Why your B2B company should be using service productisation
Service productisation is a business strategy which helps you meet the needs of your clients and grow your business over time. It is especially important for a business to business (B2B) company.
Productisation of services does not mean selling products. It means selling clearly defined services in a similar way to how you might sell products – your services have the same price, scope and quality every time.
With productisation, your customers will instantly know what they are getting when they see your offer and won’t need to ask lots of questions or hold a series of meetings to define service parameters.
Service productisation can help your business stand out from your competitors. When someone visits multiple websites and finds the one with well-defined productised offers, they know that this is the business which will solve the specific problem they struggle with.
Benefits of service productisation
Service productisation will benefit your B2B business in the following ways:
- Lowers the cost of generating new offers every time you meet a potential new customer
- Raises your sales confidence levels
- Gets rid of indecisive clients who spend time on meetings without the intention to buy
- Maximises the value of repetitive services, which you can sell over and over again
- Increases customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Decreases customer acquisition cost (CAC)
To begin a service productisation business, you need to understand the differences between services and products, and how to effectively transform a service into a product.
| Products | Services |
|---|---|
| Tangible | Intangible |
| Separate from the creator | Include an element of the skills of the service provider |
| Quality can easily be compared | Quality is harder to compare |
| Product value is clear | Value can be much greater than it first appears |
Service as a product is a business model in which a company gives services the characteristics of a product.
If you want to turn a service into a product, you need to transform its service characteristics into product characteristics.
By productising services, you are giving greater value to the customer, by emphasising the hidden value of each service.
It isn’t easy to turn a service into a product and the process presents a number of challenges. But it is worth putting in the time and effort. By streamlining and systemising your operations, the solutions you provide are easy for you and, most importantly, are so beneficial for your clients that they come back to you and become repeat customers.
Productisation of your services will:
- Mean your automated sales funnel will run independently of your involvement
- Create a work environment with focus, clarity and independence
- Bring in new high-quality leads which are really interested in your service
- Allow a business owner/ manager to oversee work instead of doing hands-on work
Productised consulting services
A productised consulting business offers pre-defined consulting services to a target audience, rather than providing a customised solution for every client. The key benefits of working with productised consulting services are:
- Transparency - Specified consulting packages with descriptive service scope and parameters productise consulting services, meaning clients know from the outset what to expect from a business. This way, there can be no question that they are being overcharged or given services they don’t need.
- Trust – Thanks to the transparency offered by a productised business, a company feels it can trust the business and is happy to go back for repeat business.
- Reduced negotiation time – Having a clear productised offer from the start means you spend less time negotiating a contract, freeing up time to be as clear as possible about your best productised offers.
- No endless tweaks – When you create a customised proposal for a client, it can feel like a never-ending cycle of tweaks and adjustments, as you send draft after draft back to them for approval. Productising consulting services doesn’t mean you can’t make improvements. But it means you can make the right improvement for the right price, at the right time and for the right client.
- Streamlined work processes
– With productised offers, it is easy to streamline and even automate your processes to follow defined quality standards.
Productised services mean you spend a lot less time chasing clients. Instead, you will attract clients for whom you can help grow their sales (and they will help you grow your sales too), while you productise the services which will be most valuable to clients.
The key to service productisation is through standardisation of your offer. By adding automation to the standardised features and qualities of your services, you can optimise and scale up your business.
And the good news is, every service industry can be productised.
Every productised service starts with a good idea, but the most important thing is knowing how to productise your service (the expertise and skills you have to offer other businesses) in a way that provides maximum value to your clients.
Once you have done this, you have started a productised service business which can run and grow by itself, making it easier for you to continue to run and grow your business.
How to productise your service
Turning your productised service ideas into practical steps and implementing them isn’t easy. But it is worth investing the time and effort to get it right.
These questions can help you create a framework to do the work:
• What problems are my target audience trying to solve? - Ask current customers or do online research to connect your skills to potential new clients, which you have the skills and expertise to help. And if you’re lacking expertise in some areas, hire new team members to fill the gaps.
• What is the goal of my dream client? – A solution to a problem should always be related to a goal your dream client wants to achieve.
• How to transform their problem into a solution? - Having clear, defined parameters will help turn your expertise into a solution to your client’s problem (and from there to the problems of many similar future clients). Again, recruit new staff members if needed or make sure the task is allocated to the best possible member of your team to ensure you are providing real value to your client.
• Does this solution really work? – To find out if your productised solution really works, you need to test it on at least three clients who are already happy with the service you provide and get their feedback. 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 and effective action for your customer.
• Can I keep solving problems for my clients?
– Solutions won’t stay solutions forever and new problems will arise. A productised service doesn’t mean never making changes to your offer, it just means not making changes for every single client, every single time. Track results from your initial solution and see where you can make changes and improvements over time to grow your productised service business.
Service productisation framework
A service productisation framework helps your business to break the cycle of more clients leading to higher costs and more stress. It prevents the value of what you have to offer getting lost in layers of complexity.
Instead, it helps you to identify and package that value in a way that works for yourself and your clients, without repeating past mistakes.
Running a productised service business adds value for clients and boosts customer lifetime value (CLV) – making you a reliable and trustworthy partner, leading to increased sales.
Examples of three productised offers which will help you productise any service business, regardless of its complexity are:
No-brainer offer
This is a great starting point, an entry level productised offer to get started for your own business and your clients.
A no-brainer offer:
- Shows clients and potential clients what makes your business different from the competition
- Is low risk for yourself and your client
- Pays for itself
- Gets the client’s problem solved quickly and easily
- Establishes trust, thanks to the result you have achieved
Solution productised offer
The no-brainer offer does the initial legwork, then you can move on to the solution productised offer.
This is where you implement the key solution, which solves the client’s main problem, related to the high-complexity processes requested by the client. The solution productised offer adds new value with clear features and processes, which follow on from the early results you achieved with the no-brainer offer.
Maximisation offer
If a client has bought a working productised solution from you, this can become a maximised offer by implementing a KPI monitoring system and giving suggestions for improvements, based on the tracked results.
Using this three-offer system, your business can:
- Build a repeatable process
- Add value for your clients month by month
- Develop long-term client relationships
- Reuse the same process for future clients, reducing your own costs over time
It’s not easy to get started with running a productised service business, and it may initially involve some thinking outside the box. But, once you have it up and running, it will really make a difference to the bottom line of your B2B business, as well as making processes smoother, clearer and more effective.
Once you have your productised offers ready, running a productised service business can be done almost on autopilot. The key things to remember are:
- Define your client’s problems and identify their goals.
- Create a solution to their problem (which should ideally be a problem for other businesses, so you can sell your solution to more potential clients).
- Validate your offer by finding three to five clients who can check that your solution lives up to the quality standards required of their business.
