A productised service is a service that’s packaged, priced and delivered just like a product.
Let me share an analogy to help paint the picture. Author Neville Chamberlain compares productised services to a box of cake mix. They share 3 characteristics.
1. Pre-defined scope
Just like a box of cake mix, productised services have set deliverables and outcomes.
With your cake, the deliverables are the ingredients and the outcome is that delicious cake!
With legal services, the deliverables might be a number of meetings or documents drafted, and the outcomes are the resolution of your client’s problem.
The scope is standard and it comes pre-prepared.
Think about Donna Hay’s Molten Chocolate Chunk Brownie baking mix. No doubt you can picture that iconic blue box. When you pick the box up off the supermarket shelf, you’re buying the standardized recipe that Donna wrote and mass-produced in hundreds of thousands of blue Donna Hay baking mix boxes. She’s not going to custom make a recipe just to your liking on her $7 cake mix range. It’s a standard product. Likewise, your productised legal service should come with a pre-defined scope.
2. Fixed price
Just as Donna Hay’s baking mix has a price label on the supermarket shelf, so too does a productised service. When you’ve determined the scope of a service, you know exactly what is involved in delivering it, so you can price it in advance.
Selling a service for a fixed price encourages you to find efficiencies in your work. Your focus becomes how you can deliver a solution effectively, not on how long it takes to deliver it.
3. Systemised delivery
Processes and systems are what really sets a productised service apart from a typical fixed price service. Systems are the engine that drives the productised service.
The process or system that we get from Donna Hay’s baking mix is the recipe.
Have you tried to make a cake without following a recipe?
How did you get on? Did it end in disaster? Did your cake rise? Or did it sink in the middle? Maybe it’s a little bit crunchy around the edges? Does it taste nice, or did you overdo it on the baking soda?
That’s what it’s like when you deliver services without a clear system or process. You might achieve the end result, but chances are you didn’t get there in the most effective way and your client experience and end result may not be the best they could have been.
To recap, a productised service has 3 elements:
- Pre-defined scope
- Fixed price
- A method for systemised delivery
Productised services are about making life easier for our customers – and for us! Make yourself easier to do business with.
If you’re interested in productising your services, find out more about my coaching programs Productise and Profit! or book a discovery call to learn how productised services can transform your business.
