Measuring Service: Quantifying Your Experience for Maximum Impact

As you build your freelance business, you get the satisfaction of touting the work you have already done when talking to new prospects for your services. Demonstrating that you have experience delivering the services your prospects are looking for can make all the difference in landing that next project.

Make sure you tally up that experience so that you can present it with maximum impact.

Care to Have Your Gall Bladder Removed?

A good example of the power of experience in recommending a service provider is surgery. If you are facing an operation, you want to go under the knife with someone who has performed the procedure many times before. It doesn’t matter if you are having an organ removed, your eyesight modified by laser surgery, or any other major procedure, experience counts.

So you look for someone who specializes, who concentrates on a particular type of surgical procedure, and who does it (successfully) over and over again. You’d rather have an old hand, not a rookie, take out your gall bladder any day.

What Are the Units of Your Services?

For surgeons, “customers served” tends to be very close to “procedures done.” Nobody goes back to have a gall bladder removed a second time!

At the fast food chain McDonald’s, signs advertise “burgers sold,” perhaps because many of those burgers were sold to repeat customers. Very simply, it is a more impressive number if you count the individual sales, rather than the people served.

For many of the services freelancers provide, the McDonald’s approach makes more sense. Web designers do not create just one page for each customer. Copywriters, hopefully, write more than one word for each client. Training professionals may serve dozens of participants at a time, in a single seminar.

Working at the level of those individual units can give your prospects a more accurate, and a more persuasive, sample of your experience than working at the client or customer level.

For Example . . .

One of the services I provide is ghostwriting newsletter articles. To simplify the arithmetic, let’s take just a couple of those newsletters and compare the numbers that different accounting methods — all of them truthful and accurate – can generate.

When a current client makes a referral, and I get a call from a new prospect looking for help with an e-zine, they often bring up “wordsmithing,” the notion that I will take their content and make it more effective. If I am trying to convince them that handling words, for newsletters, is one of my strengths, which of the following statements is most likely to do that job?

• “I have been handling most of the biweekly e-zine writing for two clients for the past six months.”
• “I have written more than 50 articles in the past six months for newsletters just like yours.”
• “I have created more than 22,000 words of highly effective e-newsletter content for my clients in the past six months.”

All of these statements are true, but surely “50 articles” and “22,000 words” will beat “two clients” any day of the week!

At a recent meeting with a training consultant looking for marketing help, it was clear  that writing content of various kinds would be important  to winning the business. When I told him I kept track of my business writing output, and that I average nearly 250,000 words a year, it immediately resolved any doubts he had about my experience in providing writing services.

Log Your Production

If you are a web designer, would you rather tell people how many sites you maintain, or how many pages you have created? For writers, articles and similar products can tell the tale, not to mention words. For training consultants, the number of participants you have educated can far exceed the number of clients you have served.

Admittedly, if you haven’t been thinking this way to date, you may have to look at past projects and estimate your output, to some extent. And you should do exactly that.

Going forward, put systems in place to capture your production so that you can use those data to impress your prospects with your experience in providing the services they need.

The more impressive you can legitimately make that “burgers sold” number, the more “customers served” you can look forward to in your freelance business.