Many smaller companies developed their offerings when the company first opened. But they don’t always revisit their products on a routine basis, and they are not necessarily as engaged in product improvement as they need to be. In the competitive markets we find ourselves in today, it’s important to keep pace with shifts in the market and changes that may happen for our customers as they grow. I should mention before I get too far here that “products” include services.
As your customer grows, their own customer-base may change, and if that happens their needs almost certainly will change. Sometimes your client will shift the focus of their own business or fine tune it based on their experience in the market. At other times, new competitors or alternative products that appeal to your (mutual) customer base may enter your targeted market(s). While you need to stay focused on what you do and how you do it, you also need to keep an eye out for possible shifts in your overall market and in your customers’ markets as well.
In either of these instances, having an active product development program will help you avoid losing customers and sales. Product development should be a routine activity which you revisit periodically. It’s not a is “set-it-and-forget-it” activity. Yet it is often overlooked, or assumed that someone else in your organization has handled it.
Productization is the process by which you create or modify your product or service so it’s standardized, tested, packaged, and marketed to a specific target audience. It creates products that are developed using repeatable processes, standardized materials, and tactics, which take less time to produce, and appeal to a specific audience. This, combined with the ability to increase the price per unit of your products or services is what makes you more profitable.
When this task is handled well, your offerings will appear to “sell themselves” or, at the least, take less effort and time to close. And you will find that increasing your prices is easier. I don’t mean to day that any of this will be “easy” and it can all be especially challenging for service providers. That’s because, in many cases, service providers are delivering a service that is customized by client. But that doesn’t mean you cannot productize your offerings. And the more effectively you handle this task, the faster your sales will close and revenues will increase.
The process for creating these offerings in a more market-friendly manner contributes to increased sales because it forces you to look at the offerings from the perspective of your customers. This is not a common activity for most businesses when they are first started because, frankly, you don’t typically start with any customers or have a significant customer base. As your customer base grows however, you will be able to revisit your offerings.
By about a year in, every business should have enough data on the success of their sales efforts to make changes to their offerings. If you don’t have that type of data and your doors have been opened for more than a year, you will want to start gathering it and, if possible, look back at customers you lost or prospects that never converted to see what you can learn about those interactions.
I’m certainly not saying that productization will cure all your sales ills. I am saying it will do much more than you think it will Want to chat about how to productize your offerings more effectively? Set up a complimentary 30-minute meeting here.
