Stop Selling Just Your Time to Improve Your Bottom Line

How to package your services to increase the profitability of your service business and keep clients happy in the process

As a consultant or subject matter expert, you offer a range of services that fulfill your clients needs and solve their problems. Most of the time, if not always, you charge by the hour. Not only can this be confusing for clients, it isn’t how you’re going to optimize your time to get paid what you’re worth.

Creating service packages customers can easily understand and purchase not only helps you successfully sell them, it makes them a lot easier to deliver and to get paid.

Here are the most pressing reasons why packaging is essential for the financial success of your business, with an introduction about how to do it.

Selling a Service is Not Like Selling Vacuum Cleaners

Marketing intangible services, like consulting, requires a different approach than the one used for tangible goods. Intangible means a buyer can’t see, touch or try before they purchase, so it’s up to you to provide evidence that your services can be delivered with some reliability. This “proof” may come in many forms:

• Professional website
• Portfolio: Client list, case studies, publicity, testimonials, references, awards, licenses, etc.
• Promotional Materials: Articles, brochures, white papers, checklists, handouts, slideshows, videos, diagrams, infographics, podcasts, etc.
• Client education: Information about how you do what you do, like an explanation of your process. The more a client understands how you solve their problem, the more likely they’ll appreciate what you do (and pay you handsomely for it). People get what a lawyer does, so this is especially important for the types of consulting people generally don’t understand — what and how you communicate it should be at the level of the client’s understanding.
• Social capital: Followers, comments and other engagement measures.

Ironically, You Need to Turn Your Service into a Product: 14 Reasons Why You Should

Beyond the evidence, you need to give your services the “characteristics” of a product to make them seem tangible. Before explaining how you go about that, here’s why you should — from acquiring new business and fulfilling your promises to increasing profitability.

1. Avoid selling hours. They’re difficult to track and you’ll never scale. Like me, I bet some of your best ideas occur when you’re off the clock too.
2. Save time writing proposals. We love writing those, don’t we?
3. Spend a lot less time explaining your services, and put that time to better use.
4. Concrete attributes and benefits are easy to explain and clients value them.
5. People like neat and tidy solutions: kits, systems, turnkey
6. Greater perceived value of what you offer
7. Make your services easier to sell — what a relief.
8. Make your services easier to buy—the flip side.
9. Deliver services consistently—happy you, happy clients.
10. Reduce scope creep—egad!
11. Be more efficient, which leads to bigger margins—booyah!
12. Ability to train lower cost people to do your job—increase your margins…and remember that vacation you never took?
13. Get everyone on the same page
14. Get referred more often, because people are clear about what you offer and the value they’ve received.

How to Create Packages

Now that you’re convinced, here’s how to do it:

Start at the End

People want a clear idea of what they’ll be getting, so focus on outcomes, results, deliverables. In other words, think about what your ideal client would want. Work backwards to create a list or suite of services you can group together to meet your clients desired results.

Bonus: Creating a unique bundle of services is one way you can set yourself apart from competitors to give yourself an edge.

Standardize

Turn existing activities, knowledge and materials into procedures and processes that are repeatable, predictable and scalable. Determine which ideas hold the most potential for packaging, client acceptance, and profitability.

Here are several approaches:

• Brainstorm the different ways you provide services. You could use a mind map.
• Look for trends in the past 18 months of your business and break it down into 3–5 categories.
• Find patterns in how you work with clients. Take notes about what you spend your time on and the expertise you share.
• Think about the questions you get asked over and over again and how your answer them. This has helped me develop dozens of branded checklists that position me well and save so much time.
• Write down the steps of a project in a logical sequence or workflow. Look for redundancies and find efficiencies. To save even more time, there are many cloud-based software tools that can help you automate a process.
• Research current clients and engagements: solicit stories, ask what’s working, challenges encountered, gather anecdotes, etc. Think about the various needs of different types of clients you serve.

Productize

Once you’ve figured out how to create packages, you can turn that idea, process, prototype or expertise into a marketable and salable product, like a course or an app. You can start with something easier to create, like a digital creation. Scott Brinker of Chiefmartec has been updating and leveraging his Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic for years.

Your products can get increasingly sophisticated depending on the time you have to create them, but start with what your prospects would find most valuable. The idea is to limit the amount of customization required, saving you time and therefore increasing your profit margin. The intent of some of these tools may not be to make money in and of themselves; they may be used as link magnets to help drive leads.

Reorganize

Rethink your capabilities in terms of market changes or trends. In other words, what new problems or needs have arisen in your industry that you can solve with a suite of existing services — tweak them to suit a particular market need.

Manage Uncertainty with Fixed Pricing and Limits

People don’t like open ended pricing. They like to know what they’ll be paying and for what. However, services often depend on the type of client and where they are in their process. This makes it difficult to estimate or price with any fixed certainty. On the other hand, you don’t want to get burned with a fixed price. Here are some ways to solve that dilemma:

• Create levels or packages within categories
• Consider putting a flat or fixed price on the primary or core service, then use a modular approach for the extras to manage the variability of your entire offering.
• Read this, if you’re wondering if you should publish prices on your website
• Constrain the timeline. Be crystal clear about which activities will occur during the engagement, and identify key milestones with deliverables.
• Specify what you expect from the customer in terms of participants, activities, and time required.
• Create a standard set of terms and conditions to cover anything that may be unanticipated, such as noting that anything out of scope will be billed at your normal hourly rate or will be estimated separately.

Communicate Value

• Clearly document your value proposition — put down in words what you’re providing and the value the client can expect to get.
• Make your packages feel even more tangible by giving them descriptive, benefit-oriented, and branded names.
• Develop use cases and case studies for each category or package of services.
• Create supporting documentation and sales materials: presentations, tools, checklists, ebooks, workbooks, audio/video presentations, guides, sample reports. These will help your client see the intellectual property baked into your offering. Consider what your potential clients are likely to want to use and what’s easiest for you to create and maintain — you can’t do it all.

Ultimately, you could even sell these pieces as stand alone products. They also can be turned into promotional materials to drive traffic to your website, lead into a sales funnel, be included as an offer in an ad, for social media, and more.

Packaging Leads to More Successful Marketing

It’s clear there are many benefits to packaging your services — it’s not only more efficient, it will improve your marketing overall in terms of differentiation, pricing, product innovation, and promotional opportunities. Best of all, you’ll have a more robust bottom line.

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