How To Overcome A Client’s Hesitation To Buy With The Productization Approach
Overcoming hidden barriers to selling more of your coaching and consulting services
Overcoming hidden barriers to selling more of your coaching and consulting services
Do clients ever balk when they hear how much you charge per hour? Do they look for a better price somewhere else? Don’t you wish they could see the unique value you offer?
The bridges in the Meghalaya region of northeast India have lasted for hundreds of years. They are not built by human hands.
Bridges are needed to span the many valleys that separate one area from another in the Meghalaya. But bridge builders had a big problem. Wooden bridges rot within a few years due to the extreme amount of rain — 467 inches a year, which is 13 times that of Seattle.
So a few hundred years ago, the locals created a solution. They trained the roots of trees to build bridges for them. These root-bridges do not rot in the rain. In fact, they grow stronger over the years.
When a newcomer to the Meghalaya first sees a root-bridge, it’s not immediately apparent to them why these bridges are better than those built by bamboo or wood.
The exceptional value of these bridges only becomes apparent when you speak to the locals. Similarly, when we offer a service, we know it has exceptional value, but often our potential clients don’t see it yet. How do we make the value clear? We do that by productizing our services.
What Does It Mean to Productize a Service?
We transform a vague service into a well-defined offer. To do that, we draw clear boundaries around the service by outlining a specific result and the steps to achieve it. Here are some examples of contrasting services in which one is a productized offer, and the other is not.
One public speaking coach offered to help clients create great presentations. That offer is fairly vague. Together, we crafted an offer to help professionals overcome the fear of public speaking in four one-hour sessions. Can you see how much easier it is for a client to say yes to the second, more specific offer? That’s the power of productizing.
A lot of web designers offer to help you improve your website. One very successful company provided a ten-point website conversation analysis, delivered in seven days to help the customer find out where they might be losing sales. Customers paid for that service and often hired the firm to fix each problem they discovered in the conversion analysis.
Why does productizing a service lead to greater sales?
One word: clarity. You are clear about what results you’re getting for your time and money. A clear offer answers many unanswered questions. What will I get? How long will it take? And of course how much will it cost me?
When those questions are unanswered, people are hesitant to move forward — just as we might resist walking across an unfamiliar bridge in deep fog. We can’t see if it’s safe to cross, so we just may choose to go the long way around.
A productized offer reduces the need for caution.
It is like the sun shining on a cloudless day. Your clients or customers can see the endpoint down the road. They can see the turns they need to make (or that you will guide them through), and they know the costs.
Of course, this is the ideal. Even when you productize your offer, there are still some clients that will not say yes. But when they say no, they won’t do so out of uncertainty. They will do so because they know the offer is not what they need right now. The advantages of productizing a service are clear, but how do you do it?
How to Productize a Service
You do it in three steps:
Choose a problem your clients have.
Determine the result when the problem is solved.
Define the steps of the process needed to achieve that goal.
I worked through these steps to create an offer when I had a tutoring business. I helped students prepare to ace the essay portion of the SAT, a college aptitude test. First, I chose a problem. Some students took too long to start their essays, so they were writing essays that were not long enough to get the highest score (statistics showed 400-word essays got the best scores).
One of the results I promised was that students would write 400 words in 25 minutes. They would do this using three steps I taught them:
Prompt dissection: how to break down the prompt in two minutes, so you have the thesis and outline of your essay
Rapid paragraphs: how to write quality paragraphs quickly so you can fill the pages in 25 minutes
Powerful conclusions: how to conclude the essay with a bang, so the last thing they see is a story or analogy that impresses graders
It was much easier for parents to say yes to a tutoring contract with me because I had a clear result and packaged my offer as a repeatable system.
But what do you do if you can’t guarantee results in your work?
If a result is out of the client’s control, then you can’t promise that result. If you’re a dating coach working with singles, you may not be able to guarantee that your clients will find the partner of their dreams in a specified period. You may have to promise to develop skills that will lead to the result instead.
The dating coach may promise their clients will overcome five specific dating challenges that singles face. Or if the coach helps people who are too shy to date, they may promise their clients will ask out a certain number of people during the program (the coach can’t guarantee how many will say yes, though).
Summary
Productizing a service means turning what you do into a well-defined offer. When an offer is well-defined, it is much easier for a client to say yes to purchasing it.
Productizing works due to clarity. The client knows what results he or she is getting, how much it costs and how much time it will take.
You productize a service by defining the problem it solves, the results the client will get, and the steps to achieve results.
If you can’t promise results, promise skills that, when consistently used, can increase the chances the client obtains the desired result.
When you productize your services, you’ll find that your improved offers are like a bridge that more clients are willing to cross. And after you deliver on your promises, it’s easier to get them to take up your next offer — and the next one after that.