Sharpening Your Packaged Service Offerings
You’ve done the effort of putting together some packaged service offerings. Some specific outcomes for your freelance client, matching your skills, at a fair price.
You’re already sold on the idea. It’s a great way for your visitors to understand what you do, and how to best work with you.
But you feel you went half-way with your “productized” services.
All I have is a Learn More link. I know I should do more than that. I should add a better first step. Maybe a questionnaire.
It’s a public price that’s missing. I should define the service description more and set a price
Those are good ideas (although you might not need to publish a fixed price).
Let’s see what else can be done to sharpen up your packaged service offerings.
Sharpening Strategy 1:
Help Your Visitors Do it Themselves
Whether you’re offering to clean up your client’s processes, or you’re offering to do something your client doesn’t have a lot of experience doing (your specialty), you can bet that you’re competing against one thing:
Your visitors will consider doing it themselves first.
That behaviour is called “non-consumption”, the default thing your potential clients fall back to. Probably your biggest competitor.
So help them with that. You’ll solidy your position as an authority, and when they feel they’ve tried enough times, they’ll come to you for help finishing up the job.
Concrete Ways to Apply This Strategy:
- Consider dedicating a whole page for your service offering. Throughout the pitch, help them do it themselves, to figure out the process you’d use if you were them. Teach them right there, while giving them an option to just contact you to get it done more quickly.
- On the page where you list all your service offerings, consider catching those visitors leaning toward “I’ll just do it myself”, and offer links to some articles, a free guide, an inexpensive course, or a video or screencast you recorded.
Sharpening Strategy 2:
Play Down the Outcome, Play up the Empathy
“I will take care of creating the report, customize it to your needs, and train you with the tools I used so you can produce more of these.”
“I will do some research, run some proposed updates to your landing pages by you, and coordinate the A/B testing.”
Describing your deliverables this way works great to quell anxieties and clarify the details.
And your heading could be showing the outcome.
“A One-time Report You Can Rerun”
“Higher Conversions, Based on Buyer Research”
But! As we’ve seen above, you know they’ll likely try doing it themselves first, or trying it in-house. Because of this, the appeal of hiring an external person like you remains tenuous.
All is not lost. Instead, focus on the situations causing your clients to hire someone like you.
Struggling moments are what create momentum in your buyers. No struggle, no purchase momentum.
So work up your empathy for those situations, and confidently use that knowledge in your service offering descriptions, by using that new language before you describe the deliverables, like this:
“You’ve tried running a report in-house, but after three tries and some inconsistent results, you now want a repeatable, predictable report system. I can do that for you. Here’s what I’ll do:”
“You’re getting traffic, but just changing headlines or some colours doesn’t produce the conversions you thought you might be getting. You know researching your buyers is what helps make the biggest difference, and you just don’t have the need for a full-time researcher/copywriter/a-b tester. Here’s what I offer.”
Sharpening Strategy 3:
Ladder Them Up
Now that you know the struggling moments causing your clients to seek you out, you will start to see patterns. You can repackage similar offerings but at different scopes, different sizes.
- Small engagements that help your visitor earlier in the process (figuring stuff out);
- Medium-sized, one-off engagements to test the relationship with you and solve a specific one-time need;
- Bigger engagements that are more custom.
All of these package up your skills. Each of them addresses a likely struggle along their journey.
And the magic part: each offering competes against the other ones, up and down the value ladder.
And since you know you’re competing with them figuring it out themselves, you could add as another rung of that value ladder: the free stuff you put out. For that, the struggle you’re solving for your visitor, is the struggle of not having anybody on their short list. They’ll see your stuff, “bookmark” you for later by signing up to your newsletter (you didn’t even need to by pushy about it either). And they’ll be back soon.
So sharpen your service offerings this way, continue helping your visitors by teaching them everything you know, and stick it out.
Stay Sharp!
—
Pascal Laliberté
@pascallaliberte