Most freelancers are reactive — they wait for new leads to come to them.
The problem is that getting leads reactively depends on luck. Will you get a new client when you need them? Or will you instead need to start looking for a job?
Our in-depth articles and guides on sales and marketing will help you generate high-quality project leads on your own terms, and allow you to eliminate uncertainty and doubt.
Whether through 4+ years of in-depth articles, premium courses, the conferences and events I host, or my podcast, my #1 goal is to help you become a more successful freelancer.
I hosted a training seminar to teach local businesses how to improve the number of leads & sales driven by their Web sites. I charged the 5 attendees $250 each, for an effective hourly rate of $312.50, and I delivered outstanding value to them.
Best of all, this something I believe any freelancer or consultant could do.
But first, let’s back up and talk about why you might want to consider hosting a seminar.
OK, so let’s talk about cold contacting! So over the last two posts, we’ve established a framework for getting ideal prospects and went over exactly how you’ll break the ice with new contacts.
Today, I want to focus on logistically how you’ll make the first contact.
In a perfect world, you’d have referrals. Someone you trust (and who trusts you) would make a mutual introduction to the new contact. But what do you do when you don’t have a reference?
Previously, we covered how you could pre-qualify 10 ideal clients that you’d like to work with (missed that post? Read this first.)
Now, I’m going to introduce a strategy that will help you get in front of the people on your list, and maybe even walk away with a client or two.
The biggest single mistake people make when reaching out to someone they don’t know is their failure to produce value.
Not to toot my own horn, but now that I’ve grown a sizable audience I get people I don’t know emailing me all the time.
We all have ideal clients. They might be companies we admire, companies that have projects that are completely different than anything we’ve ever done before, companies that can be stepping stones to getting bigger fish, and so on.
Back when I ran my consulting company, I took on a job (that even then, and especially in hindsight, made no financial sense) for a multi-national in Tokyo. Why? Well, I love Asia, and I loved the idea of talking about our “Asian clients” when meeting with future prospects. They were an ideal client in that they were a stepping stone for our company.
Exactly a year ago I started my newsletter.
Though it didn’t really start out as a newsletter. At the time, I was writing my first book, Double Your Freelancing Rate. I decided that instead of just collecting email addresses, I’d presell the book for 20% off. Well, it worked. And I netted a few thousand dollars in initial sales — even though I was quite a few weeks away from delivering a finished product.
I knew that if I paid something to someone I didn’t really know and was met with radio silence, I’d get pretty perturbed. Hell, I might even ask for a refund. With this in mind, I started sending out a weekly mailing to everyone who bought my book. I extracted highlights from what I was writing, summed them up into an easily digestible format, and introduced my signature plain formatted, “Hi $NAME, …, Cheers, Brennan” email structure.
