 “Product-izing” isn’t a new concept. But it has regained popularity and momentum recently, for good reason. It can be a nice business-builder if you toil in the professional-services space.
But what is it? And what’s this “it can” caveat? Don’t worry. We’ll dive into all the details for you in this article, replete with do’s, don’ts, and some recent client examples. Why are services so hard to sell? A good chunk of our clientele here at Copel Communications consists of consultancies and similar professional-services firms. A lot of them are in high tech, or are at least high-tech-enabled. They’re all selling services. So are you. That’s why you’re reading this. You, like them, want to grow more business. Here’s the thing: Product-izing any of your offerings doesn’t really change what you do. It’s not disrupting your business model. It’s mostly a marketing ploy. You’ll still be selling the services you want to sell; you simply want to increase your odds of selling more of them. So. As you likely guessed by now, “product-izing” a service of yours just means dressing it up to look like a product, in the eyes of the target audience. Which begs a couple questions:
Let’s answer the second question first. Services, by their nature, are conceptual. You’re going to be doing something for your client, to help them get from A to B. Which means they need help along that journey. You’re good at finding, and eliminating, the various sticking points; that’s your expertise. But wrapping your head around all of this, as a prospect, when you’re simply Googling or seeing an online banner ad or checking out a web page, is hard. Services are hard. Products, on the other hand, are simple. So if you can pitch your service as a product—and here’s the key: as an instantly familiar product—you can attract that prospect, and convert the sale, that much quicker and easier. Think of it this way. What if you cut your finger? What would you need? You’d need, after washing the wound, to somehow figure out a way to keep it closed and protected against the elements so it could heal safely and cleanly, in a way that’s convenient, cost-effective, and requires minimal training and maintenance. What a mouthful. What if we just said, “Band-Aid”? Aha. A product. Which actually performs all these service-like things. You get it instantly. So this answers the “Why.” It’s also a great segue into the “How.” To serve or not to serve First off, some guidelines. You can’t, you shouldn’t, product-ize all of your service offerings. You need to be selective. This is easy. You want to productize relatively inexpensive, self-contained, entry-level service offerings. You want to look through your offerings for easy “bundles” that lend themselves to, um, “productization.” “Isn’t this,” you might ask, “the same thing as a ‘bundled service’?” Yup. Pretty much. You’re just paying more attention to the packaging and perception. And remember “entry-level.” You’re not doing this whole exercise to sell products to your existing clients. This is a foot-in-the-door offering to new prospects. So let’s say you’ve scoped out a common set of services that could qualify as a “product.” Now it’s time to do a little work. Product development Remember our “it can” caveat upfront? Here’s where we get into it. To work successfully, product-izing takes creativity and effort:
The name game This is one that, surprisingly, surprises our clients (albeit pleasantly) when we mention it to them. Often, they’re so wrapped up in the creation of the “product” that they forget that the whole purpose of this is to make an existing service more “sell-able.” What if, for example, you had some kind of digital service offering that quickly protected against bad actors with minimal cost and effort? Sure, you could call it “The Advanced Automated Firewall Remediation Protection Package.” But what if you called it an “IT Band-Aid”? That’s not the greatest example, because 1) a Band-Aid has a less-than-stellar connotation as a makeshift fix (“That’s just a Band-Aid!”), 2) “IT Band-Aid” doesn’t sound like a product, and 3) "Band-Aid" is someone else's protected trademark. But you still get the idea. Working with our clients, we’ve come up with some cool names for some cool product-ized offerings which, for confidentiality’s sake, we can’t reveal here. But they’re similar to “Band-Aid” in their underpinnings, in that they leverage the immediate perception of something else that’s popular and instantly understood to be valuable, and adapt it for that client’s specific situation and product-ized offering. Again, we can’t get into specifics, but consider this broad-strokes analogy: For one of our clients, we helped them develop a product-ized offering that was, let’s say, similar to Coca-Cola. This offering turned out to be a huge hit. So did we rest on our laurels? Heck no! We saw the potential for “brand expansion.” Seeing how that “Coca-Cola” worked so well, we helped the client come up with… “Diet Coke.” It was its own new product, and had its own campaigns. But it was similar enough to the first one (“Original Recipe,” LOL!) that the advertising impressions made the first time around also helped to “soften the beachhead” for the spin-off product. Diet Coke led to Cherry Coke. And then to Vanilla Coke. You get it. We weren’t exactly inventing the wheel here, but we sure were greasing the bearings. Get help You’ll see lots of articles, online, about the advantages of product-izing your service offerings. But it’s easier said than done. So get some help with the doing. Contact us. We tackle assignments like this every day, and would love to help you, too.
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