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| Keri Toomey |
The professional services model has always sold one thing above all else: bespoke expertise. The right people, with the right knowledge, custom fit to your specific problem.
That expertise still has value. What's changing is the conditions under which clients will pay for it. AI has compressed timelines and reduced client tolerance for the ramp-up that used to be an accepted part of every engagement. They want outcomes, not just access to the people who’ll eventually figure out how to get them. And in a market where every services firm claims deep expertise and proven results, credentials alone are no longer enough to close the gap.
The marketing and communications teams navigating this shift most successfully are the ones taking a cue from the tech industry and building the packaging, clarity, and market presence that turns expertise into something tangible for buyers.
What to Productize and What to Protect
Professional services are drawing inspiration from the tech industry to reshape the way they serve their clients. Technology companies begin with a defined user problem, build a recognizable offer around it, and improve that offer through market feedback.
What should be productized in professional services is the repeatable: the methodologies, frameworks, and technology-enabled workflows that a firm applies consistently across engagements. Things like audit processes, diagnostic frameworks, onboarding workflows, and implementation playbooks; the kinds of elements that don't require a senior partner's judgment on every step. Packaging them creates consistency, efficiency, and something the market can actually evaluate before buying.
What should not be productized is the judgment that makes each client engagement distinct. The ability to read a situation and tailor a plan to that specific situation is the expertise clients are ultimately paying for. Reserve the bespoke thinking for the decisions that genuinely require it and make everything else easily repeatable.
The result is a firm that can deliver faster, more predictably, and at greater scale while still offering the specialized analysis and creativity that brought clients to them in the first place.
| This article is featured in O'Dwyer's September '26 Financial PR/Investor Relations & Professional Services PR Magazine |
Making Expertise Buyable
Productizing expertise fundamentally changes how firms go to market and expands what marketing and communications teams are responsible for. The traditional services marketing playbook was built around credibility: credentials, case studies, thought leadership that demonstrate what the firm knows. All of that still matters, but in a productized model, clearly communicating what the firm does is equally important.
Professional services buyers should not have to schedule three meetings to understand what they're purchasing. They should be able to quickly answer four questions: Who is this for? What problem does it solve? How does it work and how long does it take? What should I expect as an outcome?
For marketers, this means developing the packaging discipline that consumer and technology companies have made so successful. B2B buyers are consumers too, and increasingly there is a need to be able to compare features and outcomes like similar products on Amazon. Each offering should have a clear name, a defined scope, transparent timelines and expected outcomes.
The Long-Term Play: Iteration as Strategy
Productized services create new commercial opportunities: entry points for prospective clients who wouldn't have engaged with a traditional open-ended proposal, and ways to deepen value for existing clients by expanding the relationship into adjacent offerings.
But as the technology industry has demonstrated, products only succeed long term when they evolve. A methodology that served clients well two years ago may need to be updated as market conditions shift, new tools emerge, or client expectations change. A framework that worked for one segment may need to be tweaked to suit another.
The firms that get this right treat their productized offerings as living assets that improve through market feedback, performance data, and deliberate iteration. Each engagement provides more information to further refine and improve the offerings. Over time, the company builds a portfolio of refined, market-tested offerings that carry the firm's expertise in a form the market can understand, buy, and return to.
That's the real opportunity in the productization shift. Not just operational efficiency, but scalability and a new kind of institutional knowledge that lives in the offering itself, not only in the people who deliver it. For marketing and communications leaders, it’s the chance to differentiate from the competition by building offerings that clients can understand while simultaneously telling the story of a firm that keeps getting better at what it does.
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Keri Toomey is Executive Vice President, Professional Services at Highwire.
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