Selling a Service can be tough, especially when your audience wants a resourceful product they can use when you’re not there.
That’s why productizing your service is the best way to provide the best solutions to your clients when you’re not there. Yes, with a service business you’ll always trade time for money.
“A productized service takes a typical service, such as web design, and creates an off-the-shelf style solution,” says Greg Elfrink
Some smart consultants, coaches, and freelancers leverage the power of product marketing to effectively scale their business. It helps you drive a sustainable business.
When you productize your service, you move beyond spending hours writing and negotiating proposals with potential clients. You’re able to create fixed-scope, flat-rate service packages.
You can sell these product pages via landing pages, and avoid writing proposals and negotiating contracts.
That being said, let me show you the 3 effective ways to productize your service, grow your brand, increase your income, and grow revenue — without trading time for money.
1. Convert Your 1-on-1 Service Into A Group Offer
It’s common to see coaches and consultants offering one-on-one services. In this case, time isn’t leveraged very well — because the coach can only talk or guide one person at a time.
Instead of following this traditional route, you can productize and scale your service-based business by offering small group coaching where you can bring 5 – 10 clients together to offer your services.
LinkedIn can be a great platform for prospecting and onboarding potential clients — it’s the best social media platform for consultants.
A good example is Brian Harris, a digital marketing coach and founder of Growth Tools and Growth University. He turned his 1-on-1 coaching service into a strategy session. Interested clients can book a ‘Strategy session’, pick a date and time, and join the group class.
This form of productized offer brings a system into your service business. It lets you teach a class of about 5 clients or more simultaneously.
This approach of productizing your service is useful when your service still requires one on one meetings. But instead of talking to 1 person at a given time, you’re talking to 10.
That’s like scaling your business 10X from where you were before.
You may still offer some one-on-one training during your group class, which is fine.
Just find a way to deliver on that — you might dedicate 20 – 30 minutes of one-on-one training where you talk to one person at a time.
Make sure you’re talking about those topics/issues that are custom to that client. There’s no need to repeat everything with each client, let the group coaching handle that.
Even if your productized offer is for businesses, instead of individual clients, you can still deliver value — and even sell physical products from within your landing page, no need for a separate online store. You can use the InFlow Inventory tool to take orders.
2. Record Every Task That You Do
Ask for permission from your clients to record your private one on one coaching classes. You can turn this into a case study.
Whenever you do one-on-one coaching programs, don’t let it go to waste. Record everything, from the preparation to the coaching sessions to the questions & answers session.
John Lee Dumas, a renowned podcaster no longer trades time for money. Instead, he turned his podcast training sessions into a webinar titled “The Podcast Masterclass.”
He teaches his strategies and tricks for succeeding as a podcaster. He sells his flagship Podcast Course at the end of the webinar.
From these recordings, you’re going to find a lot of useful and helpful information to include in your productized service offer.
However, if you’re not granted permission to do so, there’s no problem.
Record every service, your answers, and actionable tips that you give to clients, especially for the “how-to” type of things.
It’s as simple as opening a video recording software and talking about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and why it works. This recorded session can be a goldmine — a material you can turn into a product later.
3. Turn Your Repeatable Systems Into Products
Sometimes, the resources you need to productize your service are already available. You have repeatable systems — things you do all the time as a coach or consultant.
It can be profitable and fun if you can assemble them into a product and sell to potential clients and businesses.
Yoast has successfully turned its keyword research service into training. It costs $89. This training course shows clients/businesses on how to do keyword research by themselves.
Keyword research takes a lot of time and digging for the right keywords. But the team at Yoast has saved time and turned their repeatable task into a keyword research training product.
In the same vein, if you’re offering video and photo editing services (another service that requires repeatable tasks), you can productize it by creating a training course that shows clients how to edit their own photos and videos.
Your coaching calls or classes might take hours and cost a premium. Some clients may want to hire you but due to the hourly rate, might back down.
Also, you might learn a new skill in your field, then find a way to profit from it in another field. This is similar to Amazon arbitrage — but you might not be dealing with physical products here.
For example, if you have learned how to create successful sites in the real estate niche, you can bring the same ideas over to your digital marketing blog, and sell that service as a packaged product. (eBook, online course, etc.)
Content will drive the sales of your productized product. Content is more than a tool that provides helpful information to the clients, it’s an inbound strategy and should be viewed as a business asset — according to research by the Content Marketing Institute.
When you productize your repeatable systems, it means that clients can get your premium services at a much cheaper rate, and be able to do it by themselves.
When a coach or consultant receives a call for this time-consuming class, they can simply point the client to the product and say “Well, here’s the how-to, it’s value-packed… It’s cheaper!”
It’s important to embrace content marketing at this point. Because it’s one effective way to prove the value of your productized service, build trust, and drive consistent sales.
Start by offering a lead magnet and capture email addresses of your potential customers to have a consistent stream of relevant and valuable leads. This could be as simple as an eBook or free course. Just make sure to offer something that your audience really wants.
