I want to share with you how you can create a system that will allow you to be a successful freelance developer. After reading this blog post you will know exactly how I get clients and how you can do the same.
We are going to get a bit technical and I’m going to be sharing with you the process that we are going to be building in this upcoming blog posts.
This is just an overview of what I have in mind and this could change with time. The main idea here is to get a high-level overview of what we are going to be designing and start thinking of the process of acquiring new clients.
Where do you find clients?
This is a tricky question and the one that most people have when they are starting out. When I started full-time back in 2014, the first step that I did was to reach out to my local network and see what was available.
I want you to keep in mind that I have been part of my business community since I was 16 years old. By this point being 22 it does not seem like a far reach to contact some of this business owners and see how I can be of service to them.
Most of you might be just starting out and this method might not work with you. This is why I want to offer up a couple of different strategies of acquiring clients that can scale up to however much work or money that you want to make.
There is three main sources that I have found to be very effective to acquire new leads.
Facebook Advertising: This can be your facebook page or it could be paid advertisement that you pay for with Facebook. One thing to keep in mind Google AdWords works just as good but the click is a bit expensive. I’m just using facebook here as an example because I know that it works to generate new leads.
Local Advertising: Everything and anything that you do locally, are you speaking at a conference? Do you have a business card? Are you handing out that business card? Are you talking to people in your community? Are you going to meetups? Are others talking about your business? The list goes on…. The main point here is how are you using your community to drive awareness about your business? If you are doing this then this is local advertising.
Referral Networks: Your reputation is KEY. If you can create a reputation of being someone that can be worthy of responsibility and you have a complete line of people that can vouch for you. You will never have trouble finding new clients, this is by far the most effective way to acquire new clients. This is what has worked for me 80% of all my clients that I have at Salty Slopes are acquired using this one method.
There is countless of other methods to generate leads, but for the sakes of keeping this example small, we are going to be sticking with this three main ones.
You now know where these possible clients are going to come from. They are going to land on your portfolio page…. Now what? You will hope that they will use the contact form and reach out to you right? WRONG 99% of the people will not take the time to write you and email or give you a call. After all, you are just some other option in a spreadsheet of possible development shops that they could choose from.
Why would anyone hire you? This is where everyone quits and just runs back to get a 9-5 and say’s that working as a freelancer is just to “hard” for them to do. They get prepared and get the shackles of gold on.
You will never ever be successful until you turn your pain into greatness until you allow your pain to push you from where you are to push you to where you need to be. Stop running from your pain and embrace your pain. Your pain is going to be a part of your prize, a part of your product. I challenge you to push yourself. – Eric Thomas
Instead of waiting for the opportunity to arrive, we are going to go out and make it happen. The portfolio is going to be created for one and one reason which is going to be to generate leads for your business.
How are we going to do this? We are going to capture a lead with a good ethical bribe. The information that we are going for here is their name, phone number, and email. I know this is a lot to ask for but if someone is not willing to share those three things with you, they are NOT going to be a good fit as a client. I will write more about this once we get to that part. Just keep in mind the entire purpose of our portfolio is going to be to generate new leads that you can follow up with.
If your portfolio does NOT do this, YOU ARE FAILING! This can be a good or bad thing. If you have so much work lined up and you are not wanting any extra work then it’s ok to fail but if you have zero clients in your pipeline you really need to focus on this part and start generating new leads.
Generating new leads for your business is going to be required for the success of your business. I can not stress how important this is!.
No Customers = No Business -Rick H
Once you start collecting new leads for your business you are going to then have to put a system in place to help you take the new leads through a process of qualifying them as possible clients or just time wasters.
You want to pull out all the time wasters as soon as possible. These next couple of steps are going to help you do exactly that. Once you generate a new lead you will want to send them the first message letting them know that you got their request. This is now going to start the process of qualifying them. You can automate this process with various of way’s that I’m not going to get into, but the easiest way to qualify a new prospect is to just simply get on the phone with them.
Yes, I know the phone… Who uses those? Real business people do, and since you are now one of those people. You have to get on the phone and decide if this new lead is going to be someone that is going to be a possible client or not. You will want to place this call as soon as possible.
After this call ends you are going to know if this is going to be a possible lead or not. I’m not going to get to the specific’s of how to do this but if you are a new salesperson you might want to check out this blog post that I wrote.
If they are interested you are going to be sending email #3 to get them setup with an in-person meeting and start the process of writing and closing a work contract. If you do manage to get to this point it’s all easy from here on out. You just have to show up and do your job and you are on your way to the next client.
If they are not interested in your service, you want to keep in contact with them. You worked really hard to acquire them as a lead you want to continue to follow up with them and see if you can work together sometime in the future.
This is where software and automation can help us stay in contact with this possible prospects by following up with them and provide value for what they are doing. This a bit difficult to do, but if you understand your audience I’m sure that you can be creative and create something that can really get them engaged with what your services are. If at any time any of this leads start getting interested in becoming a client, you will want to get back on the phone with them and see when you can set up and appointment with them.
This might look like a lot of work, but if you get this right you can take some of those leads that you thought were dead and bring them back to life.
That’s all there is to it…
It’s not that difficult. Once you do this a couple of times you will start getting comfortable getting no’s and dealing with time wasters.
You always want to be proactive and acquiring new clients, and never reactive.
Talk to you next time,
Rick H.
I always had a passion for the field of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and I knew I wanted to do something to make a difference in the world. I just didn’t know where to start. I was an immigrant in a new country, grew up in a tough environment, and wasn’t sure how… Read More
