Service productization is a business strategy that lets you develop specific high-value productized offers for the dream clients that can systematically grow your business over time.
Productization of services does not mean selling products. It means selling clearly defined services with the same price, scope, and quality. Your clients know what they get immediately when they see your offer and don’t need to ask multiple questions or hold expensive meetings to define service parameters.
Service productization is what will clearly distinguish you from competitors.
When someone visits ten different websites and finds the one well-defined productized offers the light bulb goes on:
”A-ha! This is the company that will solve the specific problem I struggle with.”
Service Productization: Definition
Service productization is the process of creating productized offers with expert skills and know-how that show exact deliverables.
In the business of consulting or digital marketing services, it is easy to get lost in client requirements. But if you are clear in what you have to offer, you attract the right clients with high-value sales pitches without chasing every customer and every sale out there.
The problem and the solution ideally match themselves. In the densely populated digital landscape bursting with service solutions businesses and clients with similar but not identical problems, this is the silo you don’t want to miss.
Productized services don’t sell by magic. With the right productization framework based on AI and automation, you can bring skilled people to serve the dream client base.
How to Do Productization of Services
Productized services are services crafted and customized per the requirements of your dream client.
Instead of tweaking all your skilled services for each individual client, you package your best service solutions to sell them repeatedly to your clients.
Service Productization Benefits
How do you benefit from service productization?
- Raises your sales confidence levels as you have pre-packaged productized offers.
- Lowers costs for generating new offers every time you meet a potential new client.
- Weeds out leaches. Leaches are indecisive clients that orbit around your offers and spend time on consultations without the intention to buy.
- Maximizes the value of repetitive services. Repetitive services are your piggybanks. You can sell them over and over again once you define that they provide high value to your clients.
- Decreases CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).
- Increases CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
The begin a service productization business, you need to understand the key differences between services and products, and how to transform the first into the second.
Service as a Product
You have probably heard about SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solutions. Moreover, you are probably using one. The “everything-as-a-service” business model helps providers serve their clients on a non-ownership basis.
But what about SaaP (Service-as-a-Product)? Why is everyone so interested in productized services?
Let’s start with a simple definition:
Service as a product is a business model in which a vendor productizes services by giving services the characteristics of a product.
Products vs. Services
The differences between a service and a product are best identified when dealing with physical products.
However, digital services have several advantages over physical services that make them more likely to be easily transformed into digital products.
Both products and services carry an element of each other, thus creating difficulties for service providers to know what exactly is the object of sale.
We are here to help you clarify those differences and begin selling productized services.
If you want to turn a service into a product, you need to enhance its product characteristics, i.e. to “productize it” or transform its service characteristics into product characteristics.
Productizing services lets you provide greater value to the customer by emphasizing the hidden personalized interactive value of each service.
How to Turn a Service into a Product
Productizing a service will put the following challenges in front of you:
- Streamline and systemize your operations so that the solutions you provide are easy for you and so beneficial for your clients that they come back to work with you.
- Build an automated sales funnel that runs independently of your involvement for only 2-3 hours a day.
- Create a work environment with focus, clarity, and independence.
- Create an HR funnel for skilled talent with automated onboarding and job training.
- Get new high-quality leads every day that are really interested in your service.
- Oversee work instead of doing work.
You can save tens of hours per week by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence for teamwork, workflows, digital marketing, and scaling a self-managing business.
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Productized Consulting Services
Instead of providing a customized solution upon each close contact with a new client, a productized consulting business offers pre-defined consulting services to a target audience. The five benefits of working with productized consulting services are:
- Transparency
- Trust
- No back-and-forth proposals
- Reduced negotiation time
- Streamlined work processes
1. Transparency
One of the top advantages of selling productized consulting services is transparency. Clients often feel they pay unfair prices or that consultants are overcharging them for something they don’t need.
Specified consulting packages with descriptive service scope and parameters productize consulting services, assuring clients that they receive high value.
2. Trust
Productized consulting is a ”walk the talk” business model.
Clients get “what you see is what you get” proof and are drawn to come back to the provider for more value.
Such transparency establishes trust between the provider and the client. It grows both parties’ confidence in the choice they have made because of the mutual satisfaction about solving a problem.
3. No back-and-forth proposals
Let’s say you are selling marketing services. When you create customized solutions, a lot of time goes into communicating with the client to tweak the proposal until it becomes satisfactory.
In the end, both the client and the marketing provider are so tired and overwhelmed that they wonder if they went with the right partner in the first place and whether all that back and forth was worth the trouble.
Productized marketing services let you complete the customization beforehand and get rid of the hamster-wheel feeling that you can never meet current market demands.
Productizing consulting services doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement. But it does mean you can incorporate the right improvement for the right price, the right value, and the right client.
The improvement-price-value-client alignment is the core of a productization strategy that allows businesses to scale simply and profitably.
