Everything you need to launch a productised service agency

Disclaimer
I'm in the product development service business for 10+ years. Now I'm building a SaaS to automate our own agency of 150 people to productise our startup services. Here's the playbook that we automate.

Website — collect leads and build trust

Your website is a central place to lead your potential customers to. Launch your page from day 1 and improve daily.

• Portfolio — show your best work
• Testimonials — show the comments from clients about your work
• Resources — prove you know your thing. Resources can be free, gated or paid:
  • Articles and tutorials to educate your audience
  • Embed social media posts to show that you’re alive
  • Directories with best resources in your niche
  • Info-products and templates to let your audience do it themselves
  • Micro-SaaS to gain more users

Service offers — what you sell, exactly

The typical funnel is a fixed project (eg. get your design in 2 days) that leads to the subscription to book you long-term.

• Concise description/pitch. Each service is a landing page.
  • Title
  • Description
  • Main image / demo explaining the service
  • Call-to-action (submit form)
• Price
  • One-time (with prepayment, full-payment, pay on delivery)
  • Subscription (per week/per month), cancel anytime
  • Increase price every N clients and show it publicly to create scarcity and generate sales. Start with low price and say what the normal price is (x10)
  • Use promocodes for specific communities or your past clients
• Deliverables — what exactly your client will get after project / during subscription
• Timeline — when exactly you'll deliver what
• Revisions — how many times client can request changes
• Example Portfolio

Client portal — serve client requests

Keep your customers updated on the status of their requests, communicate, get feedback and upsell.

• Client sign in / sign up
• Submit requests and pay
• List of services (the same as website)
• Schedule call
• Project Board — track requests statuses and update requests
• Async chat with customers via cards (with email notifications)
• Collect feedback from customers
• Affiliates — refer friends and earn % of their payments (20—30%)

Analytics

Identify your key metrics to measure your efforts. Regularly research your analytics and take action.

• Web analytics — general performance of each individual page
• Conversion rate — each page has conversion rate: click or submission
• Session recording — see how user interacts with a page
• Clicks analytics — see what elements are being clicked
• Product analytics:
  • Users signups
  • Request submitted
  • Subscriptions bought

Engage your customers

Once you won a customer you should keep in touch with them, while bringing them value. They already trust you and more likely to engage/refer/buy.

• Send manual emails
• Send group emails (newsletters)
• Live customer chat in client portal
• Share results of your work and testimonials to social media

Automations and notifications

You want to be notified immediately about new activity from customers and keep communication on.

• Send automated emails on signup or first request etc. Make it easy to update emails to experiment
• Get Slack notifications on new requests, payments and messages
• Get email notifications

That's it!

Please comment if you have any questions, I'd love to expand on any topic!

PS I'm building Momentum where we automate this exact playbook. Use Momentum to launch your productised service agency in minutes.

Thank you!