As a small home service business, you deliver a service or some services to your customers.  That’s an obvious statement; but have you considered that this is your product?

The reason for asking this apparently bizarre question is that one such home service business commented recently that “we don’t sell products”.  In a sense this is true because there’s no physical item at the end of the process; it’s not as if they’re selling an iPad, a motor vehicle, dishwasher, or anything else.  But by taking such an intangible approach and assuming that the customer cannot see anything, the home service business is actually making life more difficult for themselves.  How do you sell something that essentially doesn’t exist?

When a business designs and sells a product, decisions are made about how it looks, how it feels, its features, what makes it unique, and what attracts the buyer to part with their cash and make a purchase.  But there’s no reason why these types of decisions shouldn’t be made when defining your service.

Here are three reasons why:

1. Differentiation – make yourself stand out from your local competitors and define what is so special and different about your service.  In the same way that a physical product manufacturer cares about the aesthetics that make their product look unique, apply this logic to your service to help make it stand-out and sell.
2. Vision – despite the earlier comment about selling something that “doesn’t exist”, the reality is: it does exist.  By defining exactly what you are selling, you can then paint a picture, a vision, in the mind of the customer.  They may not physically “see” your product but by outlining exactly what the customer gets, they will clearly “get it.”
3. Tangibility – how you market your product is more than just the product itself because you need to look at how you price and promote this, and where you sell it.  By ignoring the product aspect and not describing your service, you have nothing to price and promote: there’s nothing to sell!

The third point from the list introduces the powerful, but simple, technique called the Marketing Mix and we will provide an overview of this in a forthcoming blog.

As a small home service business, what are your thoughts about this perspective?