Estimated reading time: 4 mins

In today’s increasingly competitive and noisy B2B landscape, turning your services into products is one strategy for driving growth.

Looking for a way to more effectively communicate a specific capability to prospective clients? Need help synchronizing your staff’s messaging? Want to scale your business but not sure where to start?

Leveraging product-led growth, often called productizing, is a proven method for increasing revenue, expanding growth, and offering concrete value to prospective clients.

Focusing on product-led growth is an especially useful tool for businesses that serve pharmaceutical companies because it accelerates the process of marketing and reaching agreement with a “product” offering as a starting point for discussions. Using product-led strategies also facilitates the buy-in required from multiple stakeholders within a pharma company.

What is Product-Led Growth?

Productizing your offerings entails shifting from ad hoc services to off-the-shelf solutions. By reimaging your solutions as products, you paint an image in your clients’ minds of the work you do, what the outcomes of working with you will be, and how they’ll benefit from engaging you.  Even if the end agreement with your client is customized you will see acceleration in the selling process.

Product-led growth strategies help you communicate the intangible aspects of what you offer in a way that helps your client conceptualize the benefits of partnering with you.

Transitioning to product-led growth also creates a consistent set of actions and outcomes that you can sell holistically as one package. Instead of selling time, you’re selling bundles that make it easier for your clients to understand what they’ll get out of working with you.

Productizing “refers to packaging services, like coaching, design, and counseling, as products. This gives customers more uniform results and service providers can build scalable businesses in arenas where scalability has traditionally been an obstacle,” writes Tina Mulqueen, Forbes.

A major benefit of productizing is that it lets “service-driven companies shorten time-to-value by packaging their services into repeatable offerings,” write Tarika Bhartiya and Varun Bhartiya, Entrepreneur.com. “If you’re a service provider intent on remaining relevant in the face of a growing global competitive landscape, you need to start offering service packages with clear, tangible deliverables. Even if you’re successfully dealing with competition and leading your space, you still need to consider productization. As a service provider, time is quite literally money. Your scale and profits depend on your ability to keep taking on more clients. Packaging your services as products can allow you to serve more clients at the same time, and help you scale your business. You can also consider creating products to provide part or whole of the value you create for a client and bundling it into your service offering.”

One example of focusing on product-driven growth is the company Scribe. They’ve turned their book-writing services into a product by offering various packages or “products” based on customers’ needs:

• Publishing Only: proofing and publishing an already written book

• Guided Author: help with writing the book then publishing

• Professional: writing and publishing the book based on interviews with client

• Custom quote: bespoke option where they work to meet a specific client’s needs

By turning various forms of their service into products, they can set consistent pricing and use standardized procedures around different products. This also helps them to allocate resources appropriately when orders come in.

Why Should You Productize?

There is a wealth of benefits that comes alongside productizing. We’ll go into more detail in an upcoming article, but as a short overview, productizing offers multiple ways to optimize your business for growth.

1. Increase profits

The ultimate reason for productizing is to position your business for growth without requiring more manpower. “If a consulting firm…wants to double its revenue, it has to double its staff of consultants or attorneys. Consultancies, law firms, ad agencies, and other professional services firms struggle to nudge their gross margins above 40% as they achieve scale,” writes Mohanbir Sawhney, Harvard Business Review.

Delivering value to more clients using your existing resources is one of the primary benefits of productizing.

2. Scale your business

Productizing also has the fringe benefit of making your company more scalable. You can use a scaling process that’s similar to those who offer tangible products. Putting your services into product form makes selling and marketing them easier. Presenting and pitching your product is also simpler.

 When you have an efficient and clever productizing schema, the main thing preventing scaling is the amount of resources you’re able to dedicate to each client and your ability to handle multiple clients without developing a backlog.

 3. Stop reinventing the wheel

Transitioning to product-based positioning means that you won’t need to reinvent yourself for each new engagement. Instead, you can reuse the processes, frameworks, resources, and tools that you’ve developed while working with other clients. 

4. Communicate your full range of services and expertise

Productizing also helps communicate with your clients what you offer and lets them choose what service level is right for them. By giving clients a range of options, from your preliminary offering to your flagship “product,” clients will understand what they’ll get out of working with you and have more information about the level of service they need. 

5. Save time by offering repeatable services

The beauty of product-led growth is that you ultimately save time. You can move away from exchanging time for money and instead trade outcomes. This enables you to earn more by becoming efficient and reduces your clients’ exposure to hourly overages. 

6. Retain the flexibility to customize packages

Product-led growth strategies don’t require you to adhere strictly to the “products” you outline for prospective clients. If a client needs something different than what’s included in your packages, you still have the flexibility to meet those needs.

7. Improve product over time

When you package your services into products, each time you complete a project you have an opportunity to streamline the process and increase efficiency. This leads to better products over time, happier clients, and more business. By creating a “minimum viable product that morphs depending on customer feedback,” you can continually delight customers and grow your business (Inc.com).

8. Increase internal efficiencies

Your internal procedures will benefit from productizing your core services. Productizing sets a standard of action across your services, enabling you to further improve efficiency by automating or streamlining parts of the process.

Conclusion

Productizing produces clarity: clarity of purpose, clarity of process, and clarity of value. Product-led growth involves making abstract solutions more tangible, tying services together into packages to give clients a better idea of what they’re getting.

The bottom line is that companies that serve pharma can gain traction through productizing. By making the process of “ordering” your services as easy as possible for prospective pharma clients, they are more likely to choose to work with you.