It can be tempting to create a productized service out of your imagination.
You can get excited by imaging the scope, calculating your effective hourly rate, and visualizing people flocking to your new offering.
The problem is, there’s a good chance nobody will buy it if you do it that way. You might even be losing perfectly good prospects who leave before reaching out because they don’t like what they see.
The best way to design a productized service is to validate it before you publish it. You do that by selling it in a custom proposal first.
Custom proposals allow you to write for real people’s actual wants and needs (not the ones you think they have). They’re almost never the same.
Eventually, you’ll spot patterns. You’ll notice—in Venn diagram-like fashion—an overlap among the engagements you successfully sell.
You’ll notice people leaning towards certain price points or ways of engaging. You’ll be able to re-use parts of your proposal and massage the wording vs. rewriting it from scratch with each opportunity.
That’s when it’s time to consider productizing. That’s when you know there’s real market demand for this specific offering.
When it’s time to write up your sales page, you’ll be able to borrow specific language from your proposals for your sales copy, making future prospects feel like you are reading their mind.
So, if you want to sell a productized service, the best way is to keep your service pages a little more general. Attract people into a conversation so you can customize a suitable set of options for them.
When you look back after selling a few, it will be obvious what the market wants.
Then, and only then, will you create a highly compelling productized service that sells instead of repels. And your sales page will write itself.
—k
P.S. I’m doing a workshop next week on how to design highly profitable productized advisory services. It’s everything I’ve learned by selling and delivering over $1 million in (mostly productized) advisory services since 2017. Register here before you forget!
P.P.S. I’ve also extended the Black Friday bonus training, The 10 Ingredients of High-Performing Consulting Websites, to those who purchase before the workshop.
