How to “package” a service

There is an example from business training. It's about riding in an elevator with a billionaire. When you are looking for a buyer for your service and suddenly find yourself in the same elevator cabin with a famous billionaire who can clearly make such a big order from you. And you have literally several floors of time to share information with him.

A freelancer should always be able to blurt out his message to a potential client clearly and clearly, as if he had been preparing for this all his life. But for this to actually be the case, it is necessary to deliberately work on the wording of the sales proposal, the description of the service and the closure of objections.

There was a time when it was hard for me to talk about my profession. It was difficult to find words to describe to a person not related to IT what exactly I do. And for some reason it was embarrassing. It seems like you are having a normal conversation with a person, then he suddenly asks what I do for a living, and I begin to mumble and answer the question somehow difficult and from afar. The person notices this and tries to quickly close the topic so as not to torment me further. But potentially he could become my client!

My former boss, Andrei Ryabykh, drew attention to this and advised me to prepare a response in advance. So that I don’t display it “on the fly”, but mint it out like from a cheat sheet. That's what I did. I came up with a short answer and blurted it out if someone asked what I did. This attracted people and provoked them to ask additional questions. Over time, I already knew them all and could immediately formulate the answers in such a way that there were no questions left. Take it and contact me for services.

The resulting formulations can be called “packaging” for services and draw an analogy with goods in stores. They help to stand out on the shelves. A bright color, unusual shape or size attracts the visitor’s attention from afar. Names work at a closer distance. And finally, a potential buyer will read the description only if he is internally ready to buy.

Packaging is needed both for new customers who have not yet encountered the product, and for regular customers who are looking for something already familiar. Consequently, consumption may decline temporarily if manufacturers mindlessly change these parameters.

This all applies to goods in stores. What about services? And it’s the same with them!

Trade offer. These are the shape, size and color of the service. I will take as an example something that I myself understand - interface design. My sales proposal would sound like this: “I design information system interfaces.” An important point: the sales proposal is prepared for a specific target audience. For example, "Information Systems Design" would be bought from me by professional clients (if you've forgotten who those are, quickly return to the chapter in which I talk about them) because they would be the only ones who would understand what it means. And if I wanted to attract the attention of people less advanced in IT, a different sales proposal would be suitable. For example: “I design websites and applications.”

There is such a thing as the “Ideal Selling Proposition”. This is when the sales proposal includes exactly those parameters that the potential client needs. For example, if a client was looking for a designer who works in a specialized program called Axure, then the sales proposition “I design websites and applications in Axure” would be ideal for him. The more parameters we know that the client is interested in, the closer to the ideal our sales proposal will be.

There is also such a thing as a “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP). The name speaks for itself. If I work in such a competitive environment, where there are a lot of people designing websites and applications in Axure, I want to stand out among them in some way. For example: “I design websites and applications in Axure, I am responsible for the deadlines and quality, a free audit of your website upon the first order.”

In my case, trade offers replaced each other, became better, more understandable, and sometimes, on the contrary, brought in unwanted clients.

When I worked at Webmaster.spb, customers often came to us who needed a project “yesterday”. Often the reason was that they wanted to make it for some event that had very little time left.

Working with such people, I learned how to mobilize, work evenings and nights, make marathon approaches to work - and as a result, helped save emergency projects. Therefore, soon after going freelance, my selling proposition became: “We will help in emergency situations with planning and design.” And I was quite successful in attracting clients with such needs.

Thus, of my own free will, I began working with clients who did not know how to plan work, who did not understand how much time a particular project could actually take. And also with people who have never met with specialists who are demanding in terms of pay and management, and therefore have an incorrect basic understanding of the work. They paid reluctantly and with delays, it was difficult to communicate with them, the work was hard, since they had to devote a lot of effort to putting things in order in someone else’s garden.

I realized that the ability to work with such clients did not really help me earn more, and I decided to start by recording everything that I didn’t like about my work. So that if you don’t grow in earnings, then at least suffer less with what you have.

I wanted to work not in someone else’s emergency mode, but in my own calendar plan. Not with managers at different levels, but with owners who could make quick and responsible decisions. I wanted to work with solvent clients, for whom money comes second, and people, service and results come first.

