Product Management Services
Where are your service offerings in their life cycles? What strategies do you implement at various stages? How does stage impact future revenue? Successful CPAs use a systematic process to analyze their offerings and bring new ones to market – and all that has to be done in a way, and using verbiage, that relates to the buyer. You can manage and improve your service offerings through:
- Bringing new services to market – Do you have an idea for a new service? How are you going to introduce it to the marketplace? The best course of action is to use an early adopter process, gathering feedback along the way to help shape the offering and perfect your sales pitch. Not all ideas make it to market and the early adopter process will help you ensure you’re offering something people will buy at a rate that allows you to be profitable.
- Productizing/packaging – Think of your firm’s offerings as a shelf in a grocery store. If someone walks down the tax aisle, can the pull an offering off the shelf and understand exactly what they are getting. Are there different size boxes for them to choose from? While you aren’t selling a tangible product, you can make your intangible services product-like. When your prospects can select the offering that best matches their needs and know what they will be getting from you, you will sell more.
- Sales positioning & copy – Sales collateral is persuasive in nature. It needs to show the prospect that you understand the issues they face… the needs they have… the goals they are trying to achieve. And you need to do this in a way that is different from your competitors so you stand out from the crowd. This requires an understanding of your buyers and so the language you use resonates with them and your competitors so you are saying something different. Sales collateral won’t sell your services for you, but it is an important part of the sales process as you’re building a relationship with your buyer.
- Innovating current offerings – Where are your offerings in the product life cycle? Your marketing strategies will vary base on whether revenue is high or low, not to mention what your profit margin looks like. The further along something is in the product lifecycle, the more important innovation is. This starts with listening to what the marketplace is asking for and then applying some outside of the box thinking. You then test the idea and develop an implementation strategy.