Your ServiceM8 setup is only as good as your understanding of what you actually offer
Most people set up ServiceM8 by jumping straight in. They start adding services, building job templates, setting up categories, and tweaking things as they go. Which is fine, to a point. But at some point it’s worth stepping back and looking at your business from the outside before you go any further.
That’s where a Product Map comes in.
A Product Map is a simple document, usually a spreadsheet, that lists every service your business offers and captures the important details around each one. Not in ServiceM8, just somewhere clean and clear where you can think without clicking. It gives you an overview of your whole offering that’s hard to get when everything is buried in job templates and price lists or stuck in your head.
For each service you offer, a good Product Map captures things like:
- The service name and a brief description of what the work involves
- The price, or at least an approximate
- The category it falls into (useful for both your own reporting and your ServiceM8 job categories)
- Any certificates or documentation the job requires
- The qualifications or accreditations needed to do the work
- Who your ideal customer is for that service
- The questions customers typically ask about it
- Problems you’ve experienced when trying to offer that service
- Upsell opportunities connected to it
It sounds like a lot, but you don’t have to do it all in one sitting, and you don’t have to complete every column for every service to get value from it. Even a basic version, with just service name, price, category, and ideal customer, will give you more clarity than most businesses have written down anywhere.
The reason it improves your ServiceM8 setup is that it forces you to think through your services properly before you build. Your job templates become more consistent. Your categories make more sense. Your price list reflects what you actually charge. Your reporting becomes more useful because the data going in is cleaner. You can start to look at the bigger picture and work out how and where to tackle problems and the questions customers have before they start to cost you time or money (or both!)
I’ve put together a copy of the Product Map template I use and teach in my own training. It’s a Google Sheet you can copy and make your own.
Product Map >> Make a Copy >> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CbULKI0dOHu4WHsbEfbnowqAA3AVzyx93n5UFsvYttk/copy
Have a go at it and see what it surfaces. You might find there are services you’ve never properly documented, pricing that varies depending on who takes the call, or categories that have ended up a bit of a mess. All of that is useful to know.
Have you got your services documented anywhere, or is most of it still in your head?
