How to find clients for your freelance/consulting business?
From clear positioning to closing the deals
Dear GTM Strategist!
I retired.
Just kidding. This photo is from Heviz, the largest swimmable thermal lake in the world. The water is very warm - 35°C (95°F). More floating than swimming for us, experienced spa veterans.
After spending a couple of days in a thermal resort, my husband, two dogs and I are off to Budapest now.
As we are beating the heat wave, I wanted to share our “holiday chill” to answer a question that keeps on popping up from our community on LinkedIn: “How to get clients for freelance/consulting businesses?”
Short answer: They are probably already in your phone book.
Usually, it boils down to recommendations, outbound, and some inbound.
But since I know that you are serious readers who will not settle for that, here is my long answer:
Working as a solopreneur for the last 15 years taught me a thing or two about getting clients. Last year, when my partner Tim and I trained over 200 freelancers on scaling their service businesses, I truly systemized my thinking around the subject.
The results of our training:
85% of the class found their first client within 2-3 months of the program
2/3 of them doubled or even quadrupled their income
15 attendees are no longer solo but employ other people in their businesses now.
As we analyzed the class results, the holy trinity of how they got new clients was indeed recommendations, leads from their inbound (hack = value comments in communities) and actively reaching out to businesses that can benefit from their services.
I exited this business to have more bandwidth for the GTM Strategist. FOCUS.
But I take a lot of pride in this class because it was truly a life-changing project.
In this post, we will tackle:
Positioning - it’s where you can really make or break the deal when it comes to freelancing or one-person businesses
How to engineer a fair deal and construct an MVP collaboration model
5 ways in which solopreneurs can acquire new business based on my sample of working with over 200 freelancers
This post can also help business owners and leaders work better with freelancers. Everyone tells you how to be an “enlightened leader to your employees.” How about leading the freelancers?
Let’s break the solopreneur code!
Positioning: Are you just another “Freelance Copywriter”?
Recently, I was recruiting for the role of digital marketer at my company Growth Lab.
Freelance, contract, employment - I really do not have preferences as long as I find the best person for the job.
A variety of candidates applied.
Copywriters, ghostwriters for famous entrepreneurs, e-commerce people, CRO specialists, camouflaged agencies - you name it.
How on Earth can I make a rational decision out of such a heterogeneous talent pool?
I had to take some mental shortcuts to narrow down the pool to something manageable.
Three things were a hard “no” for me:
Not giving a shit. I am sure 70% of applicants did not even bother to see what we do at Growth Lab. If you do not bother to check out my business, why should I bother to interview you?
Vanilla positioning. “I do copywriting for socials and blogs.” Well cool, so do I, but did you ever do Substack/LinkedIn editing? Do you have any references that are similar to what I am doing?
No evidence that what you do works. Sorry, but it is such a huge turn-off if you pitch me thought leadership ghostwriting services, and then I see that you post 2x a day and barely get 1 to 2 thumbs up on your posts. More minus points if your profile was last updated in 2009. You can easily bypass that by linking me to a portfolio of what you did for other clients. But you did not - so how can I know better?
For most freelancers, consultants, and solopreneurs, riches are in the niches.
You did something that worked well.
Now put this case to the megaphone and find 10 more businesses that could benefit from this.
You might also want to explore fields that are adjacent to your expertise.
If you excelled at copywriting for food supplements, I have high confidence that you can write direct responses for educational products.
Why?
If you can convince hundreds of thousands of people to eat blueberry powder in the morning to boost their brain capacity, you are likely to be successful in selling great digital products, too.
We will just have to tone down your strong direct response voice because we are dealing with a high-IQ, critical-thinking audience here.
But your powers of persuasion can be used for good.
Here is a visual that can help you grasp this.
The more specific you can get in: “I do X to help Y to achieve Z by doing …”, the more likely it is that your positioning is going to work well.
✍️ Your turn:
Write a list of your top 5-10 achievements (If you struggle with that ask your colleagues to help you with it. I love to ask them “How would you recommend me to your peers?” or “For what would you come to me instead of everyone else?”)
Reverse engineer the Ideal Customer Profile from these references - who can you help best? If you have challenges doing that - see this post.
Ask yourself where you can find these people—better yet, ask them how they search for service providers. I expect 60-70% will say through recommendations, so now you need to create a portfolio, some case studies/social media posts and before-during-after testimonials.
