By Cursum 
Productizing your service can be your golden ticket to fast business growth. But scaling your business isn’t the only reason why you should productize your service.
Turning your service into a product is also about gaining control of your business and making things easier for you and your customers.
If you’re not convinced about productizing your service, just read along. In the following we’ll give you four reasons that should change your mind immediately.
Before digging into the reasoning, we’ll first establish what productizing a service actually mean and how you do it.
What does it mean to productize a service?
Productized services are standardized services that are packaged and sold like physical products. To productize your service, you essentially transform your know-how into a more tangible solution. But unlike other products, your productized service doesn’t involve a physical good.
However, you absolutely get the same benefits as you’d get with a product placed on a shelf in a physical shop.
A productized service is more readily available to customers since everything about it is pre-defined. It’ll be well packaged; the price will be obvious as well as content and composition will be clear. But most importantly, your productized service will provide an attractive value proposition that customers can understand right off the bat.
All this support a simplified marketing and sales process. It’ll make your business more sustainable, and you’ll be able to serve customers without much fuss and ambiguity. All in all, converting your service to a product is convenient for both you and your customers.
How to productize your service
Let’s say you own a consulting firm that offers data analysis services, training, and coaching.
You’d like to grow your business, but that requires you to hire and educate new employees. Something that can be highly expensive and definitely isn’t done overnight.
However, productizing your service by going from offline to online business operations is a much quicker and cheaper solution to scaling your consultancy business. All you need is a digital platform such as our online academy solution.
Here’s an example of how you can approach your digital transformation process:
Step 1: Talk to your subject matter experts and help them gather and review all your learning materials.
Step 2: Choose which type of format you’ll use to deliver your productized service. Common formats are digital courses, e-books, or instructor-led videos.
Step 3: Determine the demand for your service and figure out if you should offer a one-time support service or recurring subscriptions.
Step 4: Find an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) to help you develop your digital platform. Psst, Cursum is a certified Microsoft ISV partner.
Step 5: Transform your analog learning materials into digital content and organize it within your digital platform. With Cursum’s academy solution you need no alternative third-party software as you can create all content directly within your private platform.
Step 6: Market and sell your productized service through your preferred channels.
Why scalability isn’t the only reason to productize your service
When productizing a service, the main goal usually isn’t to solely achieve growth. Transforming your service to a product also offers continuity, stability, and uniformity.
Here’s four reasons you should productize your service:
Your service’s value is maximized
According to Jake Jorgovan of Lead Cookie, predictability is the best leverage business owners have when productizing a service:
The biggest benefit of a productized service is that you sell the exact same thing every time. There is no customization, no proposals, and no back and forth. You have a conversation, evaluate if it is a fit, and then they either buy or don’t buy.
Jake Jorgovan of LeadCookie
When you offer a precise, uniform, and repeatable service through an off-the-shelf digital product, you gain more control of your business. And moreover you eliminate the typical brick-and-mortar production and sales process. With greater freedom and certainty, you maximize your time and can focus more on other initiatives that’ll help reinvent your business.
Processes are standardized
Productizing your service requires you to standardize your business processes from top to bottom. This means you must:
- Define your niche
- Identify a particular market segment
- Solve a specific problem
- Develop a well-structured business format
- Package your services into an all-in-one solution
Basically, you want to offer absolute customer convenience. And to do that you need to provide clients with standard service agreements with easy-to-follow instructions and clear disclosure statements. When these guidelines are well articulated, you allow your clients to make informed buying decisions.
Marketing initiatives are optimized
Many entrepreneurs nowadays look at productized services as a mere escape from a per-project revenue cycle. But you should never underestimate how service productization can improve brand awareness and optimize marketing initiatives.
Productizing your service makes it easier for you to convey what value you bring customers.
One noticeable advantage of having a digitized service product is that you can exploit the freemium pricing strategy.
The freemium strategy entails that you provide basic services on a complimentary basis (as a free trial or limited version) while also offering more advanced services or additional features at a premium.
Although the name of this strategy was coined in 2006, the strategy dates back to the 1980s. The strategy is widely used among software applications as well as internet-based businesses and it’s great for lead generation.
The advantage of this strategy lies in the opportunity of acquiring a large set of initial users based on it being costless for them to try out your service. The trick then is to get them hooked on your offering and upgrade to premium, which secures access to upgraded features, such as an expanded course selection or additional customer service.
Many people are willing to try out new products if it doesn’t cost them anything. And oftentimes, you’ll still benefit from your free users even though they’re not explicitly purchasing anything from you. That is because you can collect their user information and data. This allows you to boost your own business numbers to continue to enhance the application.
A tactic especially beneficial for companies just starting out or companies trying to build a following for their product. The freemium strategy brings a large amount of brand awareness without you having to provide much customer support.
This is simply something you cannot do without productizing your service.
Consistency is established
Turning your service into a digital product creates consistency. With a digital product comes automation opportunities that allow you to develop a consistent output. This will not only sustain your momentum, but it’ll also enable you to dedicate more time to developing your product and business.
Take, for example, SpeedKills, a productized service business that provides WordPress hosting services.
For Vic Dorfman, Co-Founder of SpeedKills, productizing their services allowed them to proceed calmly with their growth and improvement:
Crucially, over time, these incremental improvements fueled by a more or less predictable revenue stream, adds tons of value to our customers which makes the product more valuable, attracts more business, reduces churn, etc.
Vic Dorfman, Co-Founder of SpeedKills
Not only did productizing their services help them refine their craft, but it also evened out their revenue, which enabled them to invest in team development.
With consistency often comes effectiveness. You avoid expensive and harmful disruptions and gain greater confidence. And as your team grows in excellence, it’s easier to gain your customers’ trust and respect. As time goes by, consistency no longer serves as an ethos but becomes an inherent part of your company’s brand.
Productize your service with Cursum
As a regular service business, you can become irrelevant in a snap. Processes become outdated and in-person labor can be replaced by artificial intelligence.
Today, digital transformation is everything if you want to stay competitive. Yet, the world is rapidly changing, and, in a few years, digital transformation will in many instances become irrelevant. Non-digital business will slowly phase out as digital technology plays a growing and vital part for businesses in all fields.
So, why not stay one step ahead and start your digital transformation journey today?
If you’re a domain expert, who wants to break away from the unforgiving by-project revenue cycle, we’re here to help you with that. As a proud Microsoft ISV partner, we’ve got the means to build you a powerful online academy that’ll take your expertise to new heights.
No matter if you’re ready to go 100 % digital or just want a small taste of the digital world, our online academy can be your faithful companion. And whether you want to scale your service business or simply redefine your brand, we’ll help you develop a solution tailored to your specific needs.
