Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Simon Ramsey who asks, how can you productize a website audit slash teardown slash UI audit? For example, some sites would have 10 pages, some have 100, some have thousands. Would you have different sizes in the product? Even if that is the answer, some 10-page websites might be 10 different pages, but a 100-page site might be 10 different pages with 10 pages each. Kind of answering my own question here as I go, but be interested in your thoughts. Okay, so what Simon is talking about here is coming up with a productized service to sell to your clients. And a productized service is essentially a fixed scope service that you can offer at a published price and that basically no matter who comes to you for this service, the scope's going to be the same. So if it's mom and pop pizza place or Domino's, it's basically the same amount of work for you, which allows you to publish it at a price. And when a client comes along, they can land on your website and they can say, hmm, this seems like a good deal. I trust this person to do this thing. This price seems reasonable for the outcome that I would expect to receive from this sort of a thing in my situation. And they may email you and ask you a couple of questions, but there's not a big sales process here. They can kind of take it or leave it. If a particular product isn't going to be a fit for them, they can look at maybe one of your other productized services or they can contact you about a custom project. Okay, so that's the good things about, the best thing about a productized service is that it makes the sales process very short. It's very easy. People are either interested or they're not. It's not like a big why conversation, a big value conversation. The downside of a productized service is that if you get a really big client coming along, you can leave money on the table where if you had quoted it on a custom basis, maybe their value would be super high and they'd be getting the lion's share of the profit from the engagement and you still just got your few thousand dollars or whatever you price it at. But the trade-off, I think, is reasonable for certain kinds of things, especially if you're not great at sales, you don't like doing sales, and it's just not something that you enjoy. Writing proposals, having sales conversations. If you're not into that, you'd rather never do that again, then productized services are a great fit because you can just say like, look, we'll do this stuff. Companies like X, Y, and Z should experience results like these and it's $10,000, take it or leave it. It's a good way to go. So the question that Simon's raising here is what if the scope is highly variable like a website audit, which could have Microsoft could come to you and say, yeah, we want your website audit product for $1,000. We've got 10 million web pages. Could you go over them all? Or somebody like LinkedIn coming along and saying, we have 1,300 different page templates. Could you go ahead and review those for that $1,000? So here's the thing that people don't realize with productized services. It's not obvious. So ideally, you're going to create a description of work on your sales page for the productized service that really can't scale like that. So maybe in the description, it's like part of the description is we'll optimize or we'll audit the top 10 most traffic pages on your site. And boom, doesn't matter if it's mom and pop or Domino's, you pick 10 pages, you optimize them or you audit them or whatever you're going to do to them and you're done. Another thing you can do if you don't want to limit it like that explicitly on the page, when someone comes to buy it, you can just say no. Your website is way too big for this. This is meant for companies like I described on the web page, a particular kind of business or maybe it's a solopreneur business that you're targeting or maybe it's whatever. It's not national chains. So if you're afraid of that, you can just be like, oh, here's your money back because I wasn't expecting someone as huge as you to do this. We could talk about a custom engagement, but I'm not going to do this. So it's just too big. That's not the greatest feeling in the world to someone to decide to give you money and then you'd be like, no thanks, here's your money back. So I would make some effort to set expectations on the page itself about what you think it should entail so that people who don't fit that model could graduate to some other productized service that you might have that'd be a better fit for them. So on a page, for example, if you were imagining that you have a page on your website that

your product ladder, like all of your products and services, each one of those descriptions, I like to have people start each description where it's like the name of the productized service, like 360-degree website audit. And then underneath it, I would lead off with what I call a heck yeah question, where the correct buyer, the ideal buyer for this particular product or service, is going to read this question. And in their mind, they're going to say, heck yeah, that's me. That's what I need. That's what I'm like. So it might say something like, are you a solopreneur trying to build your thought leadership, your audience of thought leadership, or something like that? And immediately, you're going to rule out Nike coming along and buying this product or service, because obviously Nike is not some solopreneur who's trying to become a thought leader and build an audience. So if you're just really specific about identifying what sort of business or what sort of, whether it's demographic vertical, psychographic, whatever your segmentation is, you want to make it really clear who you're expecting to benefit most from this service. And that should also help limit the scope or at least set expectations so that if somebody comes along and thinks they're going to get you to audit 1,000 or 10,000 page website for $1,000, you can be like, come on. This is not for businesses like you. I'd be happy to work with you, but I'll have to put together a custom proposal based on your needs. And this particular service is not meant for you. OK, hope that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and we will find it and add it to the queue. See you. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.