When you find a great potential client for your freelance blogging services, what happens next?
You grab their email address and shoot them your best pitch, right?
But how many times have you excitedly fired off a pitch, only to find out later that you were pitching the wrong prospect? Maybe they don’t have the money to hire you. Maybe they don’t need your services.
If that’s ever happened to you, you’re not alone. It happens a lot, not just to freelancers like you but to big corporations, too.
And the simple reason behind this? Failure to pre-qualify prospects before making an offer.
Unfortunately, not many freelance bloggers take the time to assess and pre-qualify prospective clients before pitching. But here’s the deal: if you do, you’ll get far better results.
Why you want to pre-qualify your leads
Pre-qualifying a prospective client means evaluating them to see if they’re a good fit for your services and if they meet your minimum requirements.
If you are (and you should be) a choosy freelancer who maintains high standards when it comes to taking on freelance projects, then this is for you. Or if you’ve been less choosy and now you’re ready to ditch the clients who aren’t willing to pay a fair rate, this is definitely for you.
Pre-qualifying your freelance prospects before pitching them holds many benefits. Here are a few:
- You’ll see how legit a potential freelance opportunity is before you jump on it.
- You’ll have a smaller but better-quality prospect list.
- You’ll know more about your potential clients before you pitch.
- You’ll pitch only to people who are willing and able to hire you.
- You’ll avoid wasting time on dead-end freelance leads.
When you know about your potential clients and their needs, you’ll be able to tailor your pitch emails to address them personally and to address those needs. That alone boosts your possibility of winning the gig.
Here are seven easy, yet practical, ways you can assess your prospects to see how qualified they are for your freelance blogging services:
7 ways to pre-qualify your prospects
1. Check their job openings
This doesn’t mean checking to see if they’re recruiting for the role you want (i.e. “freelance blogger”). They may or may not list your desired position.
You’re checking for one simple reason: when a company lists job openings, it’s an indication that they have extra money to spend.
You want to pitch a client who’s willing to pay at least one more person to join their team. Listed job openings are a good sign of this.
Don’t know how or where to find a prospect’s job openings? Simple! While on the client’s website, look out for links with such anchor text as “jobs,” “careers,” “join our team,” etc.
Tip: Even though you won’t be directly looking for the position of blogger, keep an eye out for it as well as similar roles such as “content writer”. When pitching, you could mention any relevant career opportunity they’re already advertising.
2. Check their income
In her Client Hunting Masterclass, Sophie advises pitching clients whose annual revenue is over $1 million (as I learned from Joy Collado’s guest post on Be a Freelance Writer).
No matter how good the opportunity is, if the client doesn’t have enough money to pay you, you won’t be happy working with them. So before pitching a client, do a little research to see if they have the financial power to afford your services.
Some clients may publish their income report online, but if they don’t, there are a few other ways you can get to know their worth.
For instance, check out their products’ prices. If they’re selling items priced at $5,000, they’d only need one extra sale to cover your fees.
You can also use services like Hoovers or Manta to find out a company’s revenue and see whether the prospect is worth pitching or not.
3. Follow their money to its source
Next, check to see if your prospective clients are selling a real product or service, rather than placing ads next to content and waiting for visitors’ clicks to create revenue.
A prospect’s business model more or less tells you how much they’re likely to earn, which ultimately tells you whether they’ll be able to pay your rates or not. A company without a clearly defined product or service is unlikely to make a good client.
So before pitching any client, take a look at how they are making their money. If it’s pay per click, run for your freelance career! You don’t want to end up with a client who uses your writing as “the product” while waiting for ads or affiliate links to get clicked before they pay you.
4. Look up their social media profiles
Social networks are some of the best places to see the legitimacy of your prospective clients. You can see what they’ve been saying and what people have been saying about them.
Negative customer comments and feedback are a red light, while praise from customers shows that the company is worth working with.
Social media also shows how keen the prospect is to communicate with their audience online — useful to know before you offer your freelance blogging services.
5. Check their contact information
Is the prospect’s contact information displayed on their website? Phone numbers, email addresses and, most important, their street address?
If the only means of getting to them is through a contact form on their site, it could mean they don’t have a solid offline presence. And that means trouble if ever you need to contact them and they simply don’t respond.
