Toggling between feast and famine is a reality for many freelancers because we often neglect filling our leads pipeline while we're busy working on one project.
Prospecting is also not the hardest task to avoid, filled with chasing dead ends and back and forth emailing.
Today, I'm going to teach you a prospecting approach that consistently yields good results:
cold emailing people you would love to work with and strategically doing some free work them.
Why cold emailing is more effective: you can target the exact people to contact
Iris Shoor of Takipi got more responses from cold emailing people than from getting introduced to them.
Why? Because most of the people she got referred to only responded because they were doing a favor for the mutual contact.
Cold emailing gives you the power to choose exactly who you want to contact so you can proactively reach out to people who can really benefit from your product or service.
Finding prospective clients to contact
Actively visit forums where entrepreneurs and business owners hang out. Many of them are actively seeking solutions to problems they want to solve and goals they want to achieve.
Some great places to start:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/
- http://warriorforum.com/
- Linkedin groups
- Google+ communities
- Monthly who is hiring threads on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9303396 (April 2015)
Create a spreadsheet and add the names of people who have discussed problems/challenges you can help with:
Some forum posters do not use their real names so you may have to comb through their post history to see if they mention the company they work at. If nothing turns up, you can private message them on the forum instead.
Subscribe to the newsletters of influencers in different fields. They ask subscribers questions in some emails, providing you with a perfect starting off point to engage with them and provide value.
Just talking about your benefits no longer works
We've all heard this exhort by now: "benefits not features!" However emails just describing your benefits do not work.
Case in point: Devesh Khanal cold emailed 100 businesses about redesigning their presentations. He personalized every single email and created effective before and after pictures:
Still out of the 100 emails he sent, only 16% of the people opened his email and none of them hired him.
The issue with describing benefits is, they still don't help prospective clients make that leap from seeing your previous work to imagining what you can do specifically for them.
Where strategically providing free work comes in
So what eventually worked? Instead of talking about yourself and what you can do, identify a problem your prospect has.
Then take the time to create some aspects of the solution and present it to them. Ask yourself, what is the first step you take a customer after they hire or buy from you? Do that in your first email to them.
This is the approach that Charlie Hoehn used to go from being broke and living his parent's basement - yes that stereotypical rock bottom - to working with top entrepreneurs like Ramit Sethi, Tucker Max and Tim Ferriss.
Hoehn initially did free work for the people he wanted to work with.
You know how some food brands give out free samples to give you a taste? Exact same process at work with this cold emailing strategy: let them sample your work before they buy.
That is what finally worked for Khanal. He made a personal video for Eric Siu explaining where to improve his website to capture more emails. He gave Siu an sample of what he could do for him.
Bryan Harris also used this approach to ask Hubspot about doing a video series for their site.
Instead of simply listing benefits like his videos can bring in lots of traffic, he actually created a sample video to show what he could do for them. He landed the gig.
Here's the email that Bryan Harris sent to Neil Patel, netting over $30, 000 of work with Kissmetrics:
Here are some examples of strategic free work you can provide to a business owner or influencer:
Copywriting Copy review of their landing page, pointing out which headlines, sublines and so on they can improve.
Graphic design Slightly modify one of their main graphics to make it look more aesthetically pleasing.
Video editor Recut one of their existing videos to transition the scenes more seamlessly from one another,
Helping someone is also what jumpstarted Copy Hackers, a top blog on copywriting and conversion tips.
Johanna Wiebe, the founder of Copy Hackers, did free copywriting for a Hacker News member. He wrote a post on HN about the experience, exalting it as an example of the community's giving and sharing spirit.
It stayed on top of HN for a long time and the many people who saw the post asked Wiebe to share her copywriting tips with them. This inspired her to create Copy Hackers.
This approach is also validated by what happens with in person sales.
In a book by Adam Grant called Give and Take, he found the most successful salesmen were not ones who delivered slick pitches extolling the benefits of a product.
Which salesmen sold the most?
The ones who asked customers a lot of questions to learn about their lives and to understand their needs first.
The psychology behind why this show not tell method works so well
Why does this show and tell method work so well?
Step inside the shoes of a hirer. From Elance to individual portfolio websites, there are hundreds of freelancers they can choose from.
Having choices is great, but it can also be overwhelming. The more choices we have, the more likely we are to get stuck in analysis paralysis and take no action.
It is also an arduous process for hirers to screen applicants and to communicate what they want. When you proactively contact them and present them with an actual solution to one of their problems/goals, they:
a) do not have to find you first b) can see you have the ability to do the project and took the time to understand their needs
As with any method, it's effectiveness depends on you taking that first step to apply it. So over to you!
Have a success story with this prospecting method or something similar? Love to hear it in the comments below.
About the author Sapph Li is the founder of Art of Emails - prewritten business emails (including how to sell, pitch) proven to get the right responses.