Remember when you were a kid and you stepped into the living room on Christmas morning and found these beautifully wrapped packages all prettied up with snazzy paper and fancy bows?

You got excited, waiting to dive in and start opening them, right?

Well, that’s exactly the response we need to create with our services.  We have to package them so that our potential clients get excited about purchasing our services and just can’t wait to get started using them.

But before we get to packaging our service, we have to define it.

Defining and packaging our service is a 4 step process that involves:

Giving the Service a Name

If a “Barbie™ Doll” didn’t have a name, what would you call it?  Do you think a nameless blond buxom doll would have been a hit back then if it didn’t have a name?  Not likely.  The same goes for our services.

Think about that pretty package under the Christmas tree again.  The name of the service would the name on the box that’s been given to the item inside.  If there were a blond buxom doll inside, the name on the outside might be “Barbie™”.

Creating a Visual, Emotional Description

The description will be the clarification and the substance behind the name of the service.  If we were talking about one of those gifts under the tree, the description would be the item inside the box that you can actually pick up and hold in your hands. ie: the Barbie™.

Defining Your Target Market

If you ran into the living room to open your presents and discovered that there were no names on the packages, how would you know which ones were for you?  The same goes for marketing your services, you have to put a name tag on your package.

You can bet that Mattel™ did their market research to find out what TV shows little girls watched before they spent their advertising dollars on marketing Barbie™.

Describing the Benefits

Now you create the wrapping paper for your package.  Since you know all about your ideal client you can create the paper using those marketing messages that will appeal directly to them.

Benefits are not about your service, they’re about what your service will do for the client.  For example:  Barbie is flexible, pretty, blond and loves life – those are features.  The benefits Barbie brings to a child include joy, creative roll-playing of life, fun, excitement and imagination.

It’s vital that we evoke emotion in people whenever we want to provoke a response from them to take action.  If we’re trying to sell a service, we need to connect with that emotion in our prospect that will urge them to buy our service.  Whether they buy to gain a positive feeling or buy to get rid of a negative feeling, it doesn’t matter.  Either way, they need to feel their need for our service, not just hear us tell them about it.

Contributed by VAVS Speaker: Trish Robichaud is a multiple award winning Disability Awareness Coach, Maximum Life & Business Coach & Motivational Speaker who lives with multiple sclerosis & major depression.  She is a woman with a disability but she is NOT a disabled woman. Trish teaches entrepreneurs how to achieve work/life balance AND business success by leveraging technology-based automation processes.  To learn more, go to  and signup for a complimentary Business Automation Strategy Session.