What is a Service Offering and Why Does My Company Need One?
A service offering helps to define a level of a service for a specific price. It combines the service and a service level target to bring value to a customer. Essentially, a service offering helps to package the services you offer in an attractive way that makes it easy for customers to understand what they are getting for their money. It also helps to ensure that companies are profitable when they do a job for a customer.
A lot of times customers can tack on extra services when you are doing a job for them. You don’t want to say no because you want to maintain a good relationship with them, but you do want to get paid. Having a variety of different service packages can help to make sure that your customers understand what services are being offered in a package. It also helps customers understand that if they want an additional service they are going to have to upgrade their package and pay more. Having service packages protects your business from losing revenue because your clients will understand more clearly that additional services cost more and will be less likely to hassle you about doing an additional service free of charge or at a discounted price.
Here are 7 steps to help build a service offering:
Start with Most Popular Service: Choose your most requested service and start with that. What people come to you for most is what they are going to want to see in a service offering. From here you can add on additional services to create several other packages.
Cost per Services: List out what you charge for each individual service. Remember that price is an important part of building a service offer. You should not be losing money from these packages.
Number of Hours/Sessions: List out how many hours or sessions you will need with a client to be effective in completing your services. You want to properly estimate how much time it is going to take you to complete a service. This way your client knows how much time they can expect from you and you know how much time you need to dedicate to them. Note: Multiply what you charge for a service by how much time on average you spend on service in order to get an estimated cost of your service offering.
Additional Services and Extras: Create a complete list of any additional services you offer your clients. This includes any extra services, handouts, resources, and any behind the scenes work you do. From here put a dollar value next to all the additional services you offer.
Find the Cost of All Additional Work and Extras: Multiply how much behind the scenes work and additional services you do by the hourly rate for each of these services. Doing this will help you to understand how much free or discounted services you have been given away to clients.
Find the Total Cost: Add together the services you charge multiplied by your hourly or session rate with how much behind the scenes work and additional services you provide multiplied by your hourly rate for this work. Formula: ((service x hourly/session rate) +((behind the scenes work + additional services)(hourly/session rate))) = Total Cost
Making an Attractive Offering: Once you have done this and found out what your total cost is you can divide that by the number of sessions/hours you plan to offer in the package in order to make the total costs look more affordable. It also makes clients think that they are getting a better deal on a service. Another way to make a service offering more attractive is to show it to clients as a monthly subscription plan. Clients like to see that your services will continue for the same price from month-to-month. Note: You can offer clients payment plan options to make them feel more secure and ready to spend money on your services.
Creating a service offering is so important because it helps outline what services you are going to provide your clients with. It also helps to make sure that your business is not giving away any free services and are getting paid for all the services they are doing. If you have a service packages and want help featuring them on your website or letting your customers know about them contact us. We will help to make sure your customers know about all the services you have to offer!