image via Dustin Lee
After talking to other freelancers, I’ve noticed there’s often a big hole in their processes. Many, many freelancers — not just beginners — aren’t proactive enough in their pitching, and they also spend far too much time on the beginning stages of projects. Not only does it take longer to get new clients and build up a client base, it takes longer to get those new clients to the part where they’re actually paying you. Inefficient pitching systems can really slow down the growth of your business and create lower profit margins overall.
When I went back to freelancing in 2014, I made it my goal to systematize, automate, and generally shorten the beginning stages of finding clients and starting work together. I’m convinced this was one of the key reasons I was able to build up my business so fast and replace my day job income within a few months.
Here’s what that process looks like:
Step one: Be clear on what you’re offering and have a way to show it to potential clients
We’ve essentially covered this in this post on building a great portfolio. Take the time to create a portfolio site, a good resume, and a LinkedIn profile. The LinkedIn profile can be omitted if you want, but it is useful — especially if you’re in a B2B industry. Even though I rarely log in to LinkedIn, I’ve made solid professional connections (and had new clients get in touch) through it.
Step two: Follow up with past clients
If you’re a new freelancer, you might not have this option. But if you do, now’s the time to get in touch. Previous clients are far more likely to buy from you again than a “cold” lead is and the time from initial contact to starting the project (and getting paid) will be shorter than with a new client, too. Reach out to previous clients and see if they need any work from you.
In your “touching base” email, include a personal touch about (their) life or business, update them on what you’re doing now, and include 1–2 suggestions that are relevant to your previous work together. Don’t just email and say, “Hey, this is Suzie. I wanted to let you know I’m available for development work starting next month.”
Instead, it should be more like:
Hey Jane!
This is Suzie — long time, no talk!
I saw your photos on Instagram — your family trip to the Bahamas looked like you had a lot of fun. It’s awesome that you had that time together.
Anyways, I wanted to let you know that starting next month, I’m going to have some open client slots. I thought I’d check back and see if you needed any additional work on the website we built together last year. Maybe you need it to be mobile responsive, or were looking for some theme customizations?
You get the idea.
Then, have a pleasant closing note to the email. Adding these elements (customized suggestions, showing that you know they’re a human with a life and family, in general, not sounding like a robotic a-hole asking for money) will get you much better results than just sending a copied-and-pasted “Hi! I have client openings soon!” email.
Step three: Make it easy to find gigs
One way that freelancers waste untold amounts of time is by checking job sites every few hours. We’ve all done that thing where we don’t have any client projects to work on, so you check Craigslist, then you go tweak your resume or portfolio a little bit, then you check Craigslist again an hour later, then a different gig site…and so on. It’s five or ten minutes at a time but it really adds up over the day, not just in the amount of time you spend checking, but in the switching cost between looking at those sites and trying to work on anything else.
Instead of doing this, you can set it up so that the gig listings come to you. Some sites do have an email notification option, and if they do, you should sign up for that. But, if they don’t (or if being on the new jobs email list requires getting tons of other emails you don’t want to get), you can use IFTTT to get a notification in your inbox whenever there’s a new item on a specific Craigslist search, or a new item added to an RSS feed.
After you’ve set that up, you make it a goal to check email once or twice a day. Otherwise, you’re just funneling your obsessive job-site-checking into obsessive email-checking. I recommend having one time be around noon, after you’ve had a few hours to dedicate to getting some real work done, and one time being when you’re wrapping up your workday. When you do check your email, you can sort through the gigs you’ve got an email for, and weed out the gigs that are a bad fit right away. Then, you’ll want to pitch the gigs that you are interested in ASAP. That brings us to our next step…
Step four: Make it easy for you to pitch gigs
The second mistake people make, after spending too much time looking at job boards, is spending far too much time on each individual pitch. It’s really easy, especially as a new freelancer who desperately wants to make a good impression on people, to sit and spend 30–60 minutes (or more!) crafting a pitch email.
