John (00:03): That’s right. It’s just me. I got a topic I want to talk about. This is a topic that maybe I haven’t talked so directly about, but in a lot of ways it’s been a big part of my work. It’s something that I’ve talked about for years, but I want to hit it head on today. And that’s if you are a service provider. I want to talk about the idea of productizing your service. So what do I mean by that? What I mean is creating service offerings that you can describe, explain price deliver almost as though they were a product I have for years delivered something we call Strategy First, and it is essentially our approach to developing strategy. So it is a service that we offer to business owners and we have dialed that in so thoroughly. Frankly, it was actually the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing of me creating the approach to Duct Tape Marketing was that I was a little frustrated going out and essentially delivering my marketing services in not a one-off fashion, but in a custom fashion almost whatever somebody needed.

(01:15): That’s what we designed a proposal around. That’s what we delivered. That’s how I priced it. And a lot of agencies do that. You can build a nice business doing that. But I was frustrated because I just felt like I was working more and making less as I grew that. So I created this productized approach. I called a marketing system, and we all the way down to exactly what happens when a client signs on to all the way through the way they’re onboarded. Everything we deliver in the final is really packaged up in a way that I can call it a product. That’s why we gave it a brand name. So that’s the idea behind a productized service. Now, I used an example of marketing, frankly. Accounting can have productized services, legal services can be productized, any kind of consulting can and in my view should be productized.

(02:07): There are some, I think some glaring benefits to why you might want to do this. The first one I started talking about is scalability. It is very difficult to scale an offering that is made up every time that is new for every customer. That is, and here’s my favorite word, bespoke. It’s very difficult to scale that because in a lot of ways it takes the enormous experience and let’s call it brainpower of the person who can be that nimble and deliver every single time. Now, there’s probably a place out there in the world for completely customized versions of service delivery, and in fact, we do it in the right circumstances. But for the most part, if you want to scale a service business, you have to create something that is very easy to message, that is very easy to explain. And frankly, when it comes to scale is easy to actually delegate and hire people and to train people how to deliver that package.

(03:13): And that’s much harder to do if essentially everybody’s making it up every single time they go out and work with a new client. So to me, that scalability is probably the leading benefit of doing this. I already mentioned this a little bit, but the sales process gets so much simpler Instead of, okay, what do you need? Okay, we’ll put together a proposal. Okay, we’ll refine their proposal. We’ll make it fit to the budget that you have. When you’re able to walk in and say, here’s what I’m going to do, here’s what you’re going to do. Here are the results we hope to get from this approach. And by the way, here’s what it costs. Shortens the sales cycle, which to me is a great thing. You get a yes or a no, but it also makes it very easy for you to explain exactly what somebody’s getting.

(04:01): I mean, that’s one of the most valuable things you can have in a sailing situation is something that’s very simple to explain. Somebody can get it. They can see on one sheet of paper, here’s what we’re going to do. It also will lead to much higher profit margins. And one of the reasons for that is that when you’re constantly having to figure out how to serve a client, have to write proposals, how to create whatever the deliverable calls for based on the scope of their proposal, there’s a lot of learning that goes into that. And if you can create a repeatable process, you will get better at delivering value because you’ve done it before. You will get faster at delivering value because you’ve done it many times now. And consequently, those two things alone will lead to much higher profitability. But the final piece that I think a lot of people underestimate is when you’ve got something that you can actually show somebody, here’s a proven process to get you results, it is very simple to explain to them exactly what they’re going to get.

(05:15): You can also charge a premium. So you’ve got really that profitability working two ways for you. You can generally charge more for a name branded service offering that you can now deliver very affordably or much quicker, or you can delegate to work to people that are at a much less experienced than you. It just leads to a much more profitable, and here’s the final reason to do it. And frankly, if all those other reasons weren’t enough, the final benefit or reason for doing this is that it’s a better customer experience. I know that everybody, I mean, everybody we talk to, it’s like, no, I want want something that’s tailored just to my needs. Well, on the surface, that sounds really great, but you rather have something that I’ve actually worked on for years and refined and evolved and seeing what works and seeing what doesn’t work.

(06:12): I can deliver. You can deliver much greater value by having a proven process. Now it takes time to prove that, to refine it. I mean, we’ve been doing this for 25 years and it’s evolved every single year for us as well. So to me, the product itself, because we have focused on here’s what you get, here’s what it costs, has gotten much, much better. Now, are there challenges in productizing? Some of what you’ll run up against is just what I mentioned. People want a custom approach. They don’t want cookie cutter. They feel like if it’s not created just for them that there’s something less. And so it really becomes important for you to not only create that productized approach, but be able to communicate very effectively the value, what’s in it for them. I think when people start to realize that by creating a repeatable system, you give people not only the option of getting a better end service, but you also get far better at delivering it.

