How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are (Lesson 2 of 4: Productized Services)

Presented live on Tuesday, November 23, 2021

In Part 2 of our 4 part series on “How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are”, Jo dives into productized services.

Whether it’s just to add some extra income, or create an even more effective lead generation method, you’re gonna want to check this out.

Transcript

View the lesson pack for this training here: https://bit.ly/pro-freelancer-ch

Lesson 1 of 4 of the How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are series

Lesson 3 of 4 of the How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are series

Lesson 4 of 4 of the How to Look like the Pro Freelancer You Are series

Introduction [00:00]

Joanna Wiebe: Today we are in part two of our four part mini course on looking super pro as a freelancer.

Last time, I overprepared, as I tend to do. So it was our first time coming back for Tutorial Tuesdays and I was like, here we go. And I had literally 60 slides or something ridiculous like that. Might have been 30. Still too many for a 20 minute tutorial. So, I don’t even have slides today. Lie. I have slides over here to make sure I hit certain notes on this other monitor. But the one you’re going to see has no slides. So, we’re just going to dive right in. I will share my screen.

Today we are talking about productized services. So this is part two. Again, so a lot of freelancers– I mean in that pack that I shared with you. And I can share it with you again before the end of today’s tutorial so never fear. But in that pack, we have a bunch of supporting lessons like old Tutorial Tuesdays, past ones, that you can watch. And some of those cover productize services. So what is a productized service? When do I sell a productized service? Things like that.

What is a Productized Service? [01:11]

But a productized service is just like it sounds, right? It’s a service that you’ve turned into a product. So showing here on the screen. I’m going to make it a little bigger. In case you’re on a teeny tiny monitor. Or you got the Zoom update Paul got, which made everything teensy somehow. So make it a little bit bigger.

Now this is an example. We were going to start a thing called Copyparty, and we’ve just never had the time to actually go there. But what it is a series of productized services or a set of them. Point is not to talk to you about Copyparty but what a productized service is. So these are products that are actually services. But you buy it like a product. So it’s important that you talk about your customers of productized services as customers.

Now the great thing– oh, it says participants can now see your screen. I hope you’ve been seeing it for a little while now. OK, good. Cool.

Why Should You Have Productized Services? [02:04]

So the great thing about a productized service is one, you make money off it right away. You wake up, it’s the beautiful idea of I wake up, there’s money in my account, cool. You can also do it asynchronously. So unlike a normal service, you can sell this, write an abandoned cart email. And you can write it Saturday morning. You can write it whenever you feel like it, as long as you figure out the timing with that customer. Actually, the best thing about it is it’s basically paid legion.

So if you are looking to work with a client or someone’s thinking of hiring you, they– this is our experience in having productized services particularly website audits– people come to your site and they like you, they might want to hire you for something, but they’re kind of afraid to just jump in.

And so they book a productized service, oftentimes just to get a feel for how you work, if you come up with ideas that they like stuff like that. So it’s really good paid legion. A lot of people like give away a consult or say I’ll do a free tear-down for you, and it’s like no, no. You will charge for that as a productized service on your website. So this is made in Shopify. I think this is actually a paid version because we needed a bunch of things added to it. But you can do this in Shopify and WooCommerce on a lot of different free plans and just treat it like a product.

So you need a product detail page. Whatever you’re using should have a product detail page, has to connect to stripe PayPal wherever you’re going to accept those payments. But from your prospect’s point of view, they’re looking at this going, I am buying a product but what gets delivered is the output of a service. OK, so this is what we’re talking about with productized services.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with that again, go watch the lessons. What we’re going to focus on for the rest of this tutorial is what to do to look like a pro with the people who buy this so that one, they love you and if they’re not planning on hiring you for other things maybe that was never their goal, they just wanted in this case an abandoned cart email written. Then they’ll come, and they’ll hire you to write their home page through this, and they’ll want to do more things with you and buy more of these products, services, which are also, of course, very good for people with smaller budgets so that’s something to think about.

So we want to make sure that our customer becomes a recurring customer, a repeat customer, or is ready to transition into a client with a great project that you can charge more for, et cetera. And that’s why we want to look really pro with this. So two things we’re going to focus on are:

Completion of a purchase– we want to make that a very professional moment
Delivery of the productized service

So there are those two places we’re going to work on today.

