Project-Led Growth: Using Productized Services To Grow Your Company

Table of Contents

Firstly, What is project-led growth?

Project-led growth borrows from the principles of Product-led growth. In a professional services industry, project-led growth enables companies to productize and sell their services online to customers, again-and-again. Helps you to save time by reducing the traditional sales cycle and grow your revenue through an additional revenue stream.

For new customers, they get to see what’s on offer and how much it will cost and they get to make an educated decision.

For existing customers, selling productized services makes it easy for them to re-engage with you on a repeat basis.

“Adopting a project-led growth strategy enables is your foot in the door with new customers and removes friction from the sales process for returning customers.”

Why you should start productizing your services

Once you open your mindset to a new way of selling your services online, you’re opening your business up to a new revenue stream.

Save Time by shortening the traditional sales cycle. (Lead completed a form, they wait for you to get back to them, you have a call, you prepare a proposal, present proposal, and then weeks later wait for them to accept/decline.)

Grow revenue by enabling your customers to buy from your on a project-basis and use this a foot in the door to a longer-term relationship.

Adapt digital by allowing your customer to buy from you in a way that they’re used to buying products and services in this digital-age — online, with a CC, get started almost immediately (e.g Netflix licence, HubSpot Licence, Amazon for goods)

Disruption of technology in professional services industry. If you take Xero as an example, this software is managing a lot of the basic functions the traditional bookkeeper would do. So with this professional services companies need to reimage what they offer and align themselves with technology to better serve their customers – attache yourself to technology

“This is what people think the professional services sales cycle looks like vs what it actually looks like”

Create productized services for different types of customers

For your new customers:

Try before you buy packages
Just like with consumer tech Netflix, you get watch for free for 14-days. Create service packages where your customer gets to experience not only the quality of your service delivery but alo what it’s like to work with your team.

These service packages don’t need to be for free. They can be smaller 1-hour consulting or audit packages. Anything of your simple tasks, our Buy now button will help you to easily sell these services on your website

Generate qualified sales qualified leads
For services where more information from the client is required and services that have a higher price ticket, create a packaged service to describe what can be delivered if the larger service was purchased. But if the customer would like to customize it a bit, same remove x and add y, then this packaged services gives them and you a good starting point to create a customized solution. Think of this as your way of getting super qualified leads because what a request for ths service is received, you already know that this customer has intent as they’ve seen the price and what will be delivered, so when you get on that sales call with them, you already have so much context.

 

For returning customers (and can often for sold to new ones too):

1. Consulting hours
For customers who need expert advice on a recurring basis and will brief you based on their needs — this is a great fit for them.

2. Repeatable services
So often you have services that follow a standard process and outcome. You know exactly what’s needed from the customer to get started, what will be delivered and what the prices will be. As an example if you’re an accountant and you deliver a cashflow statement, this could be a repeatable service.

3. Training services
Are you a SaaS partner? Example: Solution Partner for HubSpot Advisor for Xero? Then it’s likely that end-users will need training on how to use the software either as a newbie or will need a new team member to be trained.

4. Executional services When customers have done all of the strategy work in-house, but need some help to bring things to life, your expertise in the industry and if you’re aligned with a SaaS partnership is what will get sought out.

How to create productized services

Productizing services consists of pre-defining what will be delivered, how long the tasks will take, what you’ll need from the customer, what won’t be delivered and how much it will cost.

Step 1: Understand which services you’d like to package and why
Before you dive into packaging services, it is important to know which services you’d like to package and why. Some of the questions you can ask your self are:

1. What are you good at?
2. Which of your current services are generating good results for your customers?
3. Which of your services are more profitable?
4. Who are you trying to attract? New or return customers?

Step 2: Start defining your packages

Once you know which of your services you’d like to turn into packages, the real work starts now with adding the details.

Step 3: Make it easy for your customers to buy from you.

If you’re selling packaged services on your website, you customer must be able to pay for these services online and be able to chat with you in real-time if they’re interested but have a couple or questions.

This is where frictionless sales tools are your secret weapon and make your packaged services more appealing. Some of these tools include:

1

Chatbots

According to Drift, 70-80% of your B2B decision-makers prefer remote human interactions or self-service. This adds some complexity into the sales process as there’s an average of 6-10 decision-makers in the B2B world.  As a consequence, many steps in each process will need to be re-evaluated to be able to cover different angles. This is why the implementation of convenient chatbots is recommended in your sales strategy.

We suggest considering these questions while mapping out your customer’s journey.

  • Who are your decision- makers? 
  • What have they engaged with?
  • How to drive better conversations during meetings?
  • How to remove potential risk in the deal
2
Customer testimonials & reviews
 
Customer reviews are considered the best source of product credibility and information.  According to  Widewail out of 8 ranking factors, review signals are ranked in the 3rd position, they are only 1% behind link signals and their impact keeps on rising, which makes a Google review management strategy more important to your company than ever before. 
3

Video

Video content is a great way to help your potential buyers learn more about your products. In fact, Hubspot has stated that 94% of marketers agreed that video content has helped increase user understanding. Another interesting fact is the impact that videos have on ROI. According to Medifast, 83% of marketers say videos give them a return on investment. The success that businesses get from videos primarily depends on how good they are at getting their potential buyers and customers to watch them.

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