The Secret To Keeping Your Freelance Clients Happier Than Larry
Lea WoodwardIs taking care of your customers and clients something that just happens in your freelancing business? Or do you actively set about making sure you keep your clients as happy as possible?
One of the buzz concepts of the management consulting world a few years ago was the “client lifecycle”.
The concept of a client lifecycle is something that any freelancer can apply to their business and benefit from. In a nutshell, it comprises of the phases that each of your clients go through whilst they work with you, starting from the moment they first become aware of you and what you do.
The benefit of understanding this for your freelance business is that you can design and control what happens in each of those phases. This means that not only are you proactively determining what happens in your business and managing it, you are also focusing on and building your business around one the most important components of your business: your clients.
Here is what a client lifecycle looks like…
So how do you apply this to what you do as a freelancer? For starters, you can begin by ensuring you’ve got the following points covered for each stage in your client lifecycle:
Stage 1 Awareness and Consideration
- Who are you trying to attract?
- How will they find out about you? Via which channels?
- Are these the optimum channels based on their habits, needs and lifestyles?
- What first impression would you like prospects to have of your business?
- Do your marketing materials convey this impression?
Stage 2 Select and Buy
- What choices do you offer each of your target audiences?
- How easy is it for your prospects to find more about you and your services?
- How simple are your services/products to understand for prospects?
- How easy is it for them to choose the right solution?
- How simple is your buying process?
Stage 3 Initial Experience
- What is a new client’s first impression of actually “doing” business with you?
- Does their first post-purchase experience with you match up to your marketing story, sales pitch or your initial promises?
Stage 4 Use, Learn and Support
- Have you educated your clients about the way you want to work with them?
- Do you make it easy for your clients to use your services?
- Do you have a support “policy” that provides what your clients need but doesn’t require you to be at their every beck & call, driving you mad with frustration?
- Do your clients know what this support policy is?
- Do you have an organised & structured “back end” to your business that enables you to focus on servicing your clients effectively?
Stage 5 Repurchase and Recommend
- Do your clients know about the additional support, services or options available to them after their first purchase from you?
- If your business thrives on referrals, how easy is it for clients to refer business to you? How do you encourage this?
- Do you reward long term, loyal clients for their business?
- How much does your business value loyalty? How do you encourage this?
- Do you have systems & processes set up to make it easy & stimulate existing clients to buy from you again, more frequently or be rewarded for referring people to you?
Building your freelancing business around the specific needs of your clients is something that can give you a huge advantage over your competition - big and small. One of the first places to start to understand these needs is to understand your client lifecycle; once you understand it, put it to good use and your clients won’t be able to walk away!
Kyle
January 2nd, 2008
What a great article. It makes me think about my business from a clients point of view, which is hard to do sometimes. But really, when I’m handing someone else MY money, I want to feel like its easy to work with them and that they value me as a customer — our clients don’t always just care about whether we can do good work or not.
Scott Carpenter
January 2nd, 2008
If you are solo it’s important to not spread yourself too thin across too many clients, because you will run out of hours in the day (and night!) to please all your clients, and indeed may end up pleasing none.
However you must keep the ‘Awareness and Consideration’ stage active at all times (even in a limited capacity) to ensure that you have ongoing work.
John Faulds
January 2nd, 2008
There’s a lot of questions in this post. It may be useful to also include a few example answers to each of them.
Lea Woodward
January 2nd, 2008
Happy New Year everyone…back to “work” today eh?!?
John - you are right, lots of questions and not so many answers!
Many of the questions are based around the things that prospects and clients will be thinking internally to themselves at each stage. When I was drafting out the article, I started to include some examples but it felt like I’d be teaching the intelligent readers here at FSw how to suck eggs
and then I thought that the most important “take away” from this post was that readers should sit down and ensure they’ve got their own answers (not swayed by examples) to each of these questions for their own individual client base and target markets.
What I was hoping this exercise would achieve is that if you don’t know the answers to one or more of the questions (or especially if multiple answers are lacking for one particular stage), then it would highlight an area of development for your business. There are companies which build their entire business around this lifecycle/these stages and who think out every single aspect in advance - I’ve found with my consulting clients that if freelancers can take even just a small aspect of this thought process and apply it to their business, it can make a radical difference to the way they do business.
If there are any specific questions that are unclear however, let me know and I’ll provide some examples here in the comments…
Mark H. Abucayon
January 2nd, 2008
wow this is very nice steps. I like the picture right there great job, Thank you very much of this informative steps.
Andy
January 2nd, 2008
Good article, Lea. My experience with freelancers is that they have a lot of good ideas and activities when it comes to Stages 2-4, but really suck at figuring out how to do Stage 1 and organizing their business to encourage clients during Stage 5.
For Stage 1: I’ve heard too many freelancers say “I get my business exclusively through referrals”. What a lame cop-out! That’s like saying “I eat whatever animal happens to walk through the door of my house.” It’s a recipe for starving. Marketing your freelance business can be simple if you focus on making sure your offering is in the path that they use to find a business like yours. In other words, if your clients use Google to find someone who offers the services you do, spend the time (or money) to make sure that you are on the first page of the search results. If your clients use directories, make sure you’re in the ones that they will use to find services like yours (e.g., if your clients would find you in the yellow pages — e.g., photographers — then make sure you have an ad there; if they would use an online directory like FreelanceLocalTech, make sure you’re in there).
