Welcome to today’s GSDdaily. Today, we’re going to talk about how to productize services!
This is number 10. It is Friday morning and we’ve been up and at ’em already, which has been fantastic. We have a pretty cool topic we’re going to talk about today, which is productizing services so that you can unlink time from money. And here’s what I mean by that. So time is money. Time equals money. When you are working for somebody else, time equals money.
When I was at Pepsi driving a semi-truck around, I made 12 bucks an hour or 13 bucks an hour, whatever, like a jillion years ago. And in order for you to make more money, you had to spend more time doing whatever it is you were doing working. So that’s a challenge if you want to get ahead, if you want to make money. Especially now, we are seeing people, they’re needing to work from home. Businesses are closed, shops are closed, so time doesn’t even equal money anymore. It should, but anyway.
If you want to break out of that, if you want to start generating revenue for your business and unlinking time from money, breaking that connection, then what you need to do is productize service, productize your coaching, productize your consulting, use digital products in a way to package your information and your knowledge to sell more of something.
What that is going to do is it’s basically going to help you generate more revenue and scale online more quickly. So if you are watching this live stream, go to DoneForYou.com and you can actually ask questions there. So I’m just going to go ahead and paste that link here.
Let’s see, in the next couple of days, we’re going to be rolling out two brand-new Facebook groups. One of them is going to be DFY Funnels and the other one is going to be DFY Traffic. And the idea behind both of those is really just to dive into expert tips and build tips and how-tos and all that other stuff around those two things, around traffic and funnels; because there are so many different ways to pull off each, it really just depends on how you want to go about it.
If you want to ask questions … And there’s the Facebook page for Done For You. So I’m dropping out to all of the channels that we are on now. And we’re loosely basing this on this post. And then I also have a building map that we’re going to go through. So we’re going to go through and talk about how to productize your business based on some of the ways through it.
Just to kick this whole thing off: as a freelancer or as a service-based business, you sell something, obviously. And generally, you might work for $200 an hour or $100 an hour or $50 an hour or $30 an hour or $10 an hour, $15 an hour, whatever. When you’re working, when you were trading time for dollars, there’s always a top-end that you’re going to hit.
When I have coaches or consultants who come in and we’ve even worked with some counselors and some psychologists. And when you’re trading like an hour for $35, there is always going to be a ceiling that you’re going to hit. So even when you say, “Okay, I’m charging 100 bucks an hour,” let’s make the math easy, “charging $100 an hour.” Well, if you have 20 clients, you’re making $2,000 a week. $2,000 a week depends on where you are, but it might be awesome, it might not be, whatever. But at the end of the day, you’re going to give 30% for taxes and then you have to pay the insurance and then you have to pay for your office and then your computer and all the software that you buy and your CRM and all that other stuff.
By the time you get right down to it, is it enough? And if you want to scale past that $2,000 mark, then you’re going to have to take on more clients, which means you have to invest more time. If you take 30 or 40 or 50 clients, who each demand an hour a week, then you’re at the point where you’re overworking yourself. You have no downtime, you’re always thinking about client stuff. And are you actually delivering the best productize service to the people who are paying you than not? So, that’s always the issue. It’s always kind of the thought when it comes to trading time for money.
One of the ways to break out of that is very simply to productize service, to productize your business. And one of the best ways of doing it is to put packages together. One of the ways that we end up helping folks is when we build sales funnels, we will go through and figure out.
- What do we need to do to bring people in?
- What is your inbound marketing strategy?
- How do we need to have them apply?
- What lead magnet and webinar do we need?
- What sales video do we need?
In terms of the offer itself, there’s one of a number of ways that you can break it up. I mean, you can do a monthly retainer and so it’s $1,000 a month or $2,500 a month or you have to prepay for three months, or however, that ends up looking. But you can put together a block of deliverables and a block of things that you’re going to do for a client and then charge accordingly for those.
