The 3 hardest things about freelancing and consulting
A Starters’ Guide to make it happen
If you are starting with consulting and freelancing, this story is for you.
I will try to outline the 3 main drivers of success in this area. Feel free to comment below if you think I missed anything.
2 notions I would like to clarify before diving in:
- The nuance between consulting and freelancing. These are different activities. They differ mainly by what drives the buyer when hiring. Anyone can start freelancing right away. Being a consultant takes a little bit more expertise. Freelancers are hired to complete a very specific task and the prospect comes with a brief. The buyer already has an idea of the job to be done when you start interacting with them. “I need a video showing this and that”. Consulting, on the other hand, happens at a higher level. The prospect you’ll interact with only knows one thing: he/she has a problem and they believe your smart enough to help them fix it. Some freelancers call themselves consultants and the opposite is true as well. This article can be used by both categories.
- Most of your potential clients do not walk around thinking about hiring an independent contractor. They have a job to be done and they will probably come up with more “regular” solutions to solve them before calling you up. They will most of the time use internal resources, their own time, software as a service, seek for advice by close circles… before they think: “we need external help to solve this”.
Hard thing number #1: TRUST
You can be the nicest, smartest, most qualified person possible, you are still an external element. What the prospect will try to check off his list is: are you trustworthy to complete the job? Will you deliver what was ordered, on time, in a professional way? It’s a big question, that will come back to them every time, even if you already worked with them before.
You can tell me: Badis, it’s the same issue for any product or service. Well …not exactly. Products or service you’d buy from a company are “packaged”. Like any packaged good, they come from the same creation process, every time. That creation process is guaranteed by an institution, an organisation, a team ... With an independent contractor you are dealing with an “unscripted” human being, who can get hit by a car, change his attitude, …whatever it is… it’s more unpredictable.
That’s where trust plays a major role.
Now, how to gain that trust faster?
The funny thing about trust is that its transferrable.
If A trusts B and, B trusts C, A will trust C. If I order an Uber, I trust Uber, so I will trust the driver, who I have never met in my life, and could be a psycho killer for all I know. But I trust Uber, so I trust the driver to get me there safely.
When your prospect is going through a trust assessment phase, (which by the way he shouldn’t, if you have done your job properly), what he is basically saying is:
“ Show me who trusts you”
Which translates to show me your references, your letters of recommendation.
Now if you don’t have any, because you are just starting off. Don’t worry, there are still people who trust you! Of course, I am not talking about your grandma here, but people you have worked with in the past, who can write a short paragraph about you. They can talk about your character, your personality, your determination. This will definitely be enough to get your foot in the door.
Hard thing number #2: RESULTS
Everything in the marketplace is about value. Whatever the service you provide, you convey a perceived value.
To sell, your perceived value must be higher than the price you bill. No one will pay 5000$ if the perceived value is 4000$.
The keyword here is perceived. Trust will give you the permission to be considered but nothing else. You are not getting a premium for being reliable. Every client expects that.
What’s happening in the buyer’s head as you have passed the trust test, is “how much am I paying and how much am I getting in return”.
In this article, I will not dive into pricing your service and time. It’s a long and complicated topic, I’ll write a specific article about.
Results matter A LOT because you’ll be judged on that at the end of the day. Not on how friendly or knowledgeable you are.
The question now is: “what are good results?”
And the answer is: you don’t get to answer this question. The client does.
They have their own benchmark of what a good job is, and the results they want to get to.
The problem is, not all clients are clear on that benchmark.
A great skill I have learned on this is that, most of the time, it’s your job to help them uncover that benchmark.
If a prospect briefs you: “I need you to write 5 blog articles per week”.
What they are really asking for is the end goal of these 5 articles: Increasing lead-generation, driving more traffic, pleasing the boss…. Having 5 more blog articles is not an end goal.
Just ask and agree on one strategic end goal and one metric to measure it.
It’s both important for you and the client to have this. In my experience, most clients do not track much. They are sold on something and then forget what the end goal even was!
That’s because priorities change, teams change, and if your contribution is not anchored to a strategic, long-term, measurable end goal, your relationship won’t last.
That end goal will enable you to calculate your actual worth to the business you are supporting, in clear numbers.
“By writing for you 5 blog posts a week, I generate 500 quality leads per month, I know your team closes 15% of them, that’s 75 deals. Your average basket is 1000$, which means an additional $75k in projected sales from my work!”
Listen very carefully now, this is not an option.
YOU HAVE TO DO THIS!
That’s the only way to build a long-term mutually beneficial relationship with your clients.
Now you are going to tell me : what if I am designer, software developer, accountant etc…, can I measure the result in monetary terms?
Well, of course you can!
It depends again on the end goal.
If a prospect comes to you and says: “I need a new design for this new product”.
You ask for the end goal and they say: “to sell more of the new product”.
So the end-goal is sales. What you need to do is measure the number of people who purchased because your design was a big selling point.
Once the product is launched, take 10 or 100 customers who bought the product and ask them (among a list of other things) if the design was an important selling point.
If 20% of the customers say that it was the most important selling point. Wow, you just contributed to 20% of the total sales of this new product. That could be worth millions of dollars!
The number in itself doesn’t matter, it’s about making sure the value of your work is clear.
Let’s take another example. You are software developer hired to code a module.
And the end goal of the prospect is time, meaning to ship the product faster.
What you need to know is how much time it usually takes them to ship the same type of module. If quality being equal, you can ship the module 5 days faster… You just saved them 5 days of development with all the costs associated.
You might say “oh but why ship faster? I can just finish 5 days early and bill them for work I am not doing”, if you think that …you completely missed the point.
Their end goal is fast shipping!
That’s why they hired you in the first place.
You can actually bill them more than what you would bill for sitting around cheatingly for 5 days, because speed and time-to-market is what they really care about.
All these ROI calculations build your case studies in a universal language, that any other prospect will understand.
Once you have done this, it becomes clear to you, your current clients and your future clients what your real value is.
If your real value is not that great, then don’t whine about not getting the success you deserve. Work harder and get better results!
The hard thing #3: BRAND AWARENESS
Like any other product you carry your brand and your story anywhere you go. The consulting and freelancing market is saturated.
It’s harder and harder to differentiate your craft.
But, it’s possible.
And it’s actually your only option.
It’s your only option if you don’t want to be commoditised.
So how do you keep being relevant, when it’s fundamentally hard to differentiate yourself?
Here is the answer: you have to be “the guy/gal who…”
Imagine a room full of potential prospects. Your long-term success will be contingent on some of them recognising you instantly as you walk in the room.
They will say “It’s the guy/gal who…”.
It could be the guy who published that book, did that project, writes that blog, worked with, sold that, created this etc….
This imaginary room of potential prospects doesn’t have to be big.
Actually the smaller it is, the easier it will be to get recognised.
It could be a room of a few hundred.
As a freelancer, you could live your whole life with a market that small.
If you are able to do something significant enough for them, then you become “the guy/gal who did that significant thing”.
You won.
They will have the top-of-mind awareness to say let’s bring in the “guy who did”.
This step is clearly the hardest of the 3. But, it’s also the most important.
When Clayton Christensen wrote about the Disruption Theory, he became to large organisations like Intel “the guy who said we were going to get killed”.
If you are Andy Grove, CEO of Intel at the time, your job is to not get killed.
So, what do you do?
You bring in the guy who said you will.
Hope this story has helped you better plan for world domination. :)
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