How To Productize Your Service Offerings

If your business offers a service you may have noticed a problem. While offering a service is a great way to start, it’s not exactly the most scalable offering. If you (or your employees) aren’t physically available to do the work, then you don’t get paid.

One concept that allows service-based businesses to scale and create some more passive revenue streams is that of “productizing” your service offerings. In other words, you create a product or service-on-autopilot and use systems to deliver it to customers. Step one, of course, is knowing how to productize your service.

Brian Casel’s DIY Design Templates

Pat Flynn recently published a podcast about this very topic with designer Brian Casel. One of the examples mentioned in the podcast is how Brian Casel created DIY design templates people could purchase and install themselves with little effort. This allowed him to scale his services, create a product and create a passive form of income where customers would get the same result as if they’d hired a designer.

Kudu

Another great example, and one that shows us how to productize consulting, is Kudu. Kudu is a product you pay for on a monthly basis. This product matches you with an AdWords expert who creates a marketing plan and everything is managed for you. The software also sends automatic reports so you know exactly what’s going on and exactly what you’re paying for. It’s essentially a product based off of a service.

Another example is when experts re-purpose content and sell it as a product. For instance, I’ve consulted people on how to get more online press for their businesses. I’m in the process of creating a workshop people can join live. Once the workshop has been recorded it will be available for purchase as a digital product.

The question then becomes, how do I productize the services in my business? The question you should answer first is whether or not productizing your service works for you. After you’ve figured that out, follow some of the steps below to learn how to productize your service.

1. See yourself as an advisor

One of the pivotal parts of how to productize your service is to make a major mental shift. When you’re a service provider chances are you are the product. People hire you because they want to work with you.

However once you know how to productize your service it’s almost as if you take a step back and take yourself out of the equation. For example, in my business we’re going to have two digital products that address the needs of my market.

Both these products address two specific issues my market keeps asking me about, and both products are made by me and both products offer similar value if you were to hire me for long-term coaching, but neither product requires that I be present for the customer to get value.

So when a prospect comes to me and says “Can you coach on how to write and launch an Amazon bestselling book?” I can say “Well I have this great on-demand class that I filmed live. It will teach you x, y and z.”

So instead of selling myself as a service and tying up my time, I’m selling a product that will yield similar results. (I say similar because no product can truly replicate your brain.) I have moved from selling myself to being a third-party advisor who recommends a product.

2. What parts of your business can be productized?

The next step is to see which parts of your business can be productized. In the case of my Self-Publishing class, I knew that was something I could easily create into a product and recommend to all the people who ask me questions about self-publishing on Amazon.

The same can be said of the on-demand workshop I’m creating where I teach people how to land and leverage media placements for their business. This was a question I was getting all the time, and it’s something that can be turned into a digital product.

Now, here’s what I can’t productize. I cannot productize the articles I create for editors and clients. I can scale them by hiring sub-contractors, but I can’t productize my writing. Or, at the very least, I haven’t figured out a way to do so.

Take a look at your business to see the specific places where and how to productize your service. Are you seeing any patterns with clients that can be addressed with a product? Are there certain aspects of your business that don’t necessarily require that you be there live to deliver?

3. What systems are you going to use to productize?

A very important aspect of productizing your business is delivery. For example, in the case of my on-demand classes I need to make sure the systems we use can automatically deliver the digital product as soon as someone purchases. Systems are also something to think about when actually creating the product. For example, if I plan on turning a live webinar into a product, then I need to make sure whatever software I use allows me to do so.

For example, WebinarJam allows me to sell the recording of my webinars on their platform without me having to host recordings in other places. They also make sure it gets delivered.

Final thoughts on how to productize your service

Productizing your business is an excellent way to start scaling and putting more offerings out into the world.

It’s something to consider as your business begins to grow, and with so many online tools available to help you create and deliver these products, you can soon have an entire shelf of products you can recommend to potential customers.