This is somewhat connected to point #3 above. A company that sells real-world products or services will typically have an offline office that people can visit (or at least write to).
6. Look for social proof
Social proof is a catch-all term for testimonials, case studies, Facebook Likes, etc.
You check out a prospect’s social proof because it shows three things:
- The client’s track record of success.
- The amount of happy customers or employees who trust the client.
- The length of time the client’s been in business.
But what if a client doesn’t have social proof? Does it mean they aren’t trustworthy? No — not every prospect you find will have a ton of social proof, but a good number of them will.
7. Check their transparency
You don’t want to end up working with people who aren’t trusted even by their customers — people who aren’t transparent (not in the sense of seeing through them, but in the sense of being open and candid).
If their website’s visitors don’t trust them, that affects your work if you blog for that company. People don’t read a blog they don’t trust.
Legitimate companies who have nothing to hide will always be transparent with their customers. If a company cannot be transparent, they probably aren’t going to be your best client. And if they’re not interested in sharing information with their customers, there’s no point offering them blogging services.
Some things to look out for when checking to see how transparent a company is with their customers are their press releases, their blog, their Facebook page, and team members’ profiles or bios on their website.
Next steps
Here’s the hard, cold truth: As a freelance blogger who’s got bills to pay, you cannot afford to work with every client. Not all prospects are worth pursuing.
The only way to identify the most (and least) promising prospects in advance is through pre-qualification.
What does it mean when a prospect doesn’t qualify?
It means the prospect does not meet the minimum requirement, either financially or otherwise, to hire your freelance services and be able to pay YOUR rates.
And what should you do if that’s the case?
Drop them, period.
You want leads that increase your chances of getting new clients and ultimately help you build a strong freelance clientele, not ones that will eat up your time without any tangible result.
I don’t advocate working for low pay or working with a client ‘for now’ with the hope that they’ll raise the pay when business goes up. Just drop them and move on to better-paying clients.
And yes, there really are better-paying ones out there!
How do you pre-qualify your prospects before pitching them? We’d love to read your opinions in the comments.
Cherese Cobb says
Zoe,
I love the idea of pre-qualifying clients. I wish I had been using this the past two months of freelancing. I am going to use it from now on. I also love when I find new tools for my virtual writer’s box. Thanks for the links to Manta and Hoover because now I am one very happy writer.
Cherese R. Cobb
Zoe Uwem says
Hi Cherese,
I’m glad you love the idea.
Good luck on your freelance journey as you begin to pre-qualify clients.
PowerLancer says
Great advices, just shared the article on our social network 🙂
Zoe Uwem says
Thanks, Tom.
Jennifer Mattern says
While I agree that pre-qualifying clients is a great idea, I don’t agree with the million dollar figure.
I’ve been at this a long time, and I routinely work with smaller businesses with less revenue than that each year. And they’re often my highest paying clients. It’s a common misconception that smaller businesses won’t, or can’t, pay for professional writing. Many can. And unlike larger clients (where you sometimes deal with bureaucratic BS, low departmental budgets that have nothing to do with the company’s annual revenue, and far more nit-picking with more hands on each project), smaller clients have, in my experience, been more willing to invest. They know they need to make their money work harder for them, and serious entrepreneurs know that means bringing in other pros from time to time.
Will some smaller companies fall through? Of course. So do plenty of larger companies and publications. But don’t dismiss an otherwise ideal prospect just because you make assumptions about what they can or can’t afford. Assumptions are often wrong. Besides, there’s no good excuse to not get an up-front deposit (if you don’t charge in full up front — I do). That eliminates most of the concern regarding what a prospect can and can’t afford to pay. And at the very least, it minimizes your risks.
Zoe Uwem says
Hi Jennifer,
Good to see you here.
You’ve got a point there, but we never said nobody should work with smaller clients. If they can afford to pay your fee, why ditch ’em?
The point I was trying to make above is for you to do your homework first because, let’s face it, it’s not every company that can afford to pay top rates.
One thing I know for sure is that the types of customers you keep will more or less define your earning level. For instance, if you hope to crack six figures in freelance income at the end of your freelance business year, you would need to go after bigