If you are a bookkeeper or accountant, you offer your clients a service. And while it is a crucial service, services can be a lot more difficult to sell than products. Think for instance of the upcoming Black Friday sales. You see every major retailer advertising a drastic cut in prices and know that people are gearing up to fight over the last pair of skinny jeans, sneakers, or flat screen TV.

Products are often a lot easier to market than services are. You see a nice outfit, enquire about the price and that's that. Purchasers don't typically question how long it took to manufacture the TV they've just bought, and they use the price as part of an indication of its value. On the other hand, you try charge your clients a tiny bit more because their books are in more of a mess than you realised and they're not likely to be happy with you.

But what if you could package up your services and put a nice big bow on them?

Have you noticed a pattern in client meetings? Is there a question you often get or a solution that you frequently provide? If you've noticed something cropping up repeatedly, why not address it as a specific product? As Tarika Bhartiya and Varun Bhartiya say in an article for Entrepreneur:

"The ability to productize is all about creating standardized, repeatable processes, modularised offerings, and quantifiable results. But, at its heart, it is an innovation in your service delivery capability. As with all innovation, it arises from an intimate understanding of the need. Developing a deep understanding of your customers is, therefore, a precursor to innovation through productization."

Turning your service into a product means simplifying the usual labor, time, and human capital involved, as well as various processes into one compact thing.

It helps to find a niche into which you fit. After all, if you say that you're good at everything, your competitors are limitless. However, if you say that you are particularly good at doing a "Big Spring Clean" at the end of the year, or providing helpful management accounts, then that's your edge. You move from being a "Jack of All Trades" to a specialist.

In order to replicate your process to deliver the same results, you need to document everything that you do and systematise it. Document every step involved so that you can calculate the costs involved and transfer your knowledge as needed. That way your unique service offering becomes a something that can easily be packaged and repackaged for different clients.

Of course, you don't need to productize everything you do. For your core offering, you could continue charging your usual hourly rate. But what if you could offer a specific outcome with a fixed fee? After all, time is finite, so any earnings you make based off time are necessarily capped.

Let's say you offer a service that you know a lot of people would be interested in like an annual clean up of their books. You could easily turn that into a product. As Robin Waite of the Fearless Business podcast said on Jo Wood's The Bookkeepers' Podcast, episode 110, to package your service effectively, you need to think of three things:

If you come up with a great sounding package, like say, a "Big Spring Clean" which clients can purchase once a year, you can generate demand for that product and go on to be well-known for it. It's a catchy name with a clear outcome and a clear fee. Maybe it could even be listed as a Black Friday special.

Putting a price tag on this package can be tricky. When you think about your "Big Spring Clean" or whatever it may be, consider how long it would typically take you to implement and try to find a price that reflects value.

You don't want your product to seem super cheap because this could undermine its quality and usefulness. On the other hand, you don't want to make it incredibly expensive as you could lose clients over an extortionate fee. Robin Waite recommends picking a price just outside of your comfort zone.

To determine whether you are charging too little or too much, look at your conversion rate:

As conversion rates increase, you can begin to increase your prices.

To find the best price, you need to test out your options. Some practices change prices every 6-8 weeks, trying out new prices with new clients to see what works. You might consider removing prices from your website so that clients call you to make pricing inquiries instead.

Products are much easier to communicate to your target market than billable hours as they have specific properties and specific value propositions. A product is something that is unique and, ideally, memorable.

Your package is made up of certain components, namely your labor, the software you use, and the human capital needed to deliver the end product. When putting together your package, you need to take all these components into account and make sure that the rest of your firm is on board.

Instead of sending over a proposal to a prospect, ask them to chat with you on the phone. You can get a much better sense of how interested they are in your product over the phone than via email. It also helps to have a follow up call to get a sense of how much interest there is in your package.

Productizing isn't a perfect art form. To figure out if there's demand for your product, you have to test the waters. Try out different names and different prices. But don't be too quickly disheartened. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Do your research on what your clients really want and need and you're sure to find a hook, be that in the form of a management accounts package, end of year clean up, or something else that your firm is uniquely good at providing.