You’ll see– you don’t have to do the work with me today. Don’t worry. But if you go back and do this again later– and we know that some people have done exactly that– you’ll want to use Typeform. I’m going to walk you through that today. You’ll want to use Packs. I’ll walk you through that. And you’ll want to use Calendly. So these systems are going to work really nicely together to make you look pro, to give you notifications about things, all of the stuff that you’re trying to get done. OK.

Completion of a Purchase [05:16]

So this is the thing. Someone adds it to cart. They go through. They buy it. They land on a page. What is that page they land on? Oftentimes, this is what you pause on when you’re putting together a productized service or anything. Like where do we actually drive them to? And it can feel like there’s a lot of work on that side. There doesn’t have to be.

So this is where you want to drive them to, just a quick landing page, a confirmation page, but they should do something on it. A lot of times it’s like a dead end, like, Oh, go check your email, well there’s a link in there or something like that. And then they have to close the tab down. When in fact, they could actually do that work that they need to do so that when they close this tab down, they don’t have to go and do anything else anywhere.

So what you want to do on that confirmation page, your whole focus is to make sure that they fill in this really basic intake form, and I’m going to walk you through it. But you want to match that they have purchased a thing. So you’ve just booked a website audit with Joanna Wiebe, sub in your name. Oh, the example today is going to be for a website audit, and that’s largely because I’ve done so, so many of them that I can speak really easily to this particular productized service.

So you’ve just booked a website audit with Joanna Wiebe. Cool. There’s your headline that’s matching what they expect. OK, good. It’s booked. Now, please complete the short form so we can get started. They need to know that you can’t begin without this. And a quick note here that if they don’t have everything they need to complete this form, they should bookmark it.

Let them know how much time they’re allowed before you’ll either refund their money or it’s no longer available to them. So how much time they can take to fill in this form, and I’m going to walk you through the form and show you why they sometimes might need to take a little bit of extra time.

Oftentimes they don’t, and in fact, I think of all the website audits that I sold when I was doing productized services, this is earlier on in the life of Copyhackers, they were, I think there might have been one or two of many of dozens who didn’t immediately submit all of the information that they needed. And eventually they did, it was like two months later, two weeks later, that kind of thing.

OK. So we want to make sure there’s a very simple page that we land them on and then what goes in here? This is your embedded intake form. So I’m going to flip over to the Typeform. We recommend Typeform because it’s the best. I’m just going to hopefully go straight back to that original create, cool. So you can do anything with it, and you can set up notifications so you’re alerted as soon as someone completes this form.

So just a quick heads up on how to do that. I’m over here on the right signed into our account, of course, you can set up notifications. So this is going to be the intake form, and that means you’ll probably get a notification from Shopify or WooCommerce or whatever when somebody buys your productized service, and that’s great. So you’ll know, cool, OK, there’s a form coming, but you need to know when a person has completed this form.

So I just want to turn on email notification that’ll give you an email when someone completes your Typeform, you can send it to if it’s your VA or somebody on your team who’s going to complete the audit or the product to service, cool, add that in there, any of this stuff. We’re not going to go through filling this in but this is what you’ll want to make sure you have set up. Again, you just hit Settings and choose Notifications in order to make sure that you get those notifications as soon as somebody submits.

OK, so what actually goes in that intake form, for lack of a better word. I never called it that when I was doing productized services but people do, so I’m just going to call it that now. OK. So here’s how we’ve set it up, and you can go through. If you’re in the pack that I shared that we used last week, and that you first signed into or you first saw when you said yes to attending these Tutorial Tuesdays– hold on, we have automated lights in here, just went off. OK I’m operating in the dark hopefully it looks OK on screen and I’m not like in Blackness. OK.

So, yes, you’ll be able to go in and actually play around with this just like– Oh, sorry. Zoom just came down to not being able to show you. I can’t go up to the top, there we go just went away. I’ll Zoom. So you can see it in here, and you can go through and test it out. So on and so forth. OK.

What we also really like about Typeform and what makes you again look extra pro like you’re actually trying and thinking through things is this recall. So any question that they answer, you can later use, which is why we want to ask them, Hi, what’s your first name? They enter their first name, and then from that point on, you can populate that in any question that you have like, “Hi there, Joanna. Let’s get your website audit started. Just a few short questions where I can before I dive in.” OK?

And then you ask them basic information because you’ll need to know what their email address is, what their company name is, in most cases, this is going to be a business reaching out to you. Even if they’re a really small business, they’ll still have a company name. That’s one of the first things you think of when you’re establishing a company, no matter how small it is. So they’ll have a company name, make sure you’ve got it in there. This way you can, of course, populate that information later.

