You’ve most likely heard the term productized service before and there’s a lot of varying opinions on what productized means, but I really want to dumb it down for you and simplify, so that we can have an ongoing conversation around what it actually means.
To me, a productized service is when you take what you’re doing for your clients and you’re able to not only sell it but also start to deliver it like a product, like a physical product.
Transcript / MP3
three years, my agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today since then have transformed that agency into a hyper profitable training and consulting business. While everyone is out there and talking about scale, like it’s some sort of destination, we’ll be asking the real question, how do you transform your business into a more scalable model using the knowledge, skills and expertise that you already have? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me in, follow along as I learn, apply and share the strategies I’m using to build my multimillion dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to scale.
All right guys. So, uh, if you’re in services,
probably you’ve heard the term productized service before and there’s a lot of varying opinions on what productized means, but I really want to dumb it down for you and simplify a so that we can have an ongoing conversation around what it actually means. Right? And so to me, productized a productized service is when you take what you’re doing for your clients and you’re able to not only sell it but also start to deliver it like a product, like a physical product. So if you go to the grocery store and you’re walking down the aisle and you grab a cereal box right on the front of the box, it shows you like what the outcome of that, that product is going to be like, hey, we’re going to help you achieve x, Y, Z. Right? Like the outcome, the result on the back there is a description of, you know, and some, some testimonials and maybe some case studies write about, hey, like here’s the benefits and what comes along with it.
And other people that are enjoying this product on the right side is, you know, all of the nutritional thing is like the ingredients, how it works, the logistics, blah, blah, blah. And on the opposite side, it’s a little bit more about, about you, the creator of the product, et Cetera, right? Like you want to start to think about how do I sell my services? Like a product that has a specific outcome. So I’m a productized service. Let’s jump onto the IPAD. For those watching on video, the productized to me, there is a fixed price, a fixed price. What does that mean? Fixed price means that, um, no more back and forth and sending customized proposals that really, you know, elongated sales cycles, right? Hey, here’s what we sell. Here’s the, here’s the price, right? So a fixed outcome, okay, a fixed deliverable.
Now this one’s going to rock some of your worlds for people that are doing custom services, but if fixed deliverable, like this is what the end result looks like, you get these things, oh, you don’t want those things while you’re not a good fit, then right? Saying yes or no to the right and wrong clients is going to become way easier when you can basically say, hey, here’s the outcome. Like, and this is who is for fixed price, fixed outcome, fixed deliverable, you know, which literally means fixed scope and in many cases a fixed timeline. Like once you start delivering the same thing over and over and over again, you should have an idea as to how long it takes to deliver that thing, right? So all of these elements are what make up a productized service, right? We can now go to market and we can sell a specific outcome.
We can market a specific outcome to someone that has the problem that that outcome, uh, and these deliverables will help solve, right? And then it helps serve, right? Um, we’ll know that how many clients we can support at any given time because we know what the scope looks like. We know how long it takes to deliver it and what actually needs to be delivered, right? So on the front end, we actually start to be able to shorten our sales cycles, get super clear on who we serve. And what, why they would want to join, which makes our marketing and sales process way more effective. So when you productize your service, you’re going to see benefits on the front end of your business. But then on a back end of your business, what ends up happening is you really start to look at, you know, the client comes in, they have a problem and over here they want the solution and you’re going to have a clear path, right?
And each of these steps is like you’re moving your client through a process, a predictable and profitable process to get them to the result, right? It’s almost like they come in and you give them the new box, you know the, the box and the box comes down here and this is where the solution, it’s like a conveyor belt, right? Think of the delivery system as a conveyor belt that we’re moving our clients on down the process to get them to the actual, you know, the actual solution, right? Like, that’s what we’re talking about here when we’re talking about productizing the delivery is how do you make each step of the delivery process, whether it has done for you or done with you, um, or even more leveraged like an online program. Like what are the things that need to be done each and every step of the way.
How do I move a client through that process effectively? And so what I wanted to talk about today is kind of the, uh, like how, how you can start thinking about the transition, um, of doing this depending upon where you’re at on the spectrum. So, you know, right now, and you might be things very custom and we want to get to, you know, more productized, right? So I want to get some more productized. So once stop along this train on really kind of where many of you are at right now. A stage one, we’ll call it stage one, and we’ll drop a different color here, a stage one of this journey. So for those of you who are listening on, uh, you know, just audio, like, just look at a timeline right from left to right, the first, the first point at the way left at the timeline is where you’re doing things done for you.
It’s custom and likely are working with clients one on one, right? And that’s, that’s super fine right now if that’s where you’re at. But if you want to start growing, here’s some things like the evolution as you start, as you start taking the services that you have and um, and offer your clients and you start packaging them into the fixed outcome, the sticks scope, six deliverables, etc. Um, you’re going to start probably getting to a point where you still do done for you, but it’s uh, it’s productized and still one on one. So here’s an example. When we were in our agency, um, and when we got started, we basically were in few, we were in infusion soft agency, which is a small business marketing automation tool. Now they call themselves keep and we were behind the scenes of a lot of the top online influencers, helping them build out sales funnels, marketing automation, Webinar funnels, um, all of that stuff to help them sell more of their programs, products and services and also deliver those things more effectively.
