augment their implementation teams in situations where they don't want to hire full time resources for certain projects.

So think about what we just learned in the last two slides. So building consulting services is all about applying your knowledge of what a consultant does and why organizations hire consultants and connecting those dots back to your current company, your products and your customer journey.

That is the first step to understanding if your company will benefit from consulting services. And if yes, what kind of services to offer and it all starts with understanding and mapping out your customer's journey. And by the way, a very important thing to understand here is that not every company or product needs consulting services, for example, in A B to C setting, uh you don't need to offer consulting services. Most times you don't need consulting services to help your customers use, you know, applications like Google Maps or whatsapp or even an ipad. But if you're in a company that is in a relatively new space like internet of things, for example, and or you are in A B to B market and have a complex product. Many of your customers might not understand very well how to use your technology to their benefit. So, offering consulting services to your customers and prospects might actually help reduce the barriers of entry and also reduce the time to value, which is exactly where you want to be with your customers.

And what you see here is a typical customer journey map or in other words, how a customer buys your product and then what do they do with it? And what does that life cycle look like? The specifics might vary based on your specific company and your products. But at a high level, all companies have to fight the battles of, you know, creating or increasing awareness about their products. Once a customer is actually aware and is considering your products, you have to make it easy for them to again connect the dots between their requirements on your products. That could be a consulting opportunity. You are champions on the customer's side that needs to convert those connected dots into a formal business proposal which their decision maker can hopefully approve. That's another consulting opportunity. And once the customer has come on board, depending on the complexity of your products and expertise of your customers, they might still need help with things like implementation and testing and go live. Um And even after that, all of these are opportunities um for consulting and professional services and all of these steps, you know, could have gaps that consulting or professional services can help fill, you could offer actually offer, generate business consulting services even before somebody signs up to be a customer.

In fact, that is one consulting services can be really powerful. And based on your specific customer journey, you could drop a more elaborate um journey map like like the one that you see on screen. Uh right now, uh that really qualifies like, you know, where does the customer uh interactions with you start? And for example, if you are again in a space like internet of things, and I keep bringing that space up because I think um it actually offers a lot of opportunities for consulting. It is fairly new. Um and I have experience in that space as well. Um So if you're in a new space like that, then you a lot of times your customers might really not be aware of um what that space is uh in, in all its details and it's on all its capabilities and you really have to start at the baseline, like what's the baseline information that a customer or a prospect might need to really think about iot the right way, right?

So that's uh an opportunity for education consulting. And then once you're beyond the baseline, um there could be a lot of different opportunities for helping your customer, like doing discovery sessions with them, uh like doing, you know, value prop trainings with them. So a lot of opportunities for business consulting, some could even be before they become your customers and they are just evaluating your products. And some could be, you know, after they launch their first product with you and are looking to expand. So those are some of the opportunities for business consulting that you could be looking at. And then of course, there are opportunities for technical consulting, right, like when they are in their design and implementation phase. So building out a s a customer journey map, like this becomes your drawing board for identifying what your um consulting opportunities are. Um and how you can, you know, potentially define your offerings and to what audience and in what phases of the customer journey. So time for a real life example, I worked for an IO company and this was, you know, when IO was fairly new and we discovered that many times our prospective customers were having a really hard time connecting the dots between their IOT goals. So they all knew that, you know, they wanted to get into IOT, it was the right thing to do.

But beyond that, they were really not clear about how to go about it and what the requirements were, for example, you know, we used to, there were work with manufacturing companies that made a CS or refrigerators or fans um and so on and that they were really good at making uh these particular products.

And, but like I said, they really did not know how to make a smart version of these products, how to measure and justify cost and how to assess what would be needed uh to actually go about uh building uh uh these connected products. So we identified this gap fairly early. And in response, we offered what we call as a discovery consulting services, which was not tied to our products at all. This was a paid consulting offering where our consultants worked with our prospective customers for a 5 to 7 day workshop to flush out their requirements. And the end deliverable was a business proposal which could be presented to the decision maker on why and how to transition, transition their company to build connected products. And this consulting offering, by the way was agnostic to which IOT platform or technology they picked, they could go with my company's products or they could choose with, you know, a different partner or a different vendor. But it certainly did increase the chances of them picking us considering the trusted advisor relationships that we built with them during the process. And I'll be talking a little bit about trust advisor later.