Have a decent presence on social media - at least a profile so that I do not end up on your TikTok when I search for you (unless you sell TikTok services). This post has useful materials on how to do that.
If you are still in the super-early stage of the business and cannot yet pinpoint what exactly you will do, just list down all the ideas, research what your ICP needs (their social media posts, job posts, industry trends) and run 20 interviews with them. Then do a pilot project - you can use references from your previous jobs or offer to work for free for the first month. You can even do a dummy project, like a concept for a non-existing or famous brand. Doing the work will provide more answers for you than research.
The Deal: I buy solutions to my problems, not hours of work
We need to agree on something that is called a PROMISE.
For example, I can promise that my materials will help you achieve product-market fit faster if you follow every step.
How will you believe that I am the right person to do the job for you?
I need to present you EVIDENCE.
Case studies, testimonials, numbers, recommendations by respected people in the industry, etc.
How likely am I to buy your 5 LinkedIn posts per week if we cannot even agree on the expected result? I buy output, not input. And forgive me, but I care less about how many hours you will work on a new landing page than how much is going to cost me overall and what improvements/results I can expect.
Now, let’s examine what is going on in the head of a decision-maker, your future client.
Most business owners are quite simple to understand.
We are interested in ROI against alternatives for our investments.
And we like speedy, reliable and successful service execution.
The Alex Hormozi formula perfectly captures how we perceive the value.
The closer you can get to this logic, the more likely you are going to make a sale.
Working with you is an investment for me.
This investment has opportunity costs.
Every investment has a different time-to-value.
If I work with a performance marketer, I want to see a clear ROI in 3 months, tops. But if I hired someone to make me a better public speaker, I will settle with my perception of improvement without solid numbers in the next 6 months or so because I understand that my progress here cannot be linear and easy to measure.
Here are the risks that pause my decision-making: I will spend my time on onboarding. You will have a learning curve, and we may not be a great fit, so the investment in our collaboration could even be a sunk cost for me. Worse, I can pre-pay you, and you do a shitty job or even ghost me.
I know there are horror stories from the other side, too: of business owners who are scamming freelancers, who belong more to the mental hospital than in business, and founders with delusional expectations that everyone should work as hard as they do and be as committed that will drain the life out of you. Just to name some.
We need to develop TRUST to work together.
I must trust you to be the right person for the job and that you will do it well.
You must trust me that I will keep my end of the deal—deliver everything on time and, of course, pay your invoice as agreed (or sooner).
In the beginning, my biggest risk is whether I am going to make the best choice by hiring you. I could be wasting my time and money.
Your biggest risk is whether you have chosen the right opportunity, whether you can rely on me to do my part of the job, and, most importantly, whether we can produce good results that will generate a new testimonial or a case study for you.
The only way how this is going to work out is if we achieve a consensus:
What can/should be done? What is the objective? It does not even have to be a target number. It can be a process improvement, an insight, or a satisfactory deliverable in due time.
How do I work? What resources (design, web, my time) can I commit to this project and what is my overall availability to engage in this?
How do you work? Walk me through the process of what it is like to work with you. Then, let’s discuss your expectations, hard no's, and communication preferences.
My job is to secure 5K/month investment for 3 months and core content that you can work with.
Build me a demand generation machine that will generate at least 30K in sales, so I will have a positive ROI on this. Deal or no deal?
If we agree on this, half of the job (aligning the expectations) is done.
✍️ Your turn:
Envision your business in numbers. There are 2 ways to make 10K a month (OK, there are more, but for the sake of example, bear with me): either you work with 2 clients who will pay you 5K each or 10 clients who will pay you 1K each. What is a better bet for you?
Choose your pricing - early pricing is more a lifestyle choice or even a set-your-foot-in-the-door deal to get first references. Think:
Do you create as much value as a full/part-time employee to the company? Well, their gross paycheck is one hell of a pricing anchor for you.
Will you create a positive ROI in business? If you are a leadership coach and a client invests 30K in working with you - will they have at least 2-3x investment in 6-12 months? Great. Can you provide the evidence (testimonial, data, case study, etc.) that this is true?
Would you - as a human - rather multitask between 10 clients, develop good SOPs (standard operating procedures) and bring in more help to service them effectively; or would you rather dive deep into cracking challenges for 2 clients that will pay you more? Both ways work well in practice, and the latter is more of a boutique service.
Write “Offer 1.0” that is all about the customer: what you will do for them, what the investment is, and how they can feel confident that you are the right person for the job. It does not have to be complicated - it can be an email.
