I attended a great seminar yesterday hosted by one of the best speakers in Romania – Lorand Soares-Szasz. The seminar was called “21 Methods to Promote Your Business“. Although the information was mostly focused on businesses, some of them could be easily applied by freelancers, in order to win more jobs and keep your customers coming back for more.
Your clients’ fears
Every customer has its own fears and a dose of scepticism, especially when it comes to working with a freelancer. In my experience, the most common are:
- the work won’t be delivered on time
- the results will be poor quality
- the content won’t be original (applies to copywriters)
- the freelancer will accept the contract but will become unresponsive
- the work done will be superficial
Now, this may be different from industry to industry, but generally speaking, almost each client experiences at least one of the fears presented above. And they could decide more or less if you will be getting the job or not, as your customer may easily choose another freelancer that strikes as being more reliable than you.
How can you make sure that this doesn’t happen?
Offering guarantees
By offering guarantees, you’re subliminally removing the fear away from your customer by taking the responsibility for anything that may go wrong.
Here’s one example that was presented during yesterday’s seminar.
What’s your biggest fear when you go to wash your car? – In Romania, people are afraid that it will rain and it will ruin the polish. So one smart car-wash company here offered the following guarantee: if it rains in the next 24 hours after we washed your car, we’ll wash it again, for free.
Pretty smart, huh?
Offering guarantees isn’t a new trick in the market. In fact, it’s pretty old and we’ve all bumped into it from time to time. “30 Days Money Back Guarantee”, “Free 365 Return Policy”, “100% Satisfaction” are all guarantees that businesses have been offering for a long time. Being witty, you can also apply this tactic as a freelancer also.
What are my clients’ biggest fears?
This is something you have to find out yourself, but here are a few tips to get you started:
Fear 1: The customer is afraid that you will not deliver the work on time
No biggie! Just tell the customer that, in case you will not meet the deadline, you will be offering him a %20,%30 or %50 discount. But make sure that you take one-two days extra than you usually require for that kind of work, as unforeseen things can happen.
Fear 2: You’re a programmer and the customers fears that the code will have bugs that he will only discover in the future
You can offer 30 days of free maintenance, so that in case anything goes wrong with the code, you will be there to fix it.
Fear 3: The customer isn’t sure if the quality of your work will be top-notch
When applying to copywriting jobs, we always inform clients that we give two free revisions for each piece of content we create. If this can be applied to the services that you offer, it would be ideal to use it as your guarantee.
Remember, you don’t have to wait for customers to tell you that they fear something, you have to anticipate it and hand them the solution on a silver platter, in advance.
Fears are different from one range of services to another. Take 10 minutes of alone time and try writing down what your customers biggest fears are. Then look for solutions. It took us about 10 minutes to both list our customers’ fears and find guarantees for them.
So next time you’re chatting with a customer that hasn’t hired you yet, make sure to give him a few guarantees. Although this puts more responsibility on you, it is totally worth it as you will most likely win more jobs and your customers’ will be coming back for more, as not many freelancers give them all these free stuff.