For the past 10 days or so I’ve kept myself busy trying to find out the answer to the following question: “what are a client’s biggest fears when hiring freelancers?”. Thus, I’ve started asking people left and right, in places such as Warrior Forum, where I knew that I can find persons that collaborated with freelancers in the past. In total, I received about 50 responses, out of which a few will be presented here.
To be honest, I wasn’t even a bit surprised by their responses. But before I get to them, let me tell you why I believe that the answer to this question is important.
Knowing your clients’ fears can help you create a better connection with them by offering guarantees. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about you could read this article, which is basically the predecessor of what I am going to write about today. Simply put, offering guarantees can help you earn you clients’ trust, as you will counteract their fears, and it will also give you an advantage over your competition, considering that they may not be offering anything to ease the unrest of your prospective client.
Lack of Contact, Freelancers Going Silent
Arguably, the most often response people posted was that they fear and that they’re annoyed by freelancers that go silent and don’t actively communicate with them. This is a natural worry considering that customers may have their own delivery dates if they’re working with bigger companies or their own plan they want to stick to. Also, considering that there are so many irresponsible freelancers out there, they may think that you are one of them until they get to know you better.
How can you counteract this fear?
The answer to this is both simple and complicated, as, apart from your reviews, you don’t really have any way of proving that you will not go MIA (missing in action) on them. So, before your first contract with your new client, the best you can do is assure them that you will send daily updates about the project and stick to this promise. You can also provide your Skype and e-mail addresses so that they can contact you in case they have any urgent questions or details they want to share.
Once you’ve already started working on the first contract, even if the client doesn’t demand that you send daily updates, or you haven’t promised this, you can still take some initiative and do this. Your communication will be highly appreciated and you will win your client’s trust this way, thus, securing their loyalty in case of a future contract. You will also prove yourself to be highly professional, a characteristic that most freelancers lack.
The Work Won’t Be Delivered on Time
This fear is pretty much related to the one above and the solutions are basically the same. Assure your clients’ that you will keep daily contact with them and offer them practical answers to the question: “how will you do this?”.
Provide daily updates on your work and make sure that you actually finish the project on time. One thing that we do is set the due date 1-2 days later than we know that we’ll be able to actually complete the work. This provides us with a few advantages:
- flexibility
- in case something happens, we’ll have enough time to repair the work and still send it on time
- in case everything goes great, we’ll have the work completed and sent before the due date. This is something that clients tend to appreciate a lot.
Lack of Quality
The fact that the work will be high-quality is easier to prove, as you can send your clients samples of previous work. Thus, they will be able to see if the work you do is in line with their expectations.
Here are some solutions
- Send your best samples, and choose the ones that are the most related to your client’s project. For example, if they’re looking for an article about travel, send travel related articles that you have previously written.
- Presenting previous feedback is also necessary in this situation, so make sure that your prospective client sees them.
- One of the things we do to counteract this fear is offer revisions for the content we create. We make sure to let the clients know in advance that we will be offering two free revisions in case they want anything modified. This way, they have the certainty that, in case anything needs edits, the content will be improved, as they can come back to us and request this for free.
In my opinion, offering guarantees is one of the simplest ways to turn a prospective customer into a recurring one. And if you have had any experience with customers so far, then you already know that returning customers are the ones that help your business grow and also the ones that usually recommend your services to other people.