How Your Offer Integrates Products and Services

This survey of functional elements of value, considers practical aspects of products or services.  One challenge is to show what integrates products and services in your higher level offers.

What is It?

If you sell a service, is there anything you can automate at the same time?  The aim is convenience.  For one set of inputs, the customer receives a range of outputs.

Let’s say you market a system for recording accounts.  Your customer’s primary concern is end of year accounts for tax purposes.  Each month, you enter their income and expenditure item by item.  At the end of the year, the system produces annual accounts for tax returns.

This same information generates monthly management accounts with projections.  This may be of more value to the customer than the annual accounts.

If you are a life coach, offer other services as bonuses to your main offer.  As you get to know your client, if they want those services, offer them at no extra charge.

Value to the Customer

You may find secondary items integrated into your offer are more popular than the main offer.  Most accountants integrate annual accounts and management accounts.  Customers approach the accountant because they need help with annual accountants, which they must complete.  They find management accounts more useful, even though they did not expect them when they first approached the accountant.

However, be aware piling on more bells and whistles is not always positive.  We all use software that does far more than what we use it for.  It is possible we would use more if we knew how to use it but a lot of these add-ons are clutter.  They take up disk space and confuse an otherwise user-friendly interface.

How to Get There

If you create bricolage, one thing piled on top of another, it is not integration.  You are likely to produce a confusing mess.

A well-integrated package brings together several services customers want and delivers them with least possible inputs.

How do you work this out?  It depends on knowing your customers and what they need and want.  How do they go about their work?  How can you develop something they find easy to operate that delivers what they need with least effort?

Your Offer

Think about your customers, the way they work and what they need to complete their work.

Offer integrated products and services that exceed their expectations.  Aim for simplicity combined with high-powered utility.

This is the twenty-third of 31 posts about elements of value.  Make sure you don’t miss any by signing up for the offer below.  The posts in this sequence can be accessed below:

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