And as soon as I admitted these desires to myself, it immediately became clear where I needed to move and how to make plans. To begin with, I removed any mention of emergency situations and difficult situations from the sales proposal.

Every time I formulated a new sales proposition, I tried to convey it to future clients. I shared it with friends and relatives, colleagues, former classmates and classmates. He asked me to be recommended and promised to share the income for the recommendation. I didn’t get confused or hesitate when someone asked what I did. At some point, I even managed to assess what exactly might be of interest to the person standing in front of me, and voiced a sales proposal specifically for him.

I didn't just use sales pitches when I was talking to prospects. He also placed them in pinned posts on social network profiles, in the headers of one-page websites, in video descriptions, under articles and publications, and so on.

Description of service. Potential clients who responded to the sales proposal became interested and came closer. And here it is advisable for the freelancer to immediately give them a detailed explanation of what exactly good he does, using terms familiar to them, as well as describing the “pains” that clients face and which the freelancer could help cure.

When describing a service, you can rely on the chronology of its execution and talk about such things as:

• What you need to do to get started
• What will happen during the process
• What will the client get as a result?

For example: “I design websites and applications in Axure, I am responsible for deadlines and quality with money. Before starting work, we will talk for an hour on Skype, then I will draw up a document with functional requirements for your project and attach it to the contract. Based on this, I will make an estimate of timing and cost. Then, after 100% prepayment, I will begin the design process, during which every two to three days we will need to communicate for at least half an hour to discuss intermediate results so that we move towards a joint final vision. The result is an interactive prototype in Axure, as well as a functional specification.”

I could describe the service during a conversation with a client at the first meeting, and then hand over a business card (or send a message in the messenger) with a link to a page where all this would be described in detail.

The description of the service also undergoes significant changes as the freelancer’s experience increases. When potential clients ask us the same questions over and over again, we insert the answers to them in advance into the text of our service description. If the region is important to customers, it will appear in the description. If price is a deciding factor, it will appear in the text. If you are interested in guarantees, we will write about them in our message.

And if the description of the service suits the client, he will be almost ready to work with us, but he will have a number of objections.

Closing client objections. Each potential client’s objections are different, but after 10–15 clients, the freelancer will be able to identify recurring ones among them. For example, one says: “Why can I trust you?” And we show him reviews of five satisfied clients, give him our contact phone number, smile from a high-quality photo in an open profile on social networks - and now the client’s distrust has already decreased. Or another asks: “Why is it so cheap?” And we explain that we perform the service quickly, so it is “on stream”, we don’t have to pay for office rent, and we also use ready-made semi-finished solutions that significantly reduce production costs. And the third one gloomily declares: “Too long!” And we tell them that in fact we do the work no longer than others. It’s just that others name short deadlines and fail them, but we immediately - and with a margin! — We correctly assess our strengths and capabilities.

Reviews and examples of work. If they are included in the service package, the likelihood that strangers will contact us increases significantly. These can be source documents, documents and tables, video presentations and reviews. But the most common format is photographs of the process and result with comments.

You can start with simple photos on your phone and short descriptions. You can not be afraid to publish neutral and even negative reviews with a good outcome. From the series: “In general, I really didn’t like everything terribly in terms of service and timing. The performer is strange and boorish, but he did his job well, nothing can be done.” You don’t need to write fake reviews—the trained eye can see them a mile away—and they are more likely to scare away potential customers than to attract them.

I think many readers are now asking the question: “Where can we even publish these reviews and examples of work?” There are many options. You can post them on social networks, you can create profiles on service exchanges, you can create a Google Document and link to it to new potential clients. Or you can do everything at once. The more places information about a freelancer and his services is available, the more likely he is to be noticed.

As a result, many freelancers, whose turnover and number of clients were constantly growing, acquired their own full-fledged websites with information about services and prices, examples of work and reviews, as well as blogs in which these people shared their experience in articles - and thus attracted even more potential clients from search engines.

At the very beginning of the journey, it is not so important where the words packaging the service will be published. It is important that the freelancer consciously work on selecting and improving these words, record them in his notes and constantly experiment, voicing them to the people around him.