Tricks That Make You More Attractive to Clients | Hacker News Reader

Tricks That Make You More Attractive to Clients

freelancefolder.com

44 pointsrick88812 comments

Hmmm. The number 1 thing that worked for me (I refuse to call it a trick) was being attentive to what the client actually needed.

A lot of consultants want to walk in the door and propose all sorts of fancy / flashy solutions. Many times, that's not really needed.

Almost all of my clients (it's been a few years since I've consulted) told me that the reason they always called me back was because they knew I took the time to first understand the problem that they needed to have fixed and that my only interest was to find the right solution for them.

Sometimes that meant I had to spend weeks working in Access or VB, but that's what the right solution was for them.

It's easy to get a big head when you're consulting; you know everything that there is to know and people pay you serious money just to hear your advice. I have seen a lot of consultants who insist on only using bleeding edge everything for every solution they write; some of them even do it with great success.

I guarantee you that none of them have the same kind of word-of-mouth marketing you get by proving to your client that you care about their problems, and that you're going to find the solution that fits them the best. I closed up shop 3 years ago, and I still get referrals from my old clients on a weekly basis to this day.

Good advice. If you don't mind me asking, why did you decide to stop?

My favorite client was losing their only full time developer and made me an offer that was basically impossible to refuse to come work for them full time.

I live and die by #1. I have a last in, first out policy when it comes to requests via email. If you want something done, and you email me about it, it gets top priority over whatever else I'm doing. One of the biggest comments I hear from people who are referred to me (which is the only way I've taken on work in the last 3 years) is the speed of my support.

Like he says though, you have to be careful with this. I once had a client who would constantly email me with support questions, many of which I answered multiple times but I guess it was easier for him to just email me instead of searching his email logs. I would always answer back right away, which would mean he would write me back with another question, and the cycle would repeat itself indefinitely. It basically became instant messaging with a 20 minute delay, and totally killed my productivity while making me hate this person.

Also, I try to be as honest with my billing as possible, which means that if each support question takes 5 minutes out of my day, I might only bill this person for 30 minutes, even though the true cost to me is much greater because of my lost productivity.

My solution was to ask him to either send me support questions in batch unless they were real emergencies, or pay me to set up a bug/feature tracker.

When this happens to me, and it has several times, I just get real honest with the person and ask them to try and be a little more organized with their questions. Most people become real apologetic when they feel like they're abusing you... especially when you've built up a track record with them.

try exponential back-off :-)

Can anyone say a little more about how to "actively attract and screen for good clients"?

One more important thing is to

1)share your experiences of your work via blog

This helps you in increasing the trust with your potential clients and to find new clients by means of inbound marketing see below link:

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/10807/Startups-How-To-B...

Nice writeup, but how did the word "tips", mentioned 4 times in the article, become "Tricks" in the title? They're not the same thing. "Tricks" implies something devious, underhanded, or hidden, and there's nothing like that in this article. No one likes to be tricked and these days, no one can be tricked for long.

Customers want you to be open, honest, and trustworthy partners and all of the "tips" in this article are great for doing just that.

I'm guessing it was just their marketing - tips suggest something you'll need to work at, tricks suggests it's magic in some way, that you'll get a surprising return on your [time] investment.

Sorry for offtopic, but just looking for an ACK for the email I sent, in case it found itself in a spam filter. :)

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