One of the most overlooked challenges for a business that offers both products and services is getting them to work together in a meaningful way.
In an ideal world, your services help clients adopt your products more effectively, and your products make your services smarter, faster and more impactful. Think Workday, SAP or Qualtrics — companies whose services naturally deepen product adoption.
That’s the model we’re working toward at ELB Learning. But it took us time to get there.
Initially, many of our service engagements didn’t use our own tools. Old habits, client expectations and contracting models made it easy to fall back on what we’d always done. Often, it meant that we were reinforcing another company’s technology rather than our own.
Looking back, it was a missed opportunity. That kind of disconnect slows growth. It also builds someone else’s pipeline instead of your own. By using another company’s tools, you’re unintentionally helping them generate leads, increase product exposure and drive future sales, rather than doing that for your own products.
Over the past few years, we’ve made significant changes to address this issue. Here’s how we’ve done it.
How Can Businesses Align Products and Services?
Businesses can align products and services by unifying messaging around outcomes, removing operational barriers like contract conflicts and embedding products into service engagements. This approach drives adoption, strengthens customer value and accelerates growth.
Nail Your Positioning
Before you can align what you sell, you have to align how you talk about it.
ELB has robust learning tech — games, video platforms, virtual reality and immersive simulations — and consultative services. But selling those two sides can feel like entirely different conversations. That makes it hard.
It’s even tougher in any organization where silos exist, whether due to acquisitions (we had seven in two years), different business units or simply teams with competing priorities. People naturally focus on their immediate goals and can lose sight of the bigger picture.
To address this, organizations need to unify their messaging around outcomes, not offerings. For us, that meant repositioning ourselves as a strategic human performance partner focused on improving employee performance and delivering measurable business outcomes, rather than a learning technology company or instructional design vendor. That shift gave our teams a bigger, more cohesive story to rally around.
But if leadership doesn’t consistently communicate and reinforce that positioning, all the effort spent aligning messaging and strategy goes to waste. That’s why I’m constantly on the road meeting with teams and talking to clients sharing the same message over and over. If people can repeat the vision, that’s a huge win.
Remove the Obstacles
Once you’ve got the message, you need to make it possible for your teams to act on this vision.
We saw early on that many of our service teams wanted to use our products as client solutions, but ran into real roadblocks. The biggest one was tied to contracts.
Most consulting services are billed hourly or at a fixed cost, while most products are licensed on a monthly or annual subscription basis. That mix can be tricky for clients trying to make sense of the pricing and for our internal teams who aren’t sure how to package everything together.
Clients often approach a service contract with a “one-and-done” mindset. When you introduce recurring SaaS pricing into that conversation, their expectations change. Say you sell a fixed-fee project and include a product like our learning games. If the client doesn’t renew the license in year two, the game stops working. Then what?
It wasn’t that our teams didn’t believe in our tools. They just didn’t know how to bundle them.
My message was simple: We own the products. We can figure it out. So, we pushed through the mental block. We worked with our legal team to revise how we handle product access in service contracts.
Our biggest blockers were contracts and mindsets. But based on your specific organization, you may face a whole slew of different problems. Maybe you need a unified CRM because your teams were formed through a merger or acquisition or a universal login for all your tech so that nothing feels siloed. Maybe your solution will center on shared incentives.
Whatever the barriers may be — legal, operational or cultural — don’t assume they’re permanent. Remove them. That’s one of the most important pieces to driving outcomes.
Drive Value First, Then Growth
To integrate services and products, make sure your value is obvious upfront, even if it means accepting a little short-term pain. You might give away time, revenue or some of your profit margin, but if that helps you prove why people should buy in, it’s worth it.
Consider these options:
Design for mindset, skill set and tool set. If your teams only think in terms of deliverables, your services and products won’t gain traction together. But if they think in terms of shifting behavior and driving outcomes, everything changes.
One way to make that shift is to frame every customer engagement around what the customer wants people to believe (mindset) and what they should be able to do (skill set). Then, support those with the tools that unlock those outcomes and capabilities (tool set). That approach makes it easier to embed purpose into your tech.
Showcase what’s possible. We asked teams to build creative demos using our products, regardless of whether a client had requested it. This helped everyone understand what our tech could do and how it could be used to solve real business problems. It also got us all thinking like product owners.
In some cases, the demos are even incorporated into client interactions, as seeing something in action helps people envision the possibilities for themselves. Research shows that deal conversion rates improve by 3.2 times when you show versus tell.
Include something extra. We launched a concept called a “plus-one” a bonus element in a client engagement that introduces our tech without adding cost. In our case, these have been things like a coaching snippet in a leadership course or a game module inside compliance training. The goal is to wow the client, introduce them to our ecosystem and show them what they can do with our products.
Would some of those clients have been willing to pay for that product? Maybe. But we found that most of them weren’t even aware of it. And if we’re not getting our tools into their hands, they won’t think to consider us when it comes time to buy.
If you want services that sell products and products that power services, you need to design for it, reinforce it and make it an expectation. That could mean tracking how often your internal teams are actually using your products in client work, setting targets across departments or requiring teams to show clear examples of how they’ve embedded the technology into proposals. All these moves stop growing someone else’s pipeline and start accelerating your own.
