What is a productized service and why do you need one?

Freelancing is notorious for "lumpy income", and when you trade your time for money, it can often become a struggle to be valued for your work.

Your client wants the work quickly, if you are working at an hourly rate, and if you quote a fixed price, there is always the danger of scope creep.

Value-based pricing is often the best way to price freelance projects, but it can be a struggle to communicate that value.

I was a freelance illustrator for 13 years. I was fully booked and illustrated children's books for up to 10 hours a day. When I wasn't illustrating, I felt guilty that I should be in the studio. If I took a vacation, I didn't get paid. If I got sick, I didn't get paid. And to add insult to injury, after illustrating all weekend to meet the client's urgent deadlines, I often had to wait 90 days for the client's slow payment terms.

That's when I began investigating the world of passive income and creative entrepreneurship, and I soon learned that there was a solution to cash flow problems and scope creep—by turning predictable services into defined products, I could turn clients into customers.

They paid up-front, asked fewer questions, and I knew exactly how long the project was going to take.

Gone were the endless requests for quotes and estimates, no more chasing clients for copy and content, no more haggling over additional fees or chasing that final 50% invoice.

"Shift your culture to embrace a product-mindset"—Eisha Armstrong

Fee-for-service work is difficult for the freelancer to manage, but it can also be terrifying for the client. Imagine getting in a taxi and watching the meter go up as you drive round in circles. Unfortunately, if you're not used to working with freelancers, this is often how it feels for the client.

Below are some real-world examples of creatives who offer a productized service.

The Copywriting Crew

Jesse Forrest is a professional copywriter who realized he was offering the same services over and over and so to cut down on estimates, quoting and client discussions, he packaged his copywriting services and created the Copywriting Crew. You can see all of the copywriting services Jesse has packaged in the graphic below.

Conversion Website Design in a Day

Em Winch is a website designer for coaches and course creators. By narrowing her niche, she is able to focus on helping female entrepreneurs use their websites to book more clients. This cuts down on much of the back-and-forth and so something which typically takes weeks or months when offering a custom service can be streamlined down to a day with a clear niche. You can see the service Em has packaged in the graphic below.

Branding for Online Experts 

Lisa Furze is a branding designer and has created a full branding package for online experts. She outlines her process using a free video workshop which allows potential clients to have all their questions answered before they start working with her. She details the price and deliverables in the video and invites you to book a discovery call at the end of the video to see if you are a good fit.

Are you ready to turn one of your creative offerings into a productized service? Follow these simple steps. 

STEP ONE: Choose your core service

When choosing one of your services to productize, it pays to choose something you have delivered multiple times. At least often enough to know the basic steps you need to take and the types of questions or road bumps you're likely to get from your clients. It's also a good idea to choose a service with predictable steps.

Branding packages, five-page websites, 30 icon sets, cafe chalkboards, and annual reports make excellent productized services. Fully customised illustrations or a collection of one-off design requests do not.

STEP TWO: Document the process

if you've delivered the service often enough, you should be able to predict the steps you'll need to take from brief to completion. This includes what type of information you'll need to collect from the client and the specific delivery options.

STEP THREE: Define the timeline

This is where it can get tricky, but if you've delivered the service often enough, you should be able to predict typical timescales for each of the steps. Often what holds a design process up is waiting for assets or feedback from the client, so when you productise the service, you can build this into the process. This way, you'll only have to document the time it takes you to complete each step.

STEP FOUR: Price your product

One of the best things about productizing services is that you no longer need to quote and estimate and invoice. Instead, if you can itemise the deliverables and standardise the process, you can also come up with a package price so that the client knows what they're in for.

STEP FIVE: Name your product, process, or system

You want to stand apart from other branding packages or websites offered as productized services. If you can name the system after yourself, that helps you stand out, but try and include the result in the name, so again the client knows what to expect, and it also helps when they're searching online for them to find you.

STEP SIX: Create a sales page

Typically freelancers have in-person discussions and go backwards and forward with quotes, costing, and sales pitches. Your sales page is designed to do all of the work for you, therefore, it's essential to set it up correctly and automate the payment processes. It is possible to take multiple payments automatically, to break the total amount down into something more manageable for your customer. I recommend making the payment intervals timed rather than upon completion to encourage everybody involved to keep up.

STEP SEVEN: List the benefits, features, and FAQs

Again, your sales page has to do a lot of the work for you, so it's essential to include all of the deliverables, the features and the benefits of the package that you're offering because you won't have the chance to do your usual sales pitch. You can also include a video on your sales page where you walk through your process so that the customer feels like they get to know you before hitting the buy now button.

STEP EIGHT: Showcase past work and clients

Past work and happy client testimonials are essential elements of a sales page. Typically a folio has examples of work anyway. In this case, you want only to put examples of work that has been completed using the same system or process that you're selling. You also want testimonials from real clients to help the new customer feel safe and trust you with their money.

STEP NINE: Develop an automated pipeline

Part of productizing your service is to package up the process and delivery into one standardised price. Still, the other benefit of productizing your service is that you have predictable steps and milestones which can be automated and triggered using technology and software.

For example, if there are deadlines built into your system or process, then you can time email automation to coincide with prompting yourself for the client to move the project ahead to the next stage. You can also use online forms to gather information and tools such as Content Snare to prompt your customer to upload files and other assets that you might need to complete the project.

You can set the majority of this in place before you sell your first package, which means that your time is freed up to get back to designing and creating rather than chasing up the client.

Imagine if you could iron out the lumps in your income, get paid without ever having to send an invoice, finish projects without ever having to chase a client, and be fully booked, weeks in advance.

If you productize a service, your sales page can do all the selling for you. The buy now button collects payment directly from the customer. The automated funnel prompts your customer to fill in questionnaires and automatically collects their content and assets.

What would change in your daily workflow if the first time you hear from the client is when their payment clears into your PayPal account, and the brief arrives in your inbox?

Which one of your services can you streamline and offer as a productized service?

If you would like to download a free guide with five case studies of freelancers who have streamlined their business using automation, funnels, and productized services, click here.