Productised services: how to sell consulting like a product
Custom consulting is hard to price, hard to sell and hard to hand off. Packaging it as a fixed product with a fixed scope and a fixed price fixes all three.
· 4 min read
The trouble with custom work
Most consultants start out selling their time. Every client gets a bespoke proposal, a custom price and a scope that shifts as the work goes on.
That works for a while, and then it becomes the limit on the business. Each sale needs a long discovery call and a proposal, and each project is slightly different, so nothing gets faster.
Because the method lives in the consultant's head, nobody else can deliver it either.
A productised service takes the thing you already do best and turns it into a defined product. Same deliverable, same process, same price, for every client who buys it.
What makes a service a product
A productised service has five fixed parts. If any of them is still "it depends", it is not a product yet.
- A specific buyer. Who it is for, and who it is not for.
- A specific outcome. What the client has at the end that they did not have at the start.
- A fixed scope. What is included and, just as important, what is not.
- A fixed timeline. How long it takes from start to finish.
- A fixed price. Published, or at least consistent, rather than quoted fresh each time.
Take a marketing consultant who usually sells open ended retainers. A productised version might read: "A 30 day ad account audit and rebuild for coaches spending at least $5,000 a month on ads. You get a written audit, three rebuilt campaigns and a 60 minute handover call. $4,500, fixed."
Finding the product in work you already do
You do not need to invent something new. Look back at your last ten to twenty clients and ask:
- Which problem came up most often?
- Which piece of work did you do for several clients in roughly the same way?
- Which project went fastest and left the client happiest?
- Which part of your work do clients mention when they refer others?
The overlap is usually the product. It is often smaller than your full service, and that is a good thing, because a narrow product is easier to explain, price and deliver well.
Pricing a fixed scope
Price on the value of the outcome to the buyer, then sense check it against what it costs you to deliver.
Start with cost. Say the audit above takes about 20 hours of your time and 10 hours of an assistant's. If you value your time at $150 an hour and theirs at $40, delivery costs $3,400, so a $4,500 price leaves a margin but not much room.
Then look at value. If the client spends $5,000 a month on ads and the rebuild trims 15% of wasted spend, that is $750 a month, and the audit pays for itself in about six months.
The real gain comes from repetition. By the tenth delivery, a job that took 30 hours might take 20, because the templates, checklists and examples already exist.
The price stays the same and the margin grows.
Custom work gets paid for its hours. A product gets paid for its outcome, and gets cheaper to deliver every time you sell it.
Selling it
A fixed product changes the sales conversation. Instead of designing the scope on the call, you are checking whether this buyer fits a scope that already exists.
That usually means:
- A short sales page or one page document setting out the five fixed parts.
- A short application so only suitable buyers book a call.
- A shorter call, often 20 to 30 minutes, focused on fit rather than designing a solution.
- No proposal writing. The sales page is the proposal.
Some buyers will ask for changes. Decide in advance which ones you will accept, as paid add ons with fixed prices of their own, and which you will politely decline.
A buyer who needs something genuinely different is not a failure of the product. They may simply be a fit for a different product, or for a custom project priced on its own terms.
Delivering it without you
Productising is also what lets someone else deliver the work. Once the scope is fixed, the process can be written down step by step, with a template for every deliverable.
Deliver the first few yourself and record everything. Turn the recordings into a checklist, then bring in a team member for one stage at a time, usually the most repetitive stage first, and review their work until it matches yours.
The product can also become the front door to your larger work. Clients who buy a fixed audit often come back for ongoing help, and they arrive at that conversation having already seen how you work.