So for best results, just use this as you’re seeing it. And again, you can go back into what I’ve already shown you, those Packs that you have and just go through them and basically copy exactly what I’m doing here, and this will help you set up that productized service. Oh, Ann just came and turned my light on. Thanks Ange.

“What are your goals in getting me?” So ask them what their goals are, make this really straightforward and simple. And then you’re ready to dig into what they’re looking for in this case, website audit.

So when you’re doing a website audit, when you’re doing a sales page, you’ll only ask for the one URL. Like if you’re going to do a sales page review, tell me the URL of your live sales page. And if they don’t have that, it might be a Google doc that they need to give you a link to, so just make it clear to your prospect or to your customer, what’s going on and what they need.

In this case, if you’re doing a website on– if you’re like, Jo, I don’t know what product service to do, just do a website audit, people love them. You can charge about 997 for them, so a good use of your time.

“What’s the page you’d like me to focus on?” they should enter that URL. Don’t put anything in here that isn’t required. That’s just a good survey creation overall, if it’s not required, people are not going to fill it in. So what’s the page you’d most like me to focus on, cool.

“Are there other pages you’d like me to audit?” I have three of those. The only– these are not– Sorry, I just said, don’t put unrequired in there. But these are not required because there might not be another page that I need audited. So the question 6 that we have here and question 7, these are for the two other pages that you want me to look at. Neither of those is required, but the first one is you need to know what that initial URL is that you’re going to be reviewing.

Then ask them why they chose that one page as the focus. This will help you better understand how important that page is to their business, what their challenges are with what they’re thinking at all, and then you want to know about their ideal customers.

So don’t ask too many questions. This is part of the problem with– I know products and services that I’ve bought. There’s one product service I purchased it was about $2000 and the intake form was like 30 questions. I was like, literally, I could just do this in the time. It took me a year to fill in the form, because I just kept putting it off. So don’t add in any friction.

You really don’t need to know everything under the sun in order to do a heuristic analysis of somebody’s website. You need basically to know what their customer is, and maybe something about their product itself. Although, as soon as you dig into that question, if you ask them, “Tell me about your product,” it might be an e-commerce site where they’re like, well there are three products here, and now they have to tell you all about them. So I’m like, just only ask the things that you absolutely need and you can’t figure out just by looking at the website.

One of those might be what’s your value proposition? Which you want to know, but which– remember that’s your customer, almost never actually know is what their value proposition is. So don’t put anything in there that will delay them completing the form, because productized services are supposed to move fast. That’s how you make money, you get the job done, they get what they need, and you all move on with your lives because no one has time for this.

OK. “Is this– is the majority of traffic to the site made up your ideal customers?” So if you want to know about their ideal customer, then you also want to make sure what is this page actually converting those people or are they actually coming here? And then ask them what bothers them most. And I think that’s like intentional word, like, what’s bothering you enough that you’re coming here to me today.

And then you want to say, great. Fine. When would you like me to start this, and what is my deadline? Then any final notes. So feel free to go through this Typeform in that pack and again, I’ll share that before we’re out of here today. Cool. So once they’ve completed that, then you want to make sure. Of course then we have this final note here that confirms, Great, I’ve got it. And here’s the deadline. I’ll get it to you by then. Cool.

That’s it. Now you can go forward and do that, and with that notification that you’ve set up, you’ll have all of that information in your inbox so you can quickly turn it into a Google Calendar meeting or whatever you want to do in order to make sure you schedule that work. So in the case of a website audit, you’re likely going to again, charge about $997 for it, and take about two 2 and 1/2 hours to complete it. Now what you put in the website review or audit is another story.

Delivery of the Productized Service [14:50]

When you’re going to deliver that productized service, the website review in this case, to your customer, you want to make sure– this is a moment when a lot of people kind of throw everything at their customer in an email or you’re like, hey, here’s a link to the review or here’s an uploaded video, in some cases, of my review. Here’s a PDF of the report that I’ve made, et cetera, et cetera.

So you have to figure out what’s going to go in there, but what you want to do is make sure no matter what, no matter how lean it is, and again, try to keep it pretty lean, people have remarkably low expectations of a productized service. So you don’t have to add in all the bells and whistles.