MindValley for example, offers Jim Kwik’s 15-Minute Speed Reading lesson instead of 1-on-1 training. At the end of the free lesson, the Speed Reading Masterclass is introduced, a premium course “How To Read Faster & Learn Better.” Feel free to take a look at the video landing page to get some inspiration:
3 Examples of Profitable Productized Offers
Whether you’re a coach or consultant, or you offer services, there’s always a viable way to turn your services into a product.
Let’s see some example of profitable productized services:
1) PSD 2 HTML
PSD 2 HTML is a web development services company. The company runs a file conversion website. It takes your Photoshop design, codes it in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and then quickly converts the design into WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal.
So how did PSD 2 HTML productize its service?
When you visit the interactive pricing page, you’re prompted to define your needs, and then a quote is generated, and a timeline is given.
Once you start a project and submit an order, a team member reviews it and replies if there are questions or out-of-scope requests.
PSD 2 HTML has also ‘productized’ other related services they offer, such as Bootstrap-based projects, Retina-ready designs, Javascripts, and Responsive layout designs.
It’s all about scaling your service business and offering even better products to your clients. When you have an on-demand productized offer, you could even create a physical product that will be shipped to your clients.
It could be a training kit, a physical add-on or even a stand-alone product. For example, one of my favorite brands GILI Sports grew its business from teaching people how to have the best adventures on a Paddle board into a giant Paddle board eCommerce store.
2) Ultimate Meal Plans
Ultimate Meal Plans takes a unique approach to productizing its services.
Prior to this time, the founder trades time for money by helping each client with a custom meal plan.
The good news is that it’s no longer business as usual.
The Ultimate Meal Plans has now systemized and productized their service-based business by categorizing their meal plans into: Carnivore, Custom, Healthy, Banting, Paleo, Keto, etc.
Instead of creating an individual meal plan for every client, these sorted categories will serve a segment of its target audience.
The meal planner comes in monthly, quarterly, or yearly plans to serve each client accordingly.
It doesn’t stop there. The Ultimate Meal Plans also has a supportive community where clients can get personal coaching with a health coach.
This community not only serves as a place to get questions answered, but a platform to build relationships with other clients on the same journey of healthy meals.
3) Chalet Engine
Mark Lawrence founded Chalet Engine to help Skiers with their web design and hosting.
Their services are highly focused on the Ski accommodation niche. The service involves a 7-day launch where a professional website is designed and hosted. Updates, backups, and security are provided in real-time.
The company has 3 distinct plans to help the Ski audience kick start your Ski website. Pricing starts at £49 for 1 site, all the way to £99 for multiple sites.
The objective of this productized service is to help Ski enthusiasts do more of what they love, instead of messing around with website design — and other troubles.
Chalet Engine also integrates seamlessly with some of the most popular marketing platforms and software such as MailChimp, HelpScout, Stripe, Zapier, Twilio, and so on.
Productize Your Service (The Best Structures/Options)
Having discussed some examples of productized services, let’s dive into the structures and how consultants can charge for their product offers.
1) One-Time
One-time productized offers are easier to create. You deliver the service one-time to your client and get paid once.
A favorite example of a one-time productized service is Oddo Design. They perform an audit for businesses and charge the client once.
For one-off productized offers, you can onboard new clients through live or automated webinars, create fun quizzes and leverage quiz marketing strategies to capture users’ email addresses, or use predictive dialer tools to engage potential clients.
2) Foot-In-The-Door
A service business might choose to charge for its productized offer differently.
In this case, freelancers and marketing agencies can create custom services or premium products, drive leads to a high-converting landing page, and sell these services at premium prices.
For example, the Digital Photography School created a bite-sized version of its photography service as eBooks and sells to photographers.
Aside from eBooks, other information products that work include video courses, eBooks, cheat sheets, site audits, or how-to guides — instead of signing up for a live class.
3) Recurring
If you’re a coach, a fitness trainer, or Instagram growth agency (such as Appfluence or 99Robots), this is the most exciting way to get paid for your product offers.
You provide services to clients every month, quarterly, or yearly, and get recurring payments.
WP Fixit is a good example. It offers WordPress fully managed services, with monthly software updates, personalized agent connection, unlimited website support, daily backups, etc.
It costs $291.00 (paid every 3 months)
Recordings, coaching, group sessions, workshops, retainers — all of these services can be driven by recurring productized offers. The success of every recurring productized offer is delivering ongoing value.
Conclusion
There you have it, the ‘how-to guide’ on how to productize your service, free up time, and make more money.
Whether you’re a consultant, a coach, or a freelancer, there’s no limit to what you can do with your services. You can increase the perceived value of your ‘service’ by packaging it as a product.
Your clients will love it because they will become less dependent on you and more reliant on your brand and product. What a great way to scale your service business and 3X your revenue?
About the author: Burkhard Berger is the founder of awesomex™. You can follow him on his journey from 0 to 100,000 monthly visitors on www.awesomex.com. His articles include some of the best growth hacking strategies and digital scaling tactics that he has learned from his own successes and failures.