4. Reduced negotiation time
Time is a strategic component in negotiating, which means you can use it for more successful negotiations. Instead of investing a lot of time to write down exhaustive offers with thousands of perks or talking too much, too many times per day in energy-sapping meetings, you can use that time to be as clear as possible about your best productized consulting offers.
5. Streamlined work processes
As you get to know about your clients and how best to solve their problems, you also get to polish internal processes. Streamlined work processes follow defined quality standards, are easy to adjust to new hires, and can be run automatically (or automated).
How to Productize Your Services
Productized services help you ditch the client chase. You start attracting clients that will help you grow revenues together while you productize the services that help your clients the most.
The way to service productization is through standardization. Add automation to the standardized qualities, features, and parameters, and you get to optimize and scale a productized business in the direction that brings you freedom and independence.
You may have heard about productized consulting business or a productized marketing business. But these are just two common examples. Every service industry can be productized.
Every productized service starts by having a great idea. But just having excellent productized service ideas is not enough. You have to know how to productize your service (your expertise and skills) in a way that provides maximum value to your clients. This is how you build a productized service business that runs and grows by itself. That is the whole idea behind service productization: make things easier for you and maintain the upward growth curve.
So, we come to ask the method-oriented question:
How to Productize Your Service?
Turning great productized service ideas into practical steps and using the right tools to implement them is not easy.
But these five questions can help you create a framework to actually do the work and break the routine that keeps you stuck:
- What problems is my target audience trying to solve?
- What is the goal of my dream client?
- How do transform their problem into a solution?
- How do I know if this solution really works?
- Can I keep solving problems for my clients?
Now, let’s make finding out the answers to these questions more simple.
What problems is my target audience trying to solve?
Ask current clients or do online research to connect your skills to new client potential, that you are best equipped to help. You can solve the lack of expertise by hiring talented team members who can add the skills you need.
What is the goal of my dream client?
A solution to a problem is always linked to a goal your client wants to achieve. Your client may say that they want a new accountant. But what they want is enough time to spend traveling instead of double-checking quarterly financial reports.
How do transform their problem into a solution?
Specified, explicitly-defined parameters will turn your expert service into a solution. If you don’t know how to solve a client’s problem, you have two options: either say goodbye to that client and look for a new one or delegate the specified task to a team member. The added service quality will help you be a step ahead of competitors. Also, you price your productized service business adequately for the value you provide.
How do I know if this solution really works?
Testing eliminates all assumptions. To see if your solution works, all you need to do is find at least three clients who are happy with what you have to offer. Productize your service by adding clear quantifiable features to the service package and see if you get positive value from your initial clients. The initial offer needs to be risk-free for both you and your client, which means it needs to pay for itself and provide fast, immediately applicable action steps for your client.
How can I keep solving problems for my clients?
Problems don’t get solved forever. When you thought you’ve handled one, a new one crops up. Furthermore, as an industry expert, you can make forecasts and foresee solutions before they are needed. By tracking results from the implemented initial solution, you see where you can improve to delight your client, as well as grow your productized service business.
How to Build a Service Productization Framework
A service productization framework allows you to identify and package that value in such a way that both you and your clients finally see what you did wrong in the past.
Tonnes of value that could end up in the hands of clients get lost in service complexity. Solopreneurs, consultants, coaches, marketing service providers, and freelancers are stuck in the constant battle of more clients vs. higher costs and more stress.
Running a productized service business adds progressive value for clients and boosts an essential business metric – CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
3-Component Productization Framework
This productization strategy example includes three productized offers that will help you productize any service business regardless of its complexity. If you are ready to do the work, here is where to begin:
No-Brainer Productized Offer
- Describes what makes your business stand out among the competitors
- Includes low risk for you and your client
- Pays for itself
- Gets their problem solved in record time
- Establishes trust because of the excellent result you achieve
The no-brainer offer is an entry offer that sends a compelling invitation for the main Solution offer.
Solution Productized Offer
Preparation for this main Solution offer has been set with the no-brainer offer. The No-brainer offer paid the client acquisition cost.
The Solution offer is aligned with the No-brainer offer. Furthermore, it adds new value with clear features and processes that you have created after the Entry offer gave results. The Solution offer implements the key solution because it solves the main client’s problem related to the high-complexity processes requested by the client.
Maximization Offer
If a client bought a working solution from you, such as an app or a user interface, you get on top of things by implementing a KPI monitoring system and giving suggestions for improvements based on the tracked results.
With this 3-component productization framework, you can:
- Build a repeatable optimization process
- Get into the control seat
- Add value month by month
- Develop long-term client relationships
- Reuse the same delivery process
Running a productized service business can be done on autopilot as long as you:
1. Define your client’s problems and identify your client’s goals. How? Do this with an online search or by past client assessment
2. Create a solution. How? Add features to transform a problem into a solution
3. Validate your offer. How? Find 3 to 5 clients to check if the solution is up to the quality standards.
This productization framework can help you transform any complex services into three compelling productized offers.
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