It might be weekly, one-hour sessions with a coach, and the coach are going to charge you 2,500 bucks. You’re going to charge your clients 2,500 bucks. Or it could be biweekly and it’s $1,000 a month, or it’s biweekly and you charge for six months at a time, so it might be $4,500 because it’s six months times $1,000 and then you give a $1,500 break when somebody pays in full. So there are lots of ways to package and productize service, your coaching, your consulting, whatever. And typically that is sold through a proposal or it’s sold through some sort of personal one-on-one kind of a sales call.
It’s really difficult to sell a productized service through an order form: go here and buy this. We’ve tried many, many times and sometimes you can pull it off, but mostly you can’t. So oftentimes, the sales call is required in your higher-end productize service.
The process itself: so let’s say if you have a prospect who they started with a phone call, discussed the requirements and the scope of the project, and then they figure out what is going to help them the best. And generally, that falls within the framework of your product-based service. So there might be a little bit of this and a little bit of that or a little bit less of this and more of that, but you can think of it as a Netflix membership in a very, very simple scenario.
Some people paying Netflix the 12 bucks a month or the 15 bucks a month. They pay Netflix and they stream movies every night or they rent DVDs. They’re always renting a DVD and throwing it back in the mail. And so Netflix doesn’t make a whole lot of money on that person; people like me, actually.
Netflix doesn’t make a whole lot of money on me, even though we have the four-screen plan and whatever, and we’ve been with them forever, just because of shipping costs, because of bandwidth streaming, because we have a son who watches shit like crazy all the time. So they don’t do really well when it comes to me. But for every one of me, there are a hundred people that pay Netflix and don’t really use it a whole lot. They might use it here and there. They don’t have kids who binge crazy stuff, like whenever.
So your clients are going to be the same way. You’re going to have some clients who use every single ounce of support that you will provide. And then you can also put stipulations in your proposals and contracts to stipulate that stuff. But then you’re going to have a bunch of clients who use what they need and they’re not a chore to handle. So there’s always that to be managed when you’re putting your productize service packages together, too. So it’s just something you have to play with. There are an ebb and flow to it.
By having productize service, you’re able to, A, communicate the value a lot easier. And B, you’re also able to stand above all of the competition who they’re actually putting entire proposals and quotes and all this other stuff out there that is: oh, it’s going to be such and such for this and such for that, and blah, blah, blah, and it’s going to be $100 for every 15-minute increment over and above any email that you send. So depending on the profession you’re in, I mean if it’s not legal, sometimes it just ends up benefiting you working that way.
The other thing that happens when you productize services, is it eliminates uncertainty. So what happens is you end up removing all of the discovery parts of the initial sales phases. You can create webinars and create sales materials that talk to one specific service as opposed to. What you can do is in your sales copy, you can speak to one type of person or one person, one marketing avatar. So it ends up you cut through all the noise that way.
Somebody can look on your website, look something up, watch a sales video, fill out a form. And they already know what you offer because you’ve got your productize service. They oftentimes already know what the price is. The sales call is kind of like glorified order takers. They know what they need, they know what you offer. A lot of times they know what the price is. They just have to get a couple of questions answered and then say yes. So not every project is then customized to their need. You don’t need to quote it and bicker back and forth and negotiate back and forth.
In fact, when you productize service, there’s almost no negotiation. There might be a little bit, kind of breaking up the payments or whatever, but the price is rarely ever discussed. It’s kind of like when you’re selling a house and it’s owner-financing. I haven’t done this, but a lot of our real estate clients have.
They tell me when you’re selling a house that’s owner-financed, you can charge them pretty much whatever you want because you are the one financing it. And the person never asks … because they’re going to end up paying so much less than if they were to go to a bank anyway. So they never ask about the price because it ends up being a much better deal for them anyway.
Now, some of the benefits of this productize service master plan. One of the things that we really, really like about selling your productize service this way is you can package them together inside of products. And we talked about digital products yesterday. And I’m going to show you a building map that I had meant to go through yesterday, but I totally freaking spaced on it.
