Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now it's Aisha Armstrong. Aisha, you are executive chairman and co-founder of victorious. You're found on the web@victories.com. But I think most people may know of you as the author of the books.

Speaker 1 00:01:20 Productize very popular book fearless and the upcoming the forthcoming book commercialize. Well, Aisha, it's great to have you.

Speaker 2 00:01:30 Oh thank you, Josh, it's such a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 00:01:33 Back in 2021, I read Productize, I loved it, and I'll share with you. Aisha. Listen, I'm with you. I think folks need this information, particularly if I am being empathic to the world of solutions providers, agencies. We work with a lot of agencies and consultants and coaches who may be offering, you know, larger ticket engagements or to count based sales, likely, you know, have ups and downs quite a bit. And Productize answers a lot of questions and I think provides a roadmap that might be exceptionally valuable for our friend listening to us. Aisha, would you mind maybe just sharing a little bit about your kind of your main thrust in the world and your impact?

Speaker 2 00:02:23 Yeah. So, what I saw in the market was more and more professional services providers. So like you said, consultants, law firms, agency owners who wanted to get away from trading at their time for money to selling their intellectual property, and how could they scale their business, in a way that allowed them to have better margins and perhaps even increase the value, of their business with maybe more recurring revenue, predictable revenue, things like that, and product ization.

Speaker 2 00:02:58 When you take a service and you standardize it, perhaps you automate it using technology. you sell it based on value rather than time and materials. That is a great way to, to scale your, your business. and it's a great way to increase the valuation of your company. so that's what we saw was this increased interest in product ization, but then not having the skill sets, or the people who really had a product mindset, to be able to do that successfully.

Speaker 1 00:03:33 And so it may seem easier said than done when we think about what it takes to productize and package up, what has maybe been historically a very high touch, high attention service to an audience that demands it. How do we thread the needle on providing a solution that consumers or our potential clients want versus, you know, and I'll just put this objection out there. I think just offering courses alone might be a little challenging today.

Speaker 2 00:04:10 Yeah, that's a great, great question and observation, Josh. So, in fact, that's one of the big mistakes that we saw.

Speaker 2 00:04:17 A lot of entrepreneurs, professional service, firm leaders make when they try to Productize is they create something that the market doesn't really need or want or is willing to pay money for. So, one of the things that I like to talk about is, does your product idea, does it solve an urgent and expensive customer problem? And if you can't articulate what is the urgent and expensive customer problem that your product is solving, then it may not be a great idea. And, the other thing that we found is that there tends to be a lot of hesitancy, especially from professional services providers who are so used to showing these like beautiful deliverables to their clients to kind of test half baked ideas. But that is actually the best way, Josh, to test a product idea, you know, put together a couple slides, maybe some wireframes. you know, before you really invest in development and get market feedback on it. So that's something that that is a muscle that, you know, we try to build, in, in organizations and entrepreneurs who we work with.

Speaker 1 00:05:21 Well, let's let's share maybe just a bit, Aisha, about, how to get good market feedback, because there's certainly I'd say the way to get bad market feedback would just be, hey, I've been running a small boutique agency, and then you just pull your Facebook friends and say, should I do this? And I'm sharing this ridiculous, absurd way of doing this because that's exactly what I did many, many years ago. And boy, do I wish I did not do it that way. Because you need real, true product validation before you invest a lot of effort in here to make sure that this is something that the market is not, just wants to support you and make you feel good about, but they're willing to give you money for.

Speaker 2 00:06:07 Exactly. Yes. Very good point. Yeah. So there are right ways and wrong ways to do market validation. certainly you want to start with understanding what are your customer problems. so not even talking about concept ideas yet, but validating, you know, what are their goals? What are the challenges in reaching those goals? What might the root causes be of those challenges, and what are they currently doing to address those challenges? and there's all great, you know, different ways to do that research and, you know, best practices on how to ask those questions.