You should have the video review, which you should do. You should likely have a transcript so that they can go through and make notes because they’ll want to do that if you had a lot of great ideas particularly. And then you want to make sure there’s a way for them to book a 30-minute follow-up with you. That 30-minute follow-up is important. You think it’s going to work like, Oh, do I have to?

This is them post falling in love with you in that website audit or whatever they did. They now get to come talk with you. They rarely ask, in my experience, they rarely ask questions about what you said, what you recommended, they’re usually like OK, here’s what we’re doing with this– in my case– here’s what’s we’re doing with this Jo. And then they want to ask you how to maybe work with you more.

So think of this as again, this is all paid legion, and now you have a consult where they’re largely going to pitch you on a project to work with them. So it’s a really good thing. Now if you don’t look pro, they’re unlikely to pitch that. So you want to make sure that when you’re delivering that productized service, you’ll look good.

So here’s an example of how to deliver that productized service. So match who they are, right? Like, “Hi, here’s your completed website audit.” Any messages you want to add in there it’s the kind of stuff that you would normally squish into an email, but they would then have to like forward to their team. And now they’re having like a threaded conversation when in fact, they usually have conversations in Slack.

When you share just a single pack link with them, they can pop that into their Slack and say, hey guys take a look at this. They can, of course, still forward it if they want to, if they’re actually in email a lot, they can do that. But it’s all in one place, and so they don’t risk losing like, Oh, where did that Loom video go, and where that attachment that we had. It’s all here. And that helps you look pro because it makes their lives easier, and that’s what we really want to do as freelancers. Make them look better, make their lives easier, that is actually what they’re hiring you for.

OK, so here you are. In here, you show them the pages that you audited. So in this case, again, it’s a website audit. Just remind them, “These are the three pages that you ask me to audit,” and then you get into your video review. So in this case, I’m recommending that when I was first doing productized services, we couldn’t do– what we did, I used Camtasia, and I would then download an MP4 and then upload it, and it was this whole disaster. And now you have Loom.

So I recommend, if you can break it up, just think about how your customer is going to consume this review. They might send you three URLs that they want you to review, they would like to then look at each of those reviews. Not one big review, so try to do if they’re like, OK, I would like you to look at our home page, our sales page, and our services overview page. Cool.

Do your home page review, make that a single Loom, pop it in here, embed it so it looks nice, it’s the primary one in particular. Then the sales page do as its own, and then the services overview do as its own. This way, we can speak specifically, and we can share certain links around with our team without being like your customer can go like, Oh guys, did you check out the sales page review. I have a few notes, we should discuss this. And then they can put that all in wherever they’re going to put it, in Slack or in a meeting invitation et cetera.

And then have your transcript all those in there so I can get this full video review. And already, I feel like this person has their shit together because it’s all in one place and I can actually just go share it with my team.

Then we have a written report with list of ideas. A lot of people are looking just for a bunch of ideas. So if you can do that work you don’t have to have a full report, you can really come up with like a checklist of everything you came up with, all of your ideas, and voila, it’s there for them. And now they’re like, cool, we can turn this into our A/B testing calendar for the next quarter or even for the next entire year.

And then you want to finish with scheduling that 30-minute consults. This is where we have our Calendly embedded right in here. I’ve got it over here. If you’re not sure how to embed a Calendly you can just go right in here and say, Add to website. So sign in to your Calendly go– obviously I’ve got a lot of stuff here– go Add to website, that will give you options. Just do inline embed, it’s the easiest and that’ll put you over, and you can just copy and paste it.

So you copy it from there and you just paste it in here. You can also just paste it through add HTML, but this is just to make it easier for newer people. You can just right click and paste anything or do Command-V or Control-V and paste anything anywhere inside PAX. And so that’s what you send them in the end. You share the pack, make sure it’s view only, because you’re unlikely to need them to collaborate with you on this, and then you send this link out to them.

So I’m going to share this with you right now. So you have this. That’s not going to send to host and panelist. Paul’s like, Thanks, can you share it with the team? OK. So you can see everything there. This is also– I’ll share this to that. Cool. All right, so now you have that. Those are the two pages that you need with embedded Typeform and with that embedded Calendly link. That’s what you need to deliver a productized service in a way that’s going to make your clients think you’ve got your poop in a group, all right?

Cool, cool. We’ll see you next week for part three of our four-part mini-course on being a pro freelancer, looking like you are. All right, see you all next week. Bye, everyone.