Selling a service or solution can be tricky. So many tech businesses get it wrong, because they try to sell the potato, not the bag of potatoes.
Does the phrase sound familiar? You might remember it from a previous blog of mine in which I investigated the differences between products, services and solutions, and why these differences are important for tech companies. The conclusion? Productise your tech service as a product
The concept itself is easy enough to understand… but just like how the concept of installing Internet Explorer and actually doing it are two very different things, productisation can be more difficult than it looks. That’s why I’m writing this blog, to make productising your tech offering as simple as Google Chrome.
Productisation: Bundling Services into Products
Let’s start off with a definition from Investopedia on “What is productisation?”:
“To take a new service, product or product feature - that a company has provided to a single customer or a few customers on a custom basis - and turn it into a standard, fully tested, packaged, supported and marketed product. For example, a person can productize their expertise by putting it into a tangible object by creating a product based on that knowledge.An idea, a process, a prototype or an area of expertise can be productized into marketable and salable products. For example, a marketer can write a "how-to" book for new entrepreneurs that would teach them how to market their business, or a web designer can create a DVD series on how to design web sites.”
In my words, productisation is simply packaging your service or solution so that you can market and then present it to a customer as a product. This helps ease the sales process as it fast tracks the buyer’s journey, because their education of your offering is helped along in terms that they already understand.
Why would tech companies need to do this? Differentiation, that’s why.The modern buyer (or the digital native) wants to buy a product. Their Inbound Marketing buyer’s journey has changed to become a random selection of infinite online options, motivated mainly by trust and their ease of understanding. So, if the majority of tech companies are going to market without this, productising seems like an answer to differentiate yourself from the crowd of competitors.
3 Simple Steps: How to Productise Your Service
1. Identify What Your Offerings Are
Here is the time for critical analysis, not identifying what you’d ideally like to offer the customer. Don’t always think that you have to be offering a solution – sell what you have, not what you want to have.
So, spend some time thinking about your different business offerings. If you’re not sure whether you’re offering a service or a solution, read my last blog on products vs services vs solutions. Only once you know what you’re selling, in its most basic form, can you then think about how best to package it for you customers.
2. Productise Your Business Offering
This is the difference between asking how you can help, and showing how you can help. You need to package or bundle your offering into easy-to-purchase products.
You want to be able to sell your brand along with your offering, which is a key component to keep in mind while packaging your service/solution into a product.Remember that the reason you’re doing this is to directly connect with what your customer is looking for, to easily help them understand what you do and why they need you, and then to quickly and easily purchase your “product”. Sell people what you offer, yes, but package it into a format that your customers want to buy. You can start by looking at these:
- Who needs you?
- Why do they need you?
- What do they want to "buy" from you?
Then productise your services by packaging them into one or several fixed offers (e.g. Cloud Storage Management). A great example of this in practice is VoxGen's packaged services and solutions.
Warning! Productisation often results in promising a relatively fixed outcome at a fixed price. This means that you do need promise at least a ball-park return on investment.
3. Prove Your Offering
People buy tried and tested products. Sure, there’s a market for people who are after experimental market releases… but it’s not often the tech customer, who wants to be assured that their systems will work. Remember the mention of trust earlier – this is where it comes in. If you’re going to build trust with your leads before they’re customers, then make sure your product is backed up by proof like a case study or a testimonial. Give them hard data, provable ROI, and shining examples of where your product has done exactly what it claims to do.
If you’d like to know more about how to prove your trustworthy productised service or solution, then download our free guide below.