Speaker 2 00:06:37 But the best way, really, Josh, is to, try to sell them something and so you can mock things up. you can, you know, put up web pages. perhaps if it's something that can be sold via e-commerce, you could pitch them on being a beta customer. A paid beta customer. because if somebody will pay for a beta, it's a pretty good, you know, likelihood that there's some value there. and, and I really kind of getting over that discomfort of this isn't developed yet. It's not fully baked. I don't actually have it built yet. Can I really try to go out and sell it? The answer is yes. And that is one of the best ways to validate that there's market appetite for it.

Speaker 1 00:07:18 Yeah. Aisha, can you maybe share some examples, particularly maybe folks that were kind of SMB, B2B world people, and how they were able to identify an opportunity to create a product that was appropriate for their audiences.

Speaker 2 00:07:38 Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned training courses.

Speaker 2 00:07:40 So we were working with an innovation consulting firm, and they worked with large fortune 500 CPG financial services type companies, and they had this great methodology for how they worked with their clients, and they wanted to create a training program, that where they could, hopefully kind of asynchronous, you know, e-learning with a little bit of, synchronous learning over zoom. and they were going to go and develop it and we said, how about we, sell, then build and go out and see if we can get 20 people for your inaugural class. And if you can, then that's a good indication that we should go ahead and at least do the first MVP version of what that training looked like. But they didn't spend an ounce of time on development until they had sold those first 20 seats for the class, and then they spaced it out. And, you know, between week zero and week one, they built the content for week one. They then recorded how they the week one training so that they at least have that video that they could use for later versions.

Speaker 2 00:08:46 Then they built week two in between week one and week two. So it was really kind of a build the ship while sailing, in addition to not building until they'd sold those first 20 seats. and again, that can make a lot of people feel uncomfortable, especially for those of us who are perfectionists. But it's a great way to test. And they, you know, they were very upfront with people about how they were doing it. This is not our finished version. This is our our beta. So we're going to give you a discount. But they're still charging the money for it. and again that's helping them assess whether or not there's appetite for it. we've seen the same thing with software products, So especially, IT services firms that we work with who perhaps have developers on staff, and they're always coming up with these great software products that they could be creating. And it's like, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa. Before you go down the path and develop something, let's go out and see if some of your current clients might be willing to pay to co-develop it with you.

Speaker 2 00:09:41 and they're getting a big discount. Perhaps they get industry exclusivity for the first year, year and a half. they get to really put their fingerprints all over the product roadmap and really design it for their purposes. But they're funding that initial development, so not all of it is coming out of your pocket. And again, that's a great way to test. is there market interest in it? It's also a great way to get money in the door to start paying for development.

Speaker 1 00:10:07 Well, I'll share with you, Aisha, how we implemented Productize and and and to be fair, I think we need a a refresher because it was a few years ago, so it was kind of in the back of our brain, you know, kind of the key learnings from that. And we finally implemented, late last year and it was, you know, to to provide the feedback. So the feedback that we were getting, seemed to kind of move us in a certain direction. So, again, I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time developing something that the market didn't want.

Speaker 1 00:10:35 So we did. Our validation came up with a way where, you know, historically we've replaced. So we work with a lot of B2B folks and we help them keep their, sales schedules and their partner development schedules filled without having to do Legion or ads or that sort of thing. But, you know, it involves leading with a lot of generosity, a lot of go giver stuff. And it's been fairly high ticket like, we have to charge about $4,000 a month to do what we do. So obviously in our total market, you know, there's 95% of the population we just were priced out of we can't really work with. So we came up with we it's like what we did in our instance. I'm sure you have some similar examples. We basically took the exact same system that our own pod coaches use to build, implement and operate these systems for our clients. And we basically just opened up our playbook and we've done that at like one eight the cost. So now we have a 497 a month solution.

