Productizing Your Agency’s Value: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters
The Definitive Guide
Productizing value reengineers how you create, deliver, and monetize impact—leveraging your agency’s expertise to command greater authority, stronger pricing power, and increased demand from premium clients. Productizing services simply repackages what you already do for efficiency gains.
You want to productize your value, not your services.
This guide explains why bundling services isn’t enough—and how true productization transforms your agency’s business model for scalable, high-margin growth.
The Crisis Agencies Can No Longer Ignore
“Forty percent of about 5000 global CEOs think their organization will no longer be economically viable in ten years if it continues on its current course.” – PWC’s 26th Annual Global CEO Survey, 2023
Does your agency share this same reality? For years, commoditization, declining fees, unsustainable workloads, and talent burnout have eroded the traditional model of selling time. Our industry is caught between client pressures for lower costs and faster turnarounds and the struggle to compensate top talent competitively.
Kevin Chesters, , former Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy, Dentsu, and Ogilvy, puts it simply:
“The reality for 99% of senior execs is an endless stress of being expected to do more with hugely expanding scopes of work and reduced fees.”
The result? A downward spiral:
Shrinking Margins: Average margins have dropped from 30% in the 1960s to 9% in 2020.
Diminishing Differentiation: Focusing solely on efficiency erases your creative edge.
Talent Attrition: The best talent is leaving when the focus is on volume rather than transformative impact.
The impact of AI is now the tipping point, accelerating the need for a fundamental change.
A Misguided Approach: Service-Level Productization
One common response is adopting productized services—that is, standardizing your current capabilities into packages with fixed deliverables and pricing.
This is productized efficiency, not productized value.
Beware: When you productize services, you standardize inputs (capabilities, processes) to deliver standardized outputs (deliverables). This optimizes efficiency, not client outcomes—risking your agency becoming a vendor with an a la carte menu rather than a strategic partner.
Many agencies mistakenly believe that simply bundling services equals productizing value.
Here are three dangerous assumptions that can hold your agency back:
Assumption 1: Efficiency Alone Solves Profitability
The reality: Streamlined processes may cut costs, but they don’t differentiate your firm’s value or boost your pricing power. Without:
Differentiating your value proposition,
Innovating your offerings to consistently deliver measurable outcomes and impactful results, and
Adopting value-led pricing…
…you’re still stuck in a race to the bottom.
This is most relevant today—according to the 4A’s and ANA 2024 report, "The Cost of the Pitch II – the Rise of Value," 90% of clients say they prioritize long-term ROI over short-term cost savings.
Assumption 2: Clients Value Standardization Over Strategic Insight
The reality: The most profitable engagements occur when agencies are true strategic partners. Simply standardizing services ignores the strategic, outcome-focused value that clients want, leaving your agency misaligned with their expectations for measurable impact.
This relates to a recent WFA and MediaSense study that revealed that 74% of multinational brands plan to transition to outcome-based pricing models within the next three years—driven by AI, automation, and a desire to better align compensation with business performance.
Assumption 3: Pre-scoped Deliverables IS Productization
The reality: The true value of a product isn’t the deliverable—it’s the bridge between the current state and a significantly improved outcome. In short, it unlocks transformative value for your client.
As Harvard Business School professor and marketing pioneer Theodore Levitt famously said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole."
Similarly:
You don’t buy ingredients at a restaurant; you buy the eating experience or a full belly.
You don’t buy a lawn mower; you buy the ease and vision of having a perfectly manicured lawn.
A true product is a structured, repeatable, and scalable solution to a need or problem. It’s the bridge to a better state—with pricing that reflects its inherent value. Without solving a meaningful problem, your deliverables are just checkboxes, masking an underlying reliance on billable time.
The consequences?
Engagements stay transactional
Deliverables become isolated tasks, detached from strategic impact
Scope creep continues in labor-based pricing
Scaling past headcount-driven revenue remains impossible
The Real Solution: Productizing Value, NOT Services
Agencies that break free from commoditization don’t just repackage existing services—they monetize their unique expertise by delivering outcome-driven solutions. These can be services, technology offerings, or a hybrid. Importantly, outcome-driven doesn’t mean pricing is tied directly to performance metrics—it means solutions are designed to address high-value business problems, and pricing reflects the expected strategic impact, not guaranteed results.
It’s a fundamental change to thinking about how your agency can deliver and capture value. When we move away from services to solutions, we're not constrained by people-only offerings, given the access we all now have to AI, automation, and no-code or low-code technology.
The benefits of this shift aren’t theoretical—it drives measurable strategic, financial, and operational advantages, leading to a more profitable, resilient, and scalable agency.
Professional service firms that productize their value can achieve:
2–3x faster revenue growth compared to traditional service models.
2-3x higher gross margins compared to custom project work.
30–50% fewer burnout triggers (e.g., scope creep, context-switching) and improved work-life balance.
6–8x revenue multiples (vs. 1–2x for traditional agencies).
However, these types of results come from a supporting combination of intentional shifts in positioning, pricing, and execution. You need to bridge the gap to scalable, outcome-driven success.
