Professional Services Team Alignment to Improve Performance for Software Company

Redwood Shores, CA — LSA Global, a leading business consulting, coaching, and training firm that helps fast-growth life sciences, technology, and services companies align culture and talent with strategy, announced strong results from a customized Professional Services Team Alignment Session for a leading ERP software company.

The highly experiential and customized strategic clarity session results were:

• 98% increase in strategic clarity, believability, and implementability
• 149% increase in team alignment and commitment to strategic priorities
• 197% increase is strategy success metrics understanding and buy-in
• 58% increase in role clarity and interdependencies

Professional Services Team Alignment to Improve Performance for ERP Software Companies

At this leading ERP software company, the professional services team sat at the critical intersection between what was sold, what the technology can deliver, what business outcomes the customer expected, and what must be supported post implementation. When a Professional Services Team is aligned, implementations move faster, customers realize value sooner, and employees spend less time navigating internal friction — all while increasing implementation profitability and customer retention.

With team clarity low, this Professional Services Team was facing:

• Competing priorities
• Misaligned metrics and reward systems
• Blurred and overlapping roles
• Stalled decisions
• Stretched resources
• Inconsistent project results
• Unpredictable customer experiences
• Increased attrition in key roles
• Missed contribution targets

Objectives
The objectives of the Professional Services Team Alignment Session for a leading ERP software company were to improve:

• Strategic team clarity and alignment
• Customer implementation outcomes
• Project team health and efficiency
• Gross margin contribution

Why Professional Services Team Alignment Matters
Professional services teams are inherently interdependent. Project managers, consultants, technical experts, customer success teams, salespeople, product teams, post implementation support, and executives must coordinate across complex implementations.

Our organizational alignment research found that highly aligned teams significantly outperform their less-aligned peers across revenue growth, profitability, customer retention, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

For ERP Professional Services teams, alignment means ensuring everyone understands not only what needs to get done, but also why it matters, who owns it, and how success will be measured.

Our Approach to Improve Professional Services Team Alignment

1. Understand the Current Situation
   We started by interviewing the executive team and all team members to understand the current situation, and build the psychological team safety required to have enough constructive debate to have the right conversations in the right way.

   Qualitative and quantitative 360 degree interview results were shared with the entire team.

2. Create Strategic Clarity
   We focused on ensuring that team members understood the strategic priorities and success metrics of the business and the role professional services played in achieving them. Executive leaders clearly articulated the critical few priorities that mattered most and the discussed the client, company, and team tradeoffs required to achieve them.
3. Define What Success Looks Like
   Ambiguous goals create ambiguous execution. Within the overall market realities and company context, we co-defined what constituted a high performing Professional Services Team.  We then established a small set of meaningful success metrics related to areas such as implementation quality, time-to-value, utilization, profitability, customer satisfaction, team development, and team engagement.

   People left knowing exactly how individual, team, and company success would be measured, tracked, and rewarded.

4. Clarify Roles and Decision Rights
   ERP implementations frequently require cross-functional decisions involving competing customer, technical, financial, and resource considerations. We clearly defined the decision making process and identified the key company-wide implementation workflows from sales to support to ensure consistency and clarity.

   This reduced duplication, unnecessary escalation, and decision-making bottlenecks.

5. Align Around the Customer
   When internal functions optimize primarily for their own objectives, the customer can get lost.  Sales may prioritize bookings. Services may prioritize utilization. Product may prioritize the roadmap. Finance may prioritize margins.

   The team decided to focus on shared customer outcomes to encourage silos to learn and solve problems together rather than protect or optimize only their individual turf.

6. Create Mutual Accountability
   We agreed upon key mindset shifts and team operating norms that encouraged team members to communicate directly, surface issues early, follow through on commitments, and hold one another accountable.  The team agreed that a culture of accountability should flow horizontally across the team — not just vertically through leadership.
7. Address Misalignment Quickly
   The team agreed to redesign utilization targets, billable hours, and reward systems to better balance short-term productivity with longer-term capacity and scaling needs.  They agreed to not let unclear priorities, dysfunctional behaviors, or unresolved disagreements to become normalized. They understood that misalignment can negatively impact implementation timelines, customer relationships, and employee retention.

The Bottom Line
Professional services team alignment is ultimately about creating the conditions for coordinated and sustainable execution. ERP software companies should ensure that strategic priorities are clear, success metrics are aligned, roles and decision rights are explicit, cross-functional trust is strong, and accountability is mutual. When those elements reinforce each other, professional services teams can spend less energy navigating internal friction and fighting fires while devoting more energy to profitably adding measurable customer value.

Ready to align your team for higher performance? Download Organizational Alignment for Leaders: Proven Ways to Drive Higher Performance to learn how to align teams, accelerate execution, and drive better business results.

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a trusted performance consulting and training firm that helps high-growth technology, services, and life sciences companies turn strategy into measurable results. We partner with executive teams to build competitive advantage by aligning culture and talent with strategy — so individuals, teams, and organizations perform at their peak. Learn more about how organizational alignment drives performance.

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.