I was halfway through the live stream and rather than go get it and dig it out and all that other stuff, I was like, “All right, I’m just going to chill with it, and then maybe tomorrow I’ll bring it up,” but anyway. So when it comes to bundling your productize service structure, digital products, coaching programs, recorded videos and membership training, all of that stuff works out so well because we call it assisted learning.
So you can think of colleges now. And even though everybody’s having such a shitty time right now trying to figure out how to close out the school year, and you have all these traditional universities who are trying to get online right now. This membership world and this online digital product world have been around forever. So somebody like me or some of the other internet marketers are like, “Well yeah, all you got to do is you just record some videos and throw it up in Teachable and then boom, done.” We’ve done it like a million times, but whatever.
But in terms of assisted learning, if you want to have a lot of people go through your classes, I mean, if you want … So you can talk one-on-one with 10 people, 12 people, 15 people. It depends on your capacity to being maxed out. And then that capacity to being maxed out is your ceiling for revenue.
Let’s say you’re charging $500 a month to 10 clients, well, you’re only making 5,000 bucks. So like I said: taxes, office, internet, software, boom, boom, whatever; people, VAs, whatever. Then, you’re going to tap out pretty quickly. You want to make more, you have to sign up more clients.
With a product-based or assisted learning model, basically, you can productize your knowledge. You can put it in a video course and then you can offer memberships to that video course. Or you can sell that video courses as a one-time fee, or you can give it away as a bonus for anybody who signs up to do work with you.
Let’s say right now, I’m going to call you a knowledge commerce professional. We were just talking about colleges and stuff, so we’re just talking about people who … Let’s say what you do is you help people record their digital training. So you can put together a little product, a little video product, that will teach somebody how to set up their camera, how to do their mic, how to set up their lights, the software that they need to have in order to record themselves on screen. You can put together, you can automate all of this low tech stuff; not low tech, but it’s actually pretty high tech, but you know what I mean.
You can teach somebody without necessarily having to verbally teach them or go to their house or jump on a Zoom with them or whatever. And they get the benefit of that immediately, and then you can pick up where it’s left off. So once they have the video training up and running, then you can help them put it where it needs to go, whether it’s Teachable or LearnDash or WishList Member or WordPress or whatever.
You can help them upload all that stuff and organize it into classes, then offer it for sale or offer it to their students, whatever, however it ends up looking. So you have that base work. You have that knowledge base that lets you start selling or that lets you start training immediately when somebody says, “Yes, I want to work with you.” So it ends up working out really nice that way.
That’s the assisted learning approach. It also gives you some sanity because you are not having to reiterate the same thing over and over and over and over again. I mean oftentimes, when I have to answer a question more than a couple times, I create a video like this or a lot of times you’ll see these live streams are sometimes more out of a need because I will have answered a question quite a few times. What I’m doing is I’m creating content that I can then put into a blog post and then just literally link: boom, here’s your answer, here’s your answer.
After a while once you have that knowledge base accumulated, then it becomes a lot easier to do coaching and consulting and training and all that other stuff. So in digital, products are infinitely scalable. That’s the other nice piece about it. I mean, especially if it’s a membership site or something self-fulfilled, then all you got to do is drive traffic to the front side of it after you have your sales funnel figured out and then you can go from there.
With that, I’m going to go through this thing called a bit a digital product build map. And I’m going to switch my screen here. For those of you, so if you want this digital product build map … Let’s see. So let me grab this link here. Open link in new tab. All right, here we go. I’m going to throw this in our comment box here.
This is the digital product build map, and this is going to open up directly into the page, so to the PDF, so you don’t need to opt-in for it or anything, partly because I don’t know where the opt-in page is at the moment because, like I said, I just wanted to do this from a training standpoint. All right, so this is good. I’m going to share this screen, I’m going to share the entire screen. Okay, cool. So you should be able to see this in a minute. So I’m going to share this guy. All right, so now you are looking at my screen, and then we’re going to pull this build map up. Okay. All right.
