Selling digital services: if you only talk about value at the proposal stage, you are too late
In the Vertriebszeitung of 28 September 2026, Alexander Wolter (Mercuri International) advises machine builders to sell digital services in the requirements phase — before the specification is written. Simple monitoring can be retrofitted, deeper intervention in machine control cannot; and customers usually lack anyone with budget responsibility for efficiency gains. An experience-based piece without study figures.
What happened
Alexander Wolter, partner at Mercuri International, explains in a Vertriebszeitung article of 28 September 2026 why machine and plant builders sell their digital services too late. His thesis: many treat remote monitoring, optimisation and connectivity as an add-on offered once the machine is already installed. Pure monitoring can indeed be retrofitted; anything that intervenes more deeply in machine control, however, has to be in the specification. On top of that comes a budget problem: at the customer, often nobody feels responsible for efficiency gains from machine data, because purchasing, production and maintenance track different KPIs. Wolter recommends selling monitoring offers and deeper services with separate playbooks. The article cites no study figures; it is an experience-based statement from consulting.
Who is affected
Sales managers and key account managers who sell an ongoing service alongside a product — in mechanical engineering, but equally in software, POS systems or payments, where the device is only the entry point into a service contract.
Analysis
I know the problem on a small scale from the terminal business. If you first put a device on the merchant's counter and only then want to talk about till integration, payout rhythm or online payments, you are almost always too late. The decision has been made, and everything else sounds like a surcharge. Wolter's point that the value of a service is decided in the specification and not in the proposal therefore applies far beyond mechanical engineering.
The stronger part of the article is the budget question. A benefit for which nobody at the customer has a budget gets ground down in the buying centre, however well it has been calculated. That fits what we noted on system selling in the buying centre: if you cannot assign the benefit to a person with a budget, you are selling into the void. Splitting into two playbooks is consistent — a monitoring subscription and a deep integration project have different decision-makers, different cycles and different objections.
What to do now
- In discovery, ask explicitly who at the customer is responsible for the KPI the service improves — and whether that person has a budget.
- Split your own offer into retrofittable and non-retrofittable services and build separate conversation guides for each.
- If the customer is already writing their requirements without you: treat that as a warning sign in the pipeline review, not as a normal course of events.