So when they came in, we had a handful of clients where it’s like, Hey, what do you need help with when it comes to infusion soft? Like we can do whatever and we would do a lot of different things, right? We do webinar funnels, we do, you know, you know, tags and automation cleanup. We do fulfillment systems. We do, you know, uh, billing reminders and you know, any sort of campaign, email follow up nurture sequences, like all of the, we do anything as long as they were in infusion soft. Clients are doing it using infusion soft. So everything was done for you. Everything was custom to that client. And so we worked in a one on one relationship. Then we kind of moved into, okay, well we noticed that there’s like, you know, 80% of our clients are doing, you know, one of these three things.
And so we kind of started to package, you know, done for you, productize or I’ll say packages, um, where we live literally only delivered three things for our clients because those are the things that they really wanted and that we enjoyed. So he is that we really enjoyed, we weren’t just continuing to do the services because over here and when we are in one on one phase, when we are in one on one world over here, um, there was a lot of things that we actually didn’t like doing. And so when we kind of moved into this more productized kind of element, we wanted to make sure that hey, like let’s eliminate some of the stuff that we don’t like. Right? So that’s where we started only offering a couple of different things and then we looked at the next evolution of this journey. Let me move this line over here.
This is stage three and stage three. So if you go from done for you custom and one on one two done for you productized are packaged and still one on one, then we start making the move to done with you one on one. Right? Cause if you start delivering the same things over and over again, you’re going to be able to develop resources and tools and things that your client can actually use on their own to move faster versus waiting on you. Right. A lot of times you’re like the reason your business isn’t growing is because it all depends on you and if you structure your your delivery correctly and you have the right clients that are, you know, open to moving faster and working in a one, two or a done with you environment, which believe me, many of them will be, if they can move faster, you go into this done with you in a one to one.
So I’m providing resources, they do some of the work, it comes back to us and our life becomes easier because they can move through this process of our fulfillment on their own in many cases and bring us a certain pieces. So in this case, we provided a bunch of homework assignments that our client would do, they’d bring it back to us and then we could build out one of their funnels and our delivery process became really efficient. Hey, we take them to the strategy, hand them awesome stuff, they do some work, it comes back to us, we deliver it and walk them through it. Right? And we did that in a one one on one capacity. Right? And so the next level is then done with you in a one to many. Right? So what we realized was how we were doing it done with you one to one.
Well while we give the homework to one client, like we could be also giving that homework to three, four, five, 10 clients at the same time, and they could all be coming back to us. Right now, the delivery and fulfillment systems need to change a little bit and be enhanced and innovated, which is essentially what we help our clients do, right? But doing that same thing, but now accepting five or 10 clients, 20 clients at a time became possible, which allowed us to elevate the ceiling that we had on our revenue, uh, and our ability to start growing and hire and bring in more teams to support those new clients coming in. So depending upon where you’re at in this journey, right, whether you’re done for you custom, one-on-one, done, done with you one on one, done, done with you one to many, like now you should be able to see that there’s a transition like, and sometimes look, you have to, you have to actually go through each of these steps to get there, right?
Because if you’re doing a lot of custom work, you might not know yet what can and cannot be packaged and productize. So you need to test some things. So you might have to go from phase one to phase two and do a little bit of that, right? And to refine that, then you still do it one on one before you make the transition. One to many a problem or a mistake I see a lot of, uh, service providers make is they’re doing a lot of things and then they’re going to go jump all the way to the other end where they kind of start packaging up all these things that they’re not 100% sure, um, are actually going to get their client the results. And so they’re kind of skipping that done with you, um, back and forth that are in those really important middle stages that will allow you to refine the delivery too.
A point where you can actually do it one to many. So. MMM. Hopefully that was helpful. Um, this is kind of the path that we made from kind of doing everything custom to now having our own business where we have, you know, online consulting and training programs that are really productized with the fixed outcome. The fixed deliverable, the fixed prices and has helped us grow a whole lot faster, identifies exactly what systems need to be created in our business. So that myself and even other members of the team can start to remove themselves from that area where they might be the bottleneck or where I might be the bottleneck that my friends is how we start to, uh, you know, move towards that I’m scalable, I am leveraged and I’m able to have a business that runs with what runs without me and I can go on vacation without actually having to bring my laptop.
Right? So there is a progression. The mistake is sometimes trying to make that leap all in one fell swoop without going through the necessary work and stages that will make it successful as a one to many very productized offering. So again, depending upon where you’re at in the journey, we can help you move a whole lot faster. If you’d like to hear a little bit more about our, our process, what I’d recommend you do is visit, um, system.ly forward slash apply. You can schedule a call with myself or someone on our team and we can really kind of give an assessment of where you’re at in this journey, trying to productize your service and start delivering the systems around that. And we can see if we can help, right? Well, at least be able to point
you in the right direction, no pressure, really want, just want to see if we can actually help and accelerate you through the progression of, you know, doing everything custom to having an automated and systemized way of, of delivering and selling your products, programs and services. Again, if you’re enjoying these episodes, we’d love a rating or review on iTunes and or a subscription on a youtube. So that is your payments back to us for the value that we’re bringing here to you through the podcast. And we’ll catch you in the next episode.