While wanting to wow a potential new client is a good impulse, spending that long on each pitch email makes it hard to increase the number of gigs you’re pitching each day. Which, in turn, makes it hard to build up your business quickly.
Instead, you can create a pitch email template. If you have more than one area of expertise, you’ll create one for each area of expertise (and maybe a more general one, too). If you do a lot of JavaScript work but you’re also really great at WordPress theme development, then you’d want to create a pitch email template for each of those.
Then, you’ll store those templates in an easily accessible spot. You can use Google Docs, or Evernote, or put them in a text expander tool. The idea behind those tools is that you type a brief shortcut and it automatically expands into a larger block of text. Using the above example, you could set up a shortcut of “jspitch” and when you typed that, you’d have the JavaScript pitch email template immediately at your fingers to edit for this specific gig. TextExpander and aText are two options, but both only work on Mac. Lifehacker has a list of options for Windows.
Here’s an example pitch email template:
Hi (name),
I saw your posting on (job board) and wanted to send in my information. You’ll find my resume attached and you can view my online portfolio here: (link; if a specific page has sample work or case studies, link to those pages individually as well)
I’d be a great fit for this because…(Talk about your background here. A good structure is one sentence covering your overall background, one sentence that mentions your experience and if you have any specialties within that experience, and one or two sentences that mention a specific project that’s relevant to this gig.)
Let me know if you have any questions. I’d be available for a phone/Skype call or to meet for coffee (modify depending on if this is a local gig or not) sometime in the next week if you wanted to discuss the role and my experience.
Thank you for your time and have a great day!
(your name)
Something I want to make very, very clear here is that you’re not trying to create something you can literally copy, paste, and send, because that won’t get any results. It’ll sound like a form email and it won’t stand out from the other emails that are sent in. Instead, the idea is that you’re creating something that does about 75% of the work for you. That way, you can do the other 25% to the best of your ability, while still only spending 10–15 minutes on it, instead of 30–60.
Step five: Turn it into a numbers game
It might sound counterintuitive, but you don’t want to set results-based goals for your pitching or for getting gigs. It’s easy to say, “Okay, I want to get three new projects by the end of this week.”
The thing is that you can do everything within your power and you still might not get that gig. In the end, whether you get the gig or not isn’t up to you — it’s up to the potential client. And then, if you don’t get those three new projects at the end of that week, you wind up discouraged.
Instead of setting results-based goals, put your focus on the things that you do have total control over. In this case, that’s how many gigs you’re pitching — not how many you’re getting. When you’re just starting out and looking to build things up fast, I’d suggest aiming for 3–5 pitches per work day. That will typically take an hour, maybe two, of your workday, leaving plenty of time to work on other things.
It might sound totally wackadoodle, but trust me, by not setting results based goals, you’ll actually get better results. Just turn it into a numbers game and aim to hit that number every day. And — this is important! — you want to keep doing this, even as you start getting clients and building up your workload.
By focusing on continually pitching yourself for new gigs and projects, even as you get more work, you’ll be preventing that nasty feast or famine cycle. A common mistake here is for a freelancer to stop pitching as soon as they get work. They think, “I’m booked out for the next month, and I don’t need to pitch any more. Awesome!”
The problem with that attitude is that if you don’t keep pitching things and if you don’t keep projects in your sales pipeline, then you’ll come to the end of your current workload and have nothing to start on after that. You’ll have to start all over again, from scratch, while you’re not making any money in the meantime. Doing that creates huge peaks and valleys in your income, and it’s just an all-around, awful experience.
Here’s your recap checklist for creating better pitching systems:
1. Be clear on what you’re offering and have a solid portfolio as a way to showcase those services
2. Follow up with past clients
3. Make it easy to find gigs
4. Make it easy to pitch gigs
5. Set effort-based goals to turn it into a numbers game
This post is an excerpt from Zero to Freelancer, a book-in-progress. To stay in the loop & find out when it’s released, sign up for email updates at Bombchelle.