Now you have a business hypothesis, a hypothesis to whom you will sell and what you will sell.
Time to make some bucks, my friend.
Show time: 3 proven ways to find clients
Unlike many social media gurus, I will NEVER tell you to spend 4 hours every day on LinkedIn value posting and commenting if your goal is to find 5 clients who will pay you a monthly retainer of 3-5K/month.
You can do it if you want, but if you are an experienced professional with real results, your time is better spent doing the actual work than writing inspo posts such as “What did you learn from staring at a bug in a hotel room as a tranquility exercise.” 🪲
What would work better?
In my network, 90%+ of service businesses use these channels:
Recommendations. People trust people. I get asked more than 20 times a week if I know “someone.” In reality, I only recommend up to 10 people that I have closely work with before. My credibility is at stake when I do recommendations. Make sure your entire relevant network knows about you launching your freelance business. Send them a text, DM, and email, and post about your service on social media so they can remember you the next time someone asks them for recommendations. But position well because out of all 52 graphic designers in their network, they only refer a handful - those know can get the job done and have relevant references. In most service industries, recommendations account for more than 50% of new business.
Inbound & Communities. Rule number one in GTM is to go where the audience is. If your audience is on LinkedIn, some Facebook, or Slack groups, go there and start value commenting and posting. Here is my detailed guide on how to do it. It takes a long time to build your own audience from scratch, but you might want to at least start building this habit for a get-go. Opinion leaderships start with having a point of view that is interesting and relevant to others. Very important is that you should see yourself as a teacher, not a seller. Every post and comment should deliver value and show the expertise of you and your business. You do not need to turn your business into a media company to get 5 clients. This post got me $30K in sales. It is a simple “lessons learned” with a screenshot. It took me <20min to write.
It was not even popular.
Outbound. Based on your ICP, develop a list of companies that you want to target and send them an email/LinkedIn message. People can shout that outbound is dead all they want, but if you have a well-targeted list of 200-300 decision-makers, a good relevant offer, and a real ability to help them, it can work like a charm and save you hundreds of hours in content creation. If you do not want to do cold outreach (people that you do not know), at least do some warm outreach and inform relevant ICPs in your network that you offer services now.
As your business matures, you will likely benefit greatly from partnerships and targeted ABM—Account-Based Marketing—but those things take time to develop. You can team up with other professionals, VCs, organizations, communities, or event organizers to present your case studies or proprietary methodologies and get leads from these placements. If you need new clients in less than a month, I give you my proven top three.
Think beyond channels.
✍️ Your turn:
This one is a no-brainer: Ask your previous clients, employers, and colleagues if they know someone who needs your services. If so, ask them for a warm introduction.
Figure out where your ICP actively collects information when they are making a buying decision in your problem space. There might be influencers, closed communities, events, or channels that they turn to.
If you are a beginner, check if what you offer is applicable to international marketplaces such as Upwork. Even if you are more experienced, job posts by your ICP will give you a good signal that someone is on the market actively investing in your fields of expertise.
If LinkedIn inbound is or could be part of your funnel, try documenting your journey by building in public. Not only can you help thousands of other people navigate their entrepreneurial path, but you can also win new business by doing it. This post got me 9 leads and 3 new clients. It was not one of my best-performing LinkedIn posts, but it is so good that others use it for their business development. Leads > Impressions.
Winning attitude: Easy to work with
My cousin David is a model and a TV host. He taught me a very important lesson:
“People hire me because I am easy to work with. There are so many divas, unreliable and unserious people that you stand out if you show up on time, take directions well, and act like a professional. Bonus points if you have a good sense of humor and some courtesy.”
Painfully true.
Lesson #1: just be the professional that you can be. Show up. Do the work. Respect promises.
Be an excellent communicator, a reliable person, and someone who fulfills the agreements.
Position yourself as “easy to work with.”
That doesn’t mean being a doormat. You still have hard limits, but you're flexible enough to meet my availability and capacity because I do not need another daunting process; I need a solution to my problems.
Be easy to work with.
You will have more fun and feel less stressed too.
I hope you liked this post and grasped a nugget or two that will help you grow your business or work better with freelancers.
Good luck with your business.
Let’s go to market!
(stronger together♥️)
-Maja
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Great and interesting and useful as always
I love the clarity with which you explained the positioning topic. I'm glad I came across this early today.