To shift a services-oriented company to a product mindset, frame productization as a competitive advantage. Repeatable, productized solutions offer greater market differentiation than purely custom builds, leading to more effective competition and new deal wins. This tangible benefit helps secure buy-in from sales and leadership.

SaaS companies scale revenue not by adjusting price points, but by creating distinct packages for different segments. The same core software can be sold for vastly different amounts to enterprise versus mid-market clients by packaging features, services, and support to match their perceived value and needs.

High top-line revenue is a vanity metric if it doesn't translate to profit. By setting a high margin target (e.g., 80%+) and enforcing it through pricing and cost management, you ensure the business is sane and profitable, not just busy.

Instead of treating consulting and product as separate, CNX uses feedback from services projects to inform new features. A requested customization is often built directly into the core Valence product, benefiting all customers and creating a tight feedback loop.

During a transformation from services to product, identify and commercialize the reusable tools that services teams have already built to support clients. Instead of starting from scratch, productizing these existing "mini-products" aligns them with the broader product strategy, saves development time, and leverages proven solutions.

Avoid the trap of building features for a single customer, which grinds products to a halt. When a high-stakes customer makes a specific request, the goal is to reframe and build it in a way that benefits the entire customer base, turning a one-off demand into a strategic win-win.

Many B2B companies begin by customizing software for one client, then stacking new custom projects for subsequent clients. They believe they are building a product, but are actually creating a complex, unscalable monolith that is difficult to maintain and evolve.

Enterprises are comfortable buying services. Sell a service engagement first, powered by your technology on the back end, to get your foot in the door. This builds trust and bypasses procurement hurdles associated with new software. Later, you can transition them to a SaaS product model.

To avoid the customization vs. scalability trap, SaaS companies should build a flexible, standard product that users never outgrow, like Lego or Notion. The only areas for customization should be at the edges: building any data source connector (ingestion) or data destination (egress) a client needs.