Product Innovation: How to Transform Your Professional Services Into Scalable Products

Product and service boundaries are being blurred. It’s time to review how you deliver value.

In order to remain relevant in a global competitive landscape dominated by increasing global players, you’ll need service packages with clear, measurable deliverables. Despite your ability to handle competition and lead your space, productization still needs to be considered.

By bundling your services into products, you can provide a better customer experience and serve more clients simultaneously while scaling your business.

When deciding whether to begin productizing your services, how would you know if you are ready?

In this episode, Eisha Tierney Armstrong shares how you can be ready, and how productization and product innovation can help you scale your services and ultimately grow your business.

Eisha Armstrong is a business leader with expertise in product innovation and product portfolio management. She has extensive experience launching new data and information service businesses, building executive education products, advising c-level executives, and overseeing data analysis and qualitative research in a recurring revenue model. She currently serves as an advisor to B2B C-Suite executives, guiding them through market research, new product innovation, new product design and launch, and digital transformation journeys. Most recently, Eisha was the Managing Director of MarketPredict (www.market-predict.com), a predictive analytics service offered by the E.W. Scripps Company. Prior, Eisha was a Managing Director and Finance Practice Leader at CEB, now Gartner, the world’s largest membership-based corporate performance research and advisory company.

Eisha has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kansas. She currently serves on the Advisory Boards for Datazar (www.datazar.com) and Gild Collective (www.gildcollective.com) and she is on the Board of Directors of Women Helping Women (https://www.womenhelpingwomen.org/). She is a Limited Partner in Next Wave Impact, which is working to increase women’s participation in angel investing while investing in companies that achieve both social impact and financial return.

Eisha is an RYT 200 certified yoga teacher and she teaches a weekly power yoga class at Move Your Hyde yoga studio (http://www.moveyourhyde.com).

Podcast Timestamps/Outline

02:01 – Introduction

03:14 – About Eisha Tierney Armstrong

05:04 – How does a company that is trying to innovate products look like?

07:46 – The different types of B2B productization opportunities

11:03 – The seven deadly productization mistakes to avoid

14:57 – Top 1 or 2 productization mistakes

16:51 – How to apply creative thinking and become a disruptor? The Productize Pathway

19:37 – Creating solutions and identifying the fundamental marketplace problem.

21:37 – How Eisha was able to evolve and expand the identification of the FMP

24:58 – Advice on market research

26:20 – How to accelerate the Productize Pathway

28:23 – Why you do not need to attempt all parts of the productize pathway at one time

32:02 – The importance of creative thinking and innovation in productization

33:26 – The 3 product innovation principles

35:41 – The productize pathway in terms of growth and acquisition

37:44 – What should a B2B digital marketer be asking themselves right now?

38:55 – How Eisha is doing productization to her own services

41:49 – How to get others to start thinking creatively

44:32 – Connect with Eisha Tierney Armstrong

Memorable Quotes

“Innovation is a muscle that every CEO needs to build.”

“Think big, but start small.”

“Follow urgent and expensive customer problems.”

“Be fearless. Do not let fear of failure hold you back from launching your product.”

“Creativity is a muscle that can be developed over time.”

Episode Links and Resources

Eisha’s company website: https://www.vecteris.com/ 

Eisha’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eishatierneyarmstrong/ 

Eisha’s book: https://amzn.to/3EIhmJp 

Digital activity ROI assessment: https://b2bdm.com/digital-activity-roi/ 

More episodes related to innovation: https://b2bdm.com/deep-insights-on-customer-experience/