Gaining an Edge in Tough Economic Times

Photo by Antediluvial.

With economic conditions rather on the grim side, it makes sense to look for ways to distinguish yourself from the competition, to strengthen your appeal to existing and potential clients. This goes beyond just a general increase in marketing activity. It is a matter of enhancing your value to your customers, of showing them how doing business with you can stretch their tight budgets a little farther.

Most freelancers can add value to the services they offer by tapping an area of expertise they may not realize they have. The fact is that as you work with clients and complete projects, you become more and more knowledgeable about the world your client contacts live in: their constraints, their needs, their preferences, their goals, their habits, their procedures, their biases and assumptions about working with people just like you.

That knowledge can give you an edge if you apply it to make their lives easier.

Get an Edge . . .

How do you leverage your knowledge of both sides of the client relationship?

1. As you apply your own expertise to serve the client’s needs, you also accumulate . . .
2. A lot of knowledge about how the client operates, particularly in regard to managing projects like yours.
3. Turn knowledge into an additional service to offer your clients, and you will find that . . .
4. Clients prefer to work with contractors whom they actually see working to save them time and money.

Your relationships with your clients, especially the ones you work with again and again, give you a two-edged sword of knowledge — knowledge about your own work, and knowledge about how your clients do work and should work to achieve the best results. Formalize what you have learned in tools your prospects and clients can use to be more cost-effective in their use of freelancers in your field . . . including you!

Past projects have probably taught you a few tips for clients about how to control costs, including the costs of doing business with you; how to get the most out of everything they spend on your services; how they can work with you so it takes less of their time to manage the process; what they can do to get a higher return from the same investment in you. When you share those ideas with your clients and prospects more visibly, more explicitly, you significantly enhance your perceived value.

For example, you might offer:

• A free consultation at the end of a project you are just finishing to suggest ways they could have been more efficient in working with you, saving them money.
• A short document describing the most common mistakes companies make in hiring, and working with, freelancers in your field, something they can use to avoid those mistakes before they start their next project.
• Templates, planning and tracking forms, and similar tools to help them manage their project with you more effectively, saving them time and money.
• Opportunities for savings, usually by bundling: if they are looking at doing two closely related projects, show them how they could spend less by doing them together, rather than one after the other.

The Competitive Edge

You are in a position to see opportunities for efficiency and savings that they might not be aware of. When you offer to share those insights for free, that builds trust and helps your clients see why investing their budget in your services is more likely to pay off, to produce a return, than investing in someone else’s services.

Of course, all the freelancers pitching to your clients promise to save them time and money. In most cases, that amounts to no more than assurances, good intentions, promises to try hard.

Deliver on those promises in advance to really impress your prospects and clients. Point them to savings before they sign on the dotted line.

When you give your clients clearly defined steps they can use to improve cost-effectiveness, and back them with convenient tools (documents, forms, web pages, software) to support them, that separates you from the crowd. Indeed, a good guide to working with freelancers in your field provides a lasting benefit to your client.

That’s return on investment. That’s competitive advantage.