Hit the nail on the head! In addition, there's also the size of customer that matters.
The easiest of products to use can still take 3 months of assisted onboarding to set up the right way for a large enterprise. In some cases with a PS /Implementation team, and in other cases with a simple team of onboarding consultants.
For example, I set up slack for my start-up in 5 minutes. But how do you set up Slack for a 3000 member team? Just ask people to login and create channels? Trust the IT admin's judgement on how to set up channels for the whole company? Probably not. You need a specialist from Slack who has seen successful large deployments before, understands how to make sense of org structure in your 3000 member company, the dynamics and interactions expected between teams, and hence how to best set up channels, integrations, training, phased go-lives to ensure the team starts using slack in a way they are going to succeed with it. There's a professional services team even in segment.io - smaller start-ups integrate segment.io in hours, not even days.
Hope this helps!
Hi Eddie,Excellent question, and unfortunately I don't think there is a single algorithm that answers the question. Ultimately I think it comes down to the product. Take Salesforce, for example. Implementing SFDC is a huge undertaking and requires specialized knowledge to do correctly (data migration, product customization, training, etc). For such involved processes, its really hard for a CSM to have all the knowledge required to get this done. The cost to service provider of these services is also high enough that without a separate PSA you'd be hard pressed to recover those costs without a very high initial product MRR, or a very long term contract. But I think the above is probably more of an older model. Trends are certainly going the direction of improved UI / UX to the point where customers really want products that don't require that level of setup. It's a bit of the social media phenomenon. When was the last time you saw a training for how to use FB? FB and a B2B product may be apples and oranges, but it's still how most business consumers will evaluate a product. Here's the thing - the only outcome that really matters is a customer's experience with the tool in the first period of the contract (call it 90 days, but it can vary by product). If having professional services improves or accelerates product adoption, then it's probably worth it to consider. If professional services aren't really necessary to produce better adoption results, then I think sticking with a CS do-it-all model is potentially cleaner and easier.I've done it both ways. I started my career in PS and then as things moved to CS have been running dedicated CS teams for 10+ years. I've had professional services with startups and startups without PS. Again, it really comes down to the need of the product.
Happy to chat offline anytime - 703.786.5672.Andrew