At any stage of your business, whether you’re just starting or you run a fully established organization, the success of your business is highly dependent on the success of the product or service you’re offering.
If you’re just starting to grow your business, you may think you know what your company does. But even more important is being able to clearly articulate your product vision to others.
Defining Your Product or Service Offering
When it comes to your product or service, clarity is essential. Clearly defining what you do is directly tied to the success of your sales and marketing efforts. Clearly defining the products or services you sell will help you differentiate your offering in the marketplace, which is key to revenue growth.
A clear definition is a model designed for scalability. It provides focus that helps you know how the product or service sells and the location of the appropriate market fit.
The most understated advantage of being able to define what you it that it allows you to define what you do not do.
This skill is a great filtering or decision-making mechanism for your focus of time. Often, businesses lose money by spending too much time and resources serving customers who do not have a good fit with their primary product offering. Extra time and resources are used to facilitate the sale and support those customers when the business could be serving a more ideal fit.
Having clarity gives you the confidence to say no, and focus on serving customers in your target audience.
In this post, we’ll outline a quick exercise you can use to identify and clearly defining your product or service offering.
Do you charge enough for your product or service? Let’s find out!
Increase Your Profit for FreeStep 1: Identify what currently exists:
Answer the following questions to set the table for the product/service exercise.
- What offering descriptions do you have in place today?
- What does your sales/marketing collateral or website consist of?
- Do you use any tools or processes to deliver your product or service?
- Do you have a product/service matrix with pricing mapped out? If you haven’t yet, you should create a product/service matrix.
Step 2: Product/Service Offering Analysis Exercise
Grab some note-taking material and answer the following questions about your business.
- Identify and lay out what you do at a high and low level.
- Why do you sell or provide what you do?
- If you don’t change, what happens and why?
- What is your strategy?
- Product Matrix: What is your most/least popular?
- Product Matrix: What is your most/least profitable? If you don’t know, stop here and calculate the gross margin for everything you offer. (Check out this tool to find out if you charge enough for your product or service)
- How do you feel about your offering (likes/dislikes)?
- What do you think about your competitor offerings?
- Do you have any voids/excesses in your matrix?
- What is your core offering?
- When did you last watch a customer use your product or service?
- What does your offering solve?
Now that you have analyzed what you offer in detail. What stands out to you? If you broke out each part of your offering, is there anything that could stand alone as an offering?
This exercise should help you refine the information conveyed to others. If it’s not clear, identify where you can cut or refine your messaging to be concise in both your offering and your description to others? The descriptions and pitch should be in layman’s terms without any industry jargon. Everyone hates jargon, don’t do it.
Remember, because you sit around all day thinking about what your business does in your head doesn’t mean anyone else understands what you do.
Lay it out, refine, and repeat. Simplify and focus.
If you’re not sure where to start, or you want help refining your messaging, you don’t have to go at it alone. Schedule a free two-hour session to dig into your business and identify areas you can simply and improve your messaging, pricing, or product/service fit.
Brad Kreutz is an Advisor for small business owners with Cultivate. Brad has a passion for translating business goals into strategy. Pulling from more than 17 years of experience as a 4x co-founder/owner, Brad brings an outside perspective to help business owners overcome their challenges, create a scalable platform, and grow their business.
