What Are Sellable Ways to Package up (my) Skills as Services?
You’re pretty good at what you do, you’ve been taking freelance or consulting contracts (or you’re starting that up), and the word-of-mouth keeps getting you the same kind of clients. But you want better clients, and you want referrals that highlight something new you’re specializing in.
Or maybe you head up an agency. You find you rely too much on work coming through a partnership, or your clients have followed a trend you’d like to break. Same-old got old. You’d like to pierce through that invisible ceiling and attract the kind of new client your team is primed to delight.
Anxieties About Your Services
In the previous article, we’ve seen how, despite your best efforts at presenting yourself on your web presence, there are a lot of anxieties in hiring your service business (list copied from the other article):
- ←⚬ I’m not sure if I’ll be able to translate what I’m going through in terms they’ll really understand;
- ←⚬ I’m hesitating about the fact that I might not understand the technical bits they’ll be talking about when describing their solution;
- ←⚬ I’m not prepared for them to upsell me with things I don’t need;
- ←⚬ I’m not sure we’ll be able to communicate effectively, when working together;
- ←⚬ I don’t know if it’ll take a lot of time, what I’m asking for;
- ←⚬ I don’t know if it’ll cost a lot of money, what I’m asking for;
- ←⚬ I’m not sure they can do exactly what I need to get done.
But as we’ve seen in that article, packaging up a service to address a specific struggle gives you more chances to reduce anxieties, have your clients confidently know what makes your service attractive, and help the client make some progress.
Do that, and you’ll get some go-hood word-of-mouth. So let’s make a list of packaged service ideas.
A Bunch of Example Ways to Package up Services
For each of these, you could make a full page describing what the client gets by purchasing that package. You can show your availability, some pricing guidance, what the process of working with you will be like, how long it will take. See if there’s a way to address all the anxieties listed above through that page.
For some of these, you could even offer three different options, helping them through their choice to work with you.
And of course, some of these are products themselves.
All of them are a great way to try you on for size. Remember, your main competitor is your clients considering doing it themselves first.
- Sell an exploratory phone call;
- Sell a critique call for a design your client made themselves;
- Sell a redesign of a single web page;
- Sell a monthly group coaching call;
- Sell access to a chat community, to get access to you and others like you;
- Sell access to a reading group on a book covering a new aspect of your practice;
- Sell your “about” page as a PDF (surprising, but the Make Money Online podcast by Nick Disabato and Kai Davis had that running. “Had that running”, so maybe this idea isn’t very Lindy, therefore not so great, but it was remarkable!);
- Sell a one-time report;
- Sell a weekly recurring system clean-up service;
- Sell a website loading speed increase;
- Sell the re-write of a document, max 2000 words;
- Sell the editing of a 5-minute video clip;
- Sell the editing of the first 30 minutes of a podcast episode;
- Sell access to a popular system plus your support of that system and your training on that system for a recurring retainer fee;
- Sell writing snarky tweets for the past 10 articles your client wrote;
- Sell re-writing a headline three different ways for $10;
- Sell a screencast explaining how to solve a specific problem in WordPress for $30;
- Sell a 4-hour block of your focused attention for a week for $500 and $70 off if booked two weeks in advance;
- Sell an email course condensing and summarizing your best articles or your best ideas so people could catch up;
- Sell a list of links to 30 different visual styles to inspire your client for a unique design;
- Sell three on-site sessions to train your client’s team on a new approach;
- Sell a facilitation session to help your client get unstuck, imagine possibilities and commit to next steps (include accountability follow-up calls);
- Sell an ebook or a short guide;
- Sell something that is quick for you to do and responds to your client’s emergency but is cheaper if they wait a month and book it now;
- Sell something that takes you less than one month to complete and that your client will be happy to wait for that month when you become available.
“I See Selling Multiple Services Like These”
As we’ve seen in the previous article, having multiple services packaged up like these allows each service to compete against each other, rather than competing against other competitors. The point is to make your service offerings sharp, not generic, and the same should be said about your group of service offerings. Each one points to the other as an alternative, or as a complement.
Also make sure that, as a whole, you communicate that you’re there to help your clients make progress, and that you’re the person or agency to “bookmark” for future needs. Your newsletter will be a great way for those clients to “hire” your influence, to “bookmark” you for later, without much cost to them.
Stay Sharp!
—
Pascal Laliberté
@pascallaliberte