Speaker 1 00:11:30 Now I want to share with you, you know, kind of my story here. And then I'll share with you a couple of observations. We're very, very new in the market with this. So there's still a lot yet to come. But what I can tell you already, and I'm sure, this is going to be something that you're going to love to talk about is that when you have bigger clients and they get to the end of the lifecycle, or whatever reason, they decide that they're going to stop working with you as an agency. When you lose a big client, you feel it really hard. now, with the number of low ticket clients we have, you know, it's like a below ticket client comes or goes, okay, that's fine, you know? But what it's what's nice about that is that, you know, if there's someone listening to us, you're B2B right now. You're a consultant, coach, agency owner, B2B service provider, you're high ticket and you're sick of that up and down.

Speaker 1 00:12:22 You're sick of that instability. I think Asia offering low ticket solutions to kind of provide that cushion and that stable base. and again, I can speak for ourselves personally. Wow, am I grateful for that because we can count on that. And it's just you're spreading risk over a much larger pool.

Speaker 2 00:12:44 Yeah. No, that revenue diversification can be incredibly valuable. and I think it's it's a great strategy. and it's, it's certainly one that we see a lot of organizations do, which is how can we take what we're currently doing that costs a lot of money and offer it to a more price sensitive segment. the problem that we see with this and just kind of the, cautionary tale here is and it's why we're writing this new book, commercialized, it's coming out in the fall. Is that a more price sensitive market segment? Is is likely one that you're not currently targeting? Yeah. So what we see is organizations then underestimate the effort that is going to be required in order to reach and sell that more price sensitive segment.

Speaker 2 00:13:33 Yes. and they may also underestimate the customer success investment they have to make on the back end to retain those clients. Now, I know it's a lower price point. but the way that you get a great flywheel here is not through selling, you know, and then churning, but it's through selling and retaining, those, those lower price point customers. So those are just two watch outs. I guess that I would say, are important is if you're going after a new market segment, make sure in your business case you're thinking about how you're going to market and sell to them. because you're probably not doing that now and then. Second, what type of investment do you need to make in customer success to retain them long term?

Speaker 1 00:14:15 It's absolutely true. So when we, started emailing our list, we saw that by and large, our list wasn't necessarily interested in that. They or more of a crowd that, you know, again, they they just want it done for them. They, they don't want to be scrappy and DIY and that sort of thing So that you're absolutely right.

Speaker 1 00:14:38 you know, the audience is going to be a little bit different, you know, and are there any other I mean, those are really great. I agree, I, I'd say that the two kind of warning signs that you pointed out are probably, accurate to, to our experience. and, yes, product development took us twice as long as we thought it would, because all we thought was, shoot, all we're doing is just taking our internal stuff and just, you know, providing a podcast and a box and providing this in a box. And, you know, we found out that to, to to provide that for a noob audience, was going to require a lot more handholding. Right? We've built the Ikea furniture dozens of times, to our brand new customer. Now, at that lower price point, they're having to build that piece of furniture for the very first time. So they're going to need a pretty handy dandy menu. any other are there are there any, you know, between the time the productize came out? And again, I know you've got additional books that are, that have hit the market since then, but are there any other addendums or any other maybe updates that you would make today versus what you were talking about when the book originally came out a number of years ago?

Speaker 2 00:15:47 I mean, Jen, I was not on our radar.

Speaker 2 00:15:50 And I tell you, Josh, that has just really spiked demand for interest in product ization because a lot of the professional services providers that we work with are realizing that generative AI can do a lot of the things that they used to do and, and that their team perhaps is doing. So, you know, product ization is not just creating a new product for a new market, but it's also starting with how can you standardize and automate what you're already doing for clients? the client experience may still be the same, but you're just doing it more efficiently because it's standardized and automated, and gen AI has created the occasion to really go back and look quite, quite, carefully at what can be automated using this, this technology. and then the second thing is it should be giving providers more time and information to really uplevel what they're doing. So improve the quality of their deliverables, or perhaps start to go after customer problems they couldn't previously solve. so it's a it's an opportunity for innovation, and new solution development.

Speaker 2 00:16:58 And then the last thing I'll say is that it's a competitive threat. so we know, based on our work, based on our research, that our, core client base is being disrupted by people who are using this technology more effectively than they are. so if you're not already thinking about it, you're behind.

