Professional Services automation tools vs. specialised solutions

The core dilemma appears to be whether to choose professional services automation (PSA) tools or opt for individual solutions like timesheet tools (e.g. Clockify), CRM (e.g. Hubspot), etc. The question is whether PSA tools will "dominate the world" or if specialised tools will continue to be the go-to choice for organisations.

The benefit of PSA software is that it tries to do everything. The benefit of individual solutions like time keeping, resourcing, HR, and CRM tools is that they're highly specific in what they're trying to achieve and deliver the most value in their domain.

To prove why PSA want to capture the world, we only have to look at recent history. We've seen Salesforce come to market, dominate as a CRM system and if we're honest, failing to dominate as a 'totally everything else' system. We've seen countless examples, including Hubspot, coming to market as a marketing automation tool and trying to become everything else, service hub, CRM, etc. Ultimately it is an inbound marketing tool first, and everything else second.

The reason it never works in the end is if we look in isolation at tools that are good at what they do, Hubspot as a pure marketing automation tool or Salesforce as a pure CRM tool they have understood and become great at a particular market and their culture and capability in entirety is delivering to that place – they become that Category King.

Hubspot is the category king of marketing automation, and their natural evolution is to become better and better at that category and despite, for example, any of those platforms' desire to become a good support tool there will always be a better tool like, say, Zendesk.

Professional services are by far the most complex organisations because they are required to innovate and provide bespoke service, yet in order to do that efficiently they need to standardise the process of bespoke innovation.

When you go to an architect, you're going because you can't buy a drawing for your house off the shelf. If you go to a lawyer, you go for some specific expertise that's specific to you so by nature, Professional Services as an industry is specialised to what they do and highly configured to the end consumer and they perform well so that is a much harder market to get into if you want to do everything as a Professional Services automation tool.

And ultimately, if we look at the history and the challenge we had in front of PSA tools, that is why PSA tools will never take over the world. There will also be other systems that these companies use and quite rightly so because actually, what we're seeing today is that PSA tools, practice management tools etc. all actually have specialisations, so if you look at legal practice management tools that will focus on Matter management and it doesn't really focus on the CRM, it doesn't really focus on the Reporting and I think that's the clear argument why, despite the promise that PSA will do everything for you.

The case in point is the SAP model. For 50 years it has done everything, but the problem with the SAP model is that while the customisation can get it to be exactly right, the dexterity of your organisation is limited, where in effect you're being held back by the software which cannot evolve quickly enough to your needs.