Productize
The Ultimate Guide to Turning Professional Services into Scalable Products
More and more traditional professional services firms are turning to “productization” as a strategy to grow, improve valuations, and fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many of them will fail and waste a lot of money in the process. Productize first outlines the “Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes” made when pursuing a product strategy, then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any leader of a professional services business who wants to successfully accelerate growth.
Key concepts
- The Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes
- The Productize Pathway®
- The Innovation Ladder
Research insights
- New product failure rates are estimated at 40–70%.Journal of Product Innovation Management (2013); Monetizing Innovation (2016)
- Product companies typically earn 60–90% gross margins, versus about 40% for customized professional services.Harvard Business Review (2016)
- Research has found no relationship between the size of an innovation budget and innovation success.PwC (2017)
Fearless
How to Transform a Services Culture and Successfully Productize
Transforming a B2B services business model to a more scalable, profitable, productized company can have many points of failure, but the biggest and most underserved is the cultural transformation required to support successful productization. The encore book from Eisha Armstrong and her team at Vecteris, Fearless tackles this frequent point of failure and dives deep on the change management required to build a product-friendly culture.
Key concepts
- Product-friendly culture
- The LEAP framework
- Three models for change
Research insights
- 50–70% of organizational change initiatives fail, depending on the research examined.The Science of Successful Organizational Change (2015)
- Fear and resistance to change rank among the top three challenges to digital transformation.Altimeter survey of B2B executives (2020)
- When employees understand the goals of a change, its probability of success rises by 9%.CEB HR Change Readiness Survey (2015)
Commercialize
How to Monetize, Sell, and Market Productized Offerings in B2B Professional Services
A follow-on book to Productize, Commercialize explores why commercializing new ideas is the most significant stall point when B2B services organizations productize. The book then outlines how the most successful firms commercialize packaged services and new products and get to revenue impact fast and efficiently.
Key concepts
- Product-market fit versus go-to-market fit
- Pricing and packaging
- Planning for renewals from day one
Research insights
- 74% of executives and product leaders at B2B professional services firms rated “setting the right sales strategy, structure, and incentives” difficult or very difficult.Vecteris benchmarking survey
- Professional services firms convert about 9.2% of leads, versus 1–2% for B2B SaaS companies.Lusha lead conversion benchmarks
- Professional services has the highest share of work, 41%, that generative AI could automate, of 17 industries studied.National Bureau of Economic Research (2023)