Speaker 1 00:17:17 Oh, totally. Yeah. And and I'll say to that, there is, the conversations that we had with ChatGPT is the, the platform that we used, are probably like, if I were to take, you know, kind of like the 2 or 3 main threads that that we worked with or the conversations. I they're probably about book length. Yeah. In terms of like, you know, and we really ideating hard. We really, really and we a lot of pushback don't just accept the default, you know, you know, answers to questions that you get, but you really have to use it. I'd say is more of a, you know, kind of a mind mapping process.

Speaker 1 00:17:58 You know, the default output is not necessarily the right answer, but it can help the humans within the organization to truly know the market or truly New York. Know your superpowers get closer much faster through the help of, you know, kind of this enabled guidance toward getting to that point of prioritizing in this case.

Speaker 2 00:18:18 Yeah, yeah. And and it's trainable. So you yeah, initially think of it as kind of a not so bright intern or new college graduate. But if you're investing in training, it, you can rapidly upskill it to do the work that you have people doing right now, for better or for worse.

Speaker 1 00:18:37 All right. So, Aisha, your new book, that's again, I think it's not coming out till the end of the year. Is that right?

Speaker 2 00:18:44 It's coming out in September. This fall.

Speaker 1 00:18:45 September? Well, then that's pretty close. Especially based on when this episode releases and it's called commercialized. Give us a sneak preview of what Commercializes about.

Speaker 2 00:18:55 Yeah. So we noticed, as I alluded to earlier, that a lot of entrepreneurs, professional services providers were under investing in the go to market of their new products.

Speaker 1 00:19:07 Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:19:07 And they didn't fully appreciate how difficult it might be to market and sell a product versus marketing and selling a service. so what we've done with commercialization is really look at all the steps in the go to market process from selecting your target markets, your pricing, your packaging, your messaging, your marketing tactics, and your sales channel. All of those key decisions that you have to make as a leader in order for your new product that you've developed. You've spent all this time developing it in order for it to hit your, your goals. so that's it was one chapter in Productize. It's a whole book now.

Speaker 1 00:19:44 Well, I just joined the street team. I'm excited for it because I think that again, that I absolutely agree. That's a huge part of this. It's not to build it and they will come. I mean, as much as gurus might tell you otherwise, it is a lot of work to. But that said, if you can get there and open up and truly start serving that new market, it really is exciting.

Speaker 1 00:20:09 Aisha, your website is victories.com Vectorize. To our friend listening. Just click around in your podcast app. Open up where we've got the information or the notes for this episode, and we've got a direct link to that. And I know that you've got some resources on your website. I should you mind sharing maybe next steps from this podcast conversation that our friend can go to?

Speaker 2 00:20:30 Yeah. So we have a great section, a knowledge share section where we have a lot of articles and tools that people can download, to help them think about what their products and opportunities might be, or if they have some product ideas, what are the next steps to really do that? Market validation. How do you ask these questions? Well, to to test it, how do you invite your clients in to co-create with you? And then what is successful go to market look like? So articles and tools, lots of things on our website. Please feel free to download those.

Speaker 1 00:21:00 Yeah. Do you also offer services then that you can work with folks?

Speaker 2 00:21:05 We do.

Speaker 2 00:21:05 We do. So we have our own product. We've drunk our own champagne and it's called the Productized Pathway. And it's a year long program that we take entrepreneurs and larger firms through to help them, build product ization capabilities. So it could be starting with what's your product ization strategy? it could be testing and developing a couple of new ideas, or it could be really refining and taking existing products to the next level.

Speaker 1 00:21:33 I love it. All right, well, listen, I. Aisha Armstrong, executive chairman and co-founder of vectorize. Your website is vectorize.com. And to a friend that's listening. Listen, you may know I should work already. Productize is in Amazon and everywhere. I read it back in 2021. your other book is called fearless and the new book upcoming is called commercialize, which is perfect for the market. Aisha Armstrong, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2 00:22:04 Oh, it's my pleasure, Josh, have a great day.

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