For Stage 5: I’ve also heard from too many freelancers that they build a web site for a client and then the client is done and they never hear from them again, because their site is done. In some ways, that’s a failure in fully capturing the client’s imagination about how a dynamic web site can be a bigger marketing draw for potential clients and a way to keep in touch with their existing clients to encourage them to buy more. Freelancers need to think the same way: how can I turn this fixed-length job into a job that can have some additional work for years to come? (Note: I’m not recommending creating an artificial problem the customer has to use you to keep solving for years on end, but coming up with a way for the client to continue to use you to advance their business.) The cheapest and easiest sale is the follow-on sale, so learn how to capture that sale!
Paul M.
January 2nd, 2008
I would suggest adding some examples to these points as they are quite general and further explanation would be very useful.
Will
January 2nd, 2008
Hey Lea,
You know what they say about people who assume? The same way we as freelancers should be perfectly clear with our clients is the same way we should be when addressing the FSw reader.
Lea Woodward
January 2nd, 2008
Ok guys, here are some examples (but please do try the exercise of answering the questions for yourself as I can’t know each of your individual target markets and what works for them):
Stage 1:
If for example, your ideal target client is a cash-rich but time-poor kind of person, then what type of channels/messages work best for them? It’s unlikely to be long-winded sales brochures that they have to plough through and rather short, snappy copy in a format that they prefer to read (e.g. easy-to-access web info rather than have to mail them a brochure out).
Stage 2:
Using the same example target market as above, would that cash-rich/time-poor prospect want to be faced with 10 options to have to choose from or perhaps 2 or 3 of the most suitable ones? And are the options they’re faced with the absolute ideal solutions or do they have to compromise in any way? Once that prospect has made the decision to work with you, do you make them jump through hoops to complete their payment (e.g. request x forms of ID, make them sign umpteen forms, complete x, y and z assessments, go to a post box to mail a cheque to you etc. etc.) or have you simplified this to make it simple, quick, painless and easy to get started? (e.g. online payment, a simplified sign-up process, streamlined questionaires/assessment forms etc.)
Stage 3:
When you say you’ll send them an initial spec form or brief form for completion by x date, do you do it? Or do you let it go by a day or so, thinking that now you’ve got the sale you can relax? Does your first impression convey the impression you gave during the sales process?…that you’re professional, do what you say you’re going to do, and deliver on your promises…or do you just let things slide simply because you don’t have your processes set up to make the introduction of a new client smooth and efficient?
Stage 4:
Given this cash-rich/time-poor client doesn’t have time to check out your website each month for the new services you offer, how do you let them know what additional services you can offer that might be of use to them? Maybe they’d prefer to receive a personalised email mentioning specific services that might be of interest to them or perhaps a quick mention on the phone when you speak to them and something comes up - mentioning again that you’ll send them the relevant details in a follow-up email if they express an interest.
Stage 5:
This cash-rich/time poor client clearly doesn’t have the time to find out/think about whether you’d like him to help you get more business; but he may well have plenty of other contacts who could benefit from your services. Many people forget that when they need business, asking for it is vital - never assume people know you want/need business. In this example, perhaps another email specifically asking if the client knows anyone else who’d benefit - or given that you don’t want to be taking up their precious time with yet another email, perhaps stating this up-front in your client intro process (e.g. a client referral form) is better or combining it in your email giving info about further services.
Sorry guys - there’s a few more questions in here but hopefully giving a specific example helps. The answers will obviously differ depending upon the needs of your ideal target market so don’t take this example as the only one….
Lea Woodward
January 2nd, 2008
BTW Andy, I totally agree and love your comment “I get my business exclusively through referrals”. What a lame cop-out! That’s like saying “I eat whatever animal happens to walk through the door of my house.”…it made me laugh out loud
Joefrey
January 3rd, 2008
I will apply these steps to my small business for this year 2008. Great post Lea.
cindy*staged4more
January 12th, 2008
Hi Lea
It’s good to see you over here!
I love what you have done in this post by breaking down different elements of customer contacts during a transaction (also love the nifty graphic). If I may add 1 point.. is to establish a system & scripts once these 5 steps are figured out to streamline the process for the future. This way it will also help you as a solo to respond clients’ questions like they are second nature.
As to the comment above on working on referrals only, it’s interesting because I personally feel that is not a cop out but to be more selective in terms of deciding who you want to work with. To work with just anyone knocks on our door is more risky because the clients may not necessary qualified to work with you or can be clients who can suck out a lot of your energy but yields little rewards. I think it can also speak volume about how you do business. I work in the real estate industry (style & stage homes for sale) and generally only the top, senior and seasoned agents work referrals only. They are so experienced and reputable that they no longer need to advertise, they have enough clients and they only work clients that fit their ideal client profile.
Just my 2 cents!
Cheers,
Cindy