This is the digital product build map. And I don’t know why this keeps coming up, but anyway, you can check it out. So digital product build map. And I’m going to make this full screen. Let’s just make sure. All right, so that’s full screen. There we go. All right, now we should be good. So digital product build map: this thing is quite intricate. What we’re going to do is we’re going to step through the beginning phases of this. I did these just from a simplicity standpoint, just to help work through some of these more complicated processes.
The first thing, we start up here at the top. We start our digital product. So we know we want to start something, we want to build a product that packages our knowledge, whether it’s a membership site or whatever. So what we do is the first step is we brainstorm ideas. And the brainstorming of ideas really starts with what do people come to you for? What questions do you often get answered? What do you do for work? All of that kind of stuff.
The next phase is: is there money in that space? I know that sounds like a simplistic thing, but there are so many spaces, so many niches online where there isn’t money. And literally right now, money is just being spent differently than it was even a month ago. Is your product idea, productize service plan, whatever, is money being spent there right now? The answer might be yes, the answer might be no.
If you have a landscaping company chances, I mean, you might be fine right now, but in a month will you still be? And if not, you should pivot. And that’s actually the next point, which is: is there money? Yes. Okay, cool. Would you spend money? And if there is not money, no, you move onto the next idea and you bounce back to brainstorm ideas.
The next question is: do people care? Some people don’t care. There might be money in it, but people don’t care. Yes, you layout the product. No, you return to start. You head back to the brainstorming ideas session. Now if people care and there’s money, then we kick down here to we mind map the product. And I think on the first presentation, the first live stream, we actually mind-mapped a product. So you can go back to that; it would have been GSD Daily 001.
We actually went through and mind mapped a product real quick. Once we mind map a product … And for all intents and purposes, a mind map really is you start in the center, so you have a topic in the middle and then you go one, two, three, four, five, six. This ends up being mod one, mod two, mod three, module four. And then from here you go one, two, three, four. And then this is lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, and then so on and so forth. So basically, you start in the middle, you start right here.
Do I have a highlighter? I do. So you start right here and then you kick down into module four or module one or whatever. And then you do lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, and then so on and so forth. That’s the idea of mind mapping the product.
Once the product is mind mapped, what format, what modality does this thing need to live in? So is it going to be a video course, which it should be? I mean, right now, most things need to be video courses, just because that’s how we’re consuming information and that’s how people understand. It’s not how people understand, but all in all …
Oops, I just … There we go. Boom. I just put the iPad down and it got all weird. But anymore, products need to be video. They need to include video because the video is how people are learning and how people are understanding things. So video is kind of crucial and quintessential when it comes to putting everything together. Audio is oftentimes a function of video.
What we do is we actually record the video and then we pull out the audio and then we put all that stuff in a membership site, typically. Text, written: you always need text just because there’s a lot of people who just prefer text, and I am one of those people, or you can do live. Live right now. When I first built this, I meant live as in the live event, but not so much anymore. Live events, for all intents and purposes right now, I mean, there’s not a whole lot going on there. I’m just going to switch up the view here.
All right. Okay, so we’re just going to make that one bigger. So live events, not so much anymore, but basically what you want to do is you want to put all these things together. You can do video and then you can do audio, and all that gets put into a membership site with some text content. And then live, you can actually sell live. You can do live as an upsell, or live coaching or group coaching or whatever, so that ends up working out pretty nice.
Then, so once we figure out what format we’re going to build in, then we have to create the content. So that involves recording it. We use either ScreenFlow for videos where you record your screen, or Camtasia if you’re on a PC. So ScreenFlow is a Mac thing, Camtasia is Mac or PC. But if you’re on a Mac, you’re going to want to use ScreenFlow.
Once the content is recorded, you edit it, you save it, then you produce your box shots. There are all kinds of software out there that you can produce like DVD covers and product labels and all kinds of stuff. Produce your box shots. And we want to create the website.
And this is kind of where my team and I come in when we’re talking about a productize service plan.
We create the website, we write the sales pages, the thank you pages, and actually go through and promote the product. So this where your sales funnel comes in. Your sales funnel is a hell of a lot more intricate than just some of these pieces here. So the website is a lot of steps; sales pages, tons of steps; promoting the product is a ton of steps. But that’s where we come in is the tail end of this. But we will also help with mind mapping the product and then doing the course content, too.
If we scroll down here in this build of the map, we see that there are individual steps for each of the pieces. So here we have started your digital product, brainstorm ideas, and then down below, how do you brainstorm ideas? Well, you can go to ClickBank, you can go to Amazon, you can go to dummies.com which, is the Dummies books, which we like to use from a product research standpoint.
If you have ideas, you want to write them down and then ask yourself: do people spend money, is there traffic? And then as long as people spend money and there’s traffic, then the next thing to do is to go mind map your idea.
When you mind map, we kind of already blew through this a little bit, but you brainstorm your training. Then you either do a blank sheet of paper where you can actually just mind map your stuff here, or there’s a piece of software that we covered in that Get Shit Done Daily episode one, and it was called MindMeister, mindmeister.com.
Then, you can write down any talking points related to your product. You create the categories and then you can reorganize those points. So what I do is it’s literally a brain dump where I just kind of blitz everything and say, “Okay these are” … Actually, this entire spreadsheet or this thing that you’re looking at right now is all the product of a mind map. Basically: okay, what are all the pieces of building a digital product? You organize those into sub-categories and then you go from there.
What you do after you organize all the points, you want to add context to each point, add content. So these might be personal examples. So we got personal examples, images, notes, things that you’ve saved and put in the past, pictures, videos, examples of your work, that kind of thing. And then you want to go ahead and decide on delivery, video, audio, text, all of that stuff. And then your product brainstorming is done.
Now here, we actually get into the different modalities. If you’re creating a video product or you’re creating an audio product, then we start up top. And you’ll see here that if you’re creating a video product, there’s the scenario, and then you go down and you export the audio and get it transcribed, which gives you the written. So, that works nice.
Now, to productize service, we set up the beginning parts of the sales funnel. So here we register a domain, we set up hosting. This is all pretty generic stuff; install WordPress. We use OptimizePress for all of our builds. So we install that. And then we go through and we create pages and we get the product shots and decide on the sales funnel. So now, this is either going to be a webinar, multi-video or VSL upsell, or VSL full-qualified lead.
It’s going to be one of these four formats. Then we write sales copy, you write the headline: problem solution, introduce the product, add the features and benefits, talk about the price, deliver the guarantee, and then close the offer. You post that thing to the site. This is where you set up your shopping cart. Ultimately, it’s how you promote your product. There are some free traffic strategies and ideas, and then this should be paid: solo ads, AdWords, and Facebook.
That is creating and launching a digital product and also productize service. Because what happens is is once you have this thing up and running, then you add coaching or live or consulting into the mix. And you have just successfully transitioned your productize service to the web as a knowledge product, and it’s an assisted learning product, which works out tremendously well from scaling and building and all of that other stuff. Thank you for the thumbs up. I appreciate that. Did you like this?
If you liked this, let me know. I have a lot of these kinds of build maps and I enjoy putting them together and I enjoy working through these things. And for me, it just helps making sure that everything is as good. And my camera’s all being all weird; anyway. But yeah, these build maps are great, just from keeping your head on straight when things get a little crazy during the day. And it’s what goes next, and so on and so forth.
Download that thing. Jump in and come up with productize service plan. If you have any questions at all, feel free to go to DoneForYou.com. There’s a chat box in the box. Or if you want to schedule an action plan call, go to DoneForYou.com/start, and we will jump on the phone and talk about your digital product, talk about your traffic, talk about your sales funnel and put together an action plan for that.
If there’s anything else that I can do in the meantime, just let me know. Like I said, Monday through Friday, 10:00 AM, I’m here. And then on Monday, we will be back with something different. I don’t quite know what it is. If you have any questions that you want answered, go to DoneForYou.com/GSD and there’s a little form there that you can ask any question, and then we will go from there. So I will talk to you soon. Have fun, have a great day, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday. All right, thanks. Bye.