(07:18): There’s just so much more value in it for them. So I think that the messaging really has to be about that is a lot of times people focus on, well, we can deliver this better, or we just get, we’ve got this down so that we have a very fulfillment engine that is very productized. It’s very systemized. But the key of course, is helping that buyer, that customer, that client understand why that is so much more valuable to them. So how do you get started doing something like this? Because one of the challenges I think a lot of people have in productizing, if you will, is that they’re serving such a diverse market. It’s very hard to actually create one or two or three things, packages, products, if you will, for all of the services that they might be able to offer. So it does help if you can narrow your focus first off.

(08:10): So I’m not necessarily saying a niche, maybe it is for you, but at the very least, who are the top 20% of your customers? What do they need today? What are the problems that you’re solving for them? Could you actually create or think in terms of creating a package just for them? You’ve got to standardize the offering. It’s not enough to just say, oh, this is this and it costs this. You’ve got to work on even the promotional materials need to standardize. Here’s what you get. Here are the benefits of this. Here’s why this approach works. So just even creating marketing materials for it, you have to standardize, but then you have to start writing SOPs. You have to actually map out, whether you call it a fulfillment engine or whatever you call it, you have to map out when this happens, then this happens.

(09:00): So at the global level, you have to at least have the little boxes and arrows that point to that. But then each one of those boxes, particularly critical steps, you need to maybe create an entire training process or SOP around. And I know that this can sound like, well, it is time consuming and it sounds like it because it’s, but ultimately, if you spend several weeks even creating this repeatable system that then can serve you for years and that you can delegate and you can scale your business and you can be more profitable, probably the best couple of weeks that you’ve ever spent in terms of working on your business after you productize it, then it’s field testing. I mean, you could sit in a lab all day long and create what you think is the most brilliant approach to delivering your services in a productized manner.

(09:51): Just go out there and start doing it. Start telling people, maybe give ’em option A, B, and C, but this is what I’m going to do. This is what you’re going to do. Here are the results we hope to get, and here’s what it costs. Do you want it or not? And start fulfilling it. You’re not going to refine this thing until you’ve done it dozens of times. And that just takes practice. It takes experimenting, it takes trial and error. It takes listening to the feedback that you get from your customers. It takes really evaluating, are you getting them the result? Are you getting them a better result than they could have gotten somewhere else? So how do you market this productized service? Well, if you think about it, it is the same as marketing a product. In a lot of ways. People have to understand what it is.

(10:35): They have to understand what’s in it for them. It has to address a problem that they’re trying to solve. I mean, those are all things that really any good marketing does. But I think it’s probably important for you if you’re going to productize. It’s very important for you to, I think it’s very helpful if you give things a name, give it a brand, create collateral around it that shows somebody exactly what they are going to get, and then focus a great deal of your marketing. It’s the same for any professional services on trust building, on explaining not just the components, not just selling the components. In fact, in some ways, the productized approach doesn’t really even become an issue until somebody starts saying, how will this work for me? And then you’re able to give them the very specific way it could work for them.

(11:21): But all of your marketing education, even though you have a productized approach, is going to be around educating on the problems that this productized approach solves. I always make the joke that I sell a marketing strategy. Nobody ever wakes up and says, I’m going to go buy some marketing strategy today. But they do wake up and wonder why they’re competing on price. They do wake up and wonder why they can’t fill their pipeline. They do wake up and wonder why their competitors are always ranking ahead of them in search engines. And to a large degree, those are all problems that an effective marketing strategy can solve. So even though we’re productizing the service offerings as a way to scale, as a way to be more profitable, as a way to more easily help people understand the value they’re getting, we still have to build trust.

(12:11): We still have to create a customer journey that turns us into the trusted advisor and the productized approach happens just to be a delivery mechanism for how we get them, the results and how we communicate the results, and frankly, how we differentiate. So many people are in the marketing world, I’m sure in your whatever service world that you are in, so many people are just selling the idea of the week, are selling, the tactic of the week are going to clients and saying, what do you need? Sure, we can do that. And so this proven process driven way to deliver value in a way that’s very easy to understand is also a great different in a world of service offerings. Alright, that’s it for today. Always love to hear your comments and feedback. And if you’re on one of those services like iTunes or Spotify, make sure that you give us a review, a glowing review, of course. But we hope you like the show and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.