Bridging the Gap: Market Alignment, Value-Led Pricing, and a Go-to-Market Strategy
To truly productize your firm’s value, you must address three critical pillars that reshape how clients view and value your services.
1. Market Alignment
Achieving Solution/Market-Fit
Creating solutions that align with your client’s most critical outcomes is essential. The wrong offerings lead to weak demand, price resistance, and wasted resources.
The Solution/Market-Fit Matrix is the tool we’ve developed to eliminate this risk. You can use it to:
Identify Critical Problems: Map your client’s most pressing needs against your agency’s core strengths.
Prioritize for Impact: Determine which outcomes deliver the highest value to your clients.
Optimize Resources: Develop scalable, high-margin solutions and shed commoditized, price-sensitive work—even if it’s high volume.
Only after achieving solution/market fit should you move into a structured pricing strategy.
2. Value-Led Pricing
PRICING EXPERTISE, Not Effort
When you productize value, you don’t price what you do, what you make, or your time. Instead, you price the value of your expertise, your solutions, and the outcomes they deliver.
No hourly rates. You define value based on your client’s business needs and desired outcomes, not your agency’s labor.
No arbitrary fixed fees. Pricing is fixed but strategically aligned to the complexity of the problem, the solution’s value, and the agency’s unique expertise.
Not performance-contingent. While solutions are designed to drive measurable improvements, pricing reflects the agency’s specialized knowledge, intellectual property, and ability to solve high-value business problems.
In some cases, this structured pricing can also take the form of subscription-based or licensing agreements, further aligning value with long-term impact.
For example, Twentyrising, a forward-thinking Berlin-based creative agency founded by former Media.Monks executives, has introduced a hybrid subscription model that moves beyond transactional pricing structures.
“Essentially, clients pay based on the expertise level of the team, with a monthly fee covering ongoing strategic or executional work,” said Alkisti Stolp, co-founder and chief brand officer of Twentyrising. “You have an ongoing commercial agreement, which is all about either the daily business or the strategic framework, depending on the collaboration and the requirement from the client … [it’s not about saying] ‘OK, you will get three people that will spend five hours a month doing whatever.’”
This approach shifts the pricing conversation from billable hours to strategic impact, fostering deeper partnerships rather than transactional engagements.
Clients also prefer this model. Fabio Tambosi, Senior VP of Global Marketing at ESL FaceIt Group, described why he favors Twentyrising’s approach:
“These agency features are built over time and based on building a thought-partnership model versus the classic vendor relationship. We look for partners that can co-create, dream big with us, and check the creative ego at the door. We are evolving the hourly-based model or retainers to look for partners that can bring expertise, skillsets, and a hyper-collaborative mindset.”
This underscores an essential point: agencies that productize their value don’t just improve efficiency—they redefine the way clients engage, invest, and measure success.
Other firms experiment with performance-based pricing, but true productized models anchor pricing to expertise and solution design—not speculative marketplace outcomes often influenced by more factors than an agency can control. The fixed price reflects the agency’s ability to deliver transformation, not just outputs.
3. Go-To-Market Strategy
Selling Transformation, Not Transactions
A robust go-to-market plan is essential for ensuring your productized solutions reach the right clients and drive sustainable revenue. Align your firm across these five key areas:
Product: Clearly articulate the unique, outcome-driven value of your offerings.
Pricing: Develop structured pricing models that reflect the value of expertise, not time or effort.
Promotion: Shift marketing and sales narratives to emphasize transformation rather than execution.
People: Equip your team to sell strategic impact by refining messaging, training, and sales enablement.
Process: Optimize forecasting, client onboarding, and delivery workflows for repeatability and scale.
Within the key area of Promotion is the need for a new Revenue Generation Playbook.
Some highlights from the Revenue Generation Playbook we provide to agencies include:
An Ideal Client Profile (ICP) to sharpen and align the focus of your marketing, sales, and growth efforts.
An Objection Handling / FAQ Guide to equip client-facing teams to address procurement pushback and articulate your firm’s premium value. [link to my article]
A Messaging Platform to craft a consistent narrative that positions your firm as a transformational partner.
Content Pillars and Competitive Positioning Guidance to reinforce your differentiation and thought leadership across your content and in competitive situations.
Guides to Develop Scopes of Value and Outcome-Based Agreements to transition from cost-based to value-led pricing.
A Guide for Exploring Recurring Revenue Models to identify subscription and licensing opportunities for predictable, recurring income.
Beyond Productization: Engineering Market Leadership
Productization, value-led pricing, and market alignment aren’t the end goal—they’re the path to something much bigger: the transformation of your agency for long-term, high-margin dominance.
Agencies that successfully reposition their value with these tools redefine their market presence. They clarify their highest-value expertise, structure it into high-margin, scalable solutions, and shift their business model to command premium pricing and sustainable demand.
While productizing value is a key component, this work is really about Strategic Value Design—engineering how your agency defines, structures, and monetizes its expertise to command authority, pricing power, and sustainable demand.
Socrates once said, “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
The agencies that take action now will define the future—will yours?
