As with many things in life, timing is everything. Productizing your services is no different.
The challenge can come in knowing when it is the best time for you to do this. We’ve constructed a guide which helps you realize when it is that you should be thinking about productizing your services, and which specific tells in your business lifecycle indicate when it’s best to initiate this valuable strategy. If you’ve got a bit more time on your hands, we strongly suggest you take a look at our playbook on How to productize service delivery, the one-stop shop for all things productizing.
Ready to learn more? In this guide, we’ll dig deeper into:
Use the links above to skip ahead to the sections you’re most interested in.
WHAT ARE PRODUCTIZED SERVICES?
Productized services are services that are standardized and sold like products. They have clearly defined parameters and pricing, and outline exactly what a customer will get and how much it will cost. Productized services are marketed and sold as a product and the beauty is that they are “repeatable”, so they can be sold to every customer exactly the same way, so there will be no time spent checking how the service can fit into every business and its unique requirements.
WHY SHOULD YOU PRODUCTIZE YOUR SERVICES?
If you rely on selling services to generate income, you need to be considering productizing these services. Here are some of the reasons why:
Maximize sales
Improve the customer experience
Easier to sell
Scale your business easier
To learn more, read our blog on why you should productize your services here.
KNOWING WHEN TO PRODUCTIZE YOUR SERVICES
Increase profitability
The “holy grail” of objectives for almost any business is ultimately to increase their profitability. It’s what facilitates growth in all forms, be it taking on new staff, developing new products and services, or expanding your number of facilities, all of this is made possible with an increase in profitability and therefore, profits.
The service delivery automation market is expected to grow to $17.04 billion in 2026. This presents a terrific opportunity for services teams to grow and be responsible for more ARR in the next few years.
Productizing your services can help you increase your profitability in various ways:
Predictable income
It’s very important to have an accurate forecast of your future income, as it opens the door for making plans for investment or other costs. Productized services grants you just that.
These services have a predetermined, fixed fee, so it’s much easier to estimate what your income will be. If you stick with custom quoting each project that pops up, you could be charging $2000 for one project and $500 for another depending on their requirements. Although this is still revenue coming in, it is far more volatile, with no assurances that it will be the same month on month.
With a productized service model, you could, for example, charge a flat rate of $1500. Any prospective customer would be quoted this fee, leaving no room for confusion. It is an appealing concept for your customers as well, as they will not have to wait hours or days to hear back from you if you were quoting a bespoke service that is unique to every incoming business.
On-time payments
With a much more simplified payment process with productized services, gone are the days when you had to track hours and invoicing for every project, tedious admin work that is no longer needed. Now, the pricing is clearly defined upfront, as is the project scope.
Businesses can greatly benefit from getting paid on-time. For instance, increasing cash on hand is a big plus for many smaller businesses as it reduces the need for any costly loans. A SaaS company can send customers a request for payment, and receive this payment instantly once it has been authorized by the customer. The responding payment can be linked to the original request, so account reconciliation can be automated. This not only reduces a huge chunk of the manual processing, this improves the customer experience, which can go a long way to reducing churn.
Scale up a business
High demand for your services is a dream come true for any small business, but one of the biggest dangers is not being able to keep up with this growing demand. When the time comes, businesses must be ready for growth, but it can be difficult scaling up a business.
This difficulty can be reduced by productizing your services. With regular services, quoting each project individually will become impossible when your business outgrows your own capacity.
By having a productized service offering, you’re ensuring you have a range of products that can be easily sold and delivered without much need for deviation from the specifications and offerings. This will be a repeatable process that should be able to be followed by any team member, and as a result should not take up lots of valuable time when you’re trying to scale.
Streamline your operations
Selling regular services can often leave many factors open to interpretation, and this can come at a cost. You could offer a service that allows each customer to request something slightly different, leaving you to go away and come up with a unique price, and potentially an awkward slot in your teams’ schedules.
As a result, this could increase the time it takes to get back to prospect with a quote and an implementation date, by which point they may have gone cold. If you’re facing this reality, now is the perfect time to productize.
Productization can streamline your operations, and you can implement standardized processes. There are no longer any time-consuming proposals and less time spent communicating with clients. As a result, this can go a long way to reducing wait times for customers to hear back, often causing frustration and all but ensuring you won’t see them again. Your services will be much easier to automate and manage, so customers can go onto your site, see your productized services on offer and know they’re getting exactly what it says on the tin. Increasing customer satisfaction is a very beneficial byproduct of streamlining your operations.
WHAT NEXT?
Want to understand more about how you can productize your service offerings? Our new playbook, How To Productize Services Delivery, is the free, detailed guide to what you need to do. This playbook covers:
Frameworks to design, build and sell services packages
The metrics that are used to monitor success
Sales enablement toolkits and pricing strategies
Visit our Precursive Products page to discover how we can help you deliver a great productized service to your customers. Alternatively, book a demo today to see it in action for yourself.