But, but that is a really key again, a key differentiator to success and failure um when you are a consultant. So in a nutshell, once you are clear about your customer's journey, you determine the problem statement to identify the gaps or opportunities to build consulting services, uh, then you're in a really good spot to take it to the next step. But again, keep in mind that depending on the nature of your product or company, there could be no opportunities or no need for doing any consulting. And that is ok. And that's probably a good thing. So, you know, assume you identified some opportunities and gaps. Right. So, is that enough to start building consulting services, is that all you need? Well, not, not really, you know, because whatever gaps that you identified, depending on the nature of the gaps and depending on, you know, the stage of your company, maybe you can plug those gaps by using your sales engineers or the sales reps themselves can probably double up as uh you know, business consultants and help with flushing out, you know, some of those early business proposals uh that I uh that I spoke about, uh you could potentially create, you know, stock training and enablement material to help uh your customers get on the baseline, get the minimum required information to effectively evaluate your products.

And or you could also have your customer success team help your customers as account managers to collect some of these gaps and to be able to help connect those dots, right? So a lot of customers use these mechanisms and to great success and they are definitely very, very good places to start. But then how do you make the leap from providing general services and support as part of your product enablement assistance to pro to product product, your services more formally and what's the best time to do it. So the best time to think about products, your service offerings is when you have a complete understanding of your customer's journey from start to end this way, you know exactly when and where services can augment the product offerings and where how they can fill the gaps in deployment or customer understanding when to actually package services is when you want to offer consistent standardized services at scale.

So these product type services should be designed to help your customers at every step of the journey and they should be able to do it in a repeated manner across your customers. And at scale, there needs to be a demand for these services in order for you to invest the time and energy to actually product them. And that's the way to think about it. So when, when you initially get started, try it out, build those processes, uh processes out, offer them to your customers, we the demand we the effective and then if the you know the business there is business value to it, think about the next step, which is how do you product those services?

So what are some of the best practices for making consulting services sustainable? Right. Again, you know, I've beaten most of most of these points to death, align your services to the customer journey at all points, identify the gaps, build structures to your offerings, make them repeatable, make them standardized template, whatever you can. Because that is how you scale and then build your services with the intent to maximize efficiency and scale not to increase your service revenue. That is not the right way to think about it and that will not make you successful and last but certainly not the least build services only when they are essential. And if you think that your com your uh product offerings do not need consulting services, uh customers can very easily uh get enabled, they can see success in them, then that's completely fine. And like I said, that's probably a good thing. So, um many times, you know, when you offer services to your customers, uh you could, you could see some resistance.

So I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about, uh you know, what do you do when you see that kind of resistance and why, why do you see that? So customers typically push back when they don't see or understand the value that they can gain from your services. So, in situations where you know, that customers will need your service offerings to see success and value from your products, then try to introduce those services and pro uh upfront. So they can be built in the, into the overall uh cost and, and customers don't get a sticker shock because there's nothing worse than the customers feeling that ok, we have signed this deal and we are all good to go. And then suddenly you put these, you know, the three or four services in front of them with additional costs, that's never a good customer experience. So be transparent and be upfront about what they would need to be successful with your products and in situations where you know, that customers will not be successful.

So without certain services then make them, you know, like certain trainings or cc certain consultancy services, make them mandatory, making them mandatory is one way of making sure that once the negotiations are over and the deal is signed, the customers have everything that they need to be successful with your products.

The best way to avoid any customer resistance is to make sure that the customers see you as their trusted advisors and partners. Because when you do that, you know, you become as invaluable to your customers as they are to you and that's always a win win situation. So coming back to becoming a trusted advisor, right? Again, the key differentiator between success and failure. When you are offering, when you're building and offering consulting services, your consulting services will not be successful if you don't have good consultants, that's the bottom line and that's the key to success. So how do you be a good consultant by developing a consultative mindset and knowing your customers really well by asking the right questions by understanding why customers buy your products, what their culture is, what their pain points are. And then using this understanding to connect the dots back to your products and services and using that knowledge gained from other customer projects, uh other customers and projects that you did um and tying it, tying it back to your current customer's needs in order to be able to articulate your offering in a way that makes sense to the current customer.

And then lastly be empathetic and show integrity. Always nothing, nothing substitutes that. So, um I realized that, you know, I have packaged a lot of information in these 20 minutes and each of the subtopics that I have covered, um like how to be a good consultant, how to build your customer journey, maps best practices to build consulting services and so on. Could be a full-fledged presentation by themselves. And there are many things I did not even touch on like pricing strategies, marketing strategies, Roy realization and so on. However, I, I really hope that this presentation gave you a good overview of how to be a good consultant.

What to keep in mind when thinking about building consulting services and what are some of the key things that would help you get started and be successful when you choose this as your career path? Thank you so much.

Oh, you bet. I certainly think you did exactly all of those things and really help people kind of take some of those first steps. So thank you so much for being with us today and um we will see you around the conference in the next few days

if you're sticking around. Awesome. Sounds good. And if anybody wants to connect with me on linkedin, feel free, I'll be more than happy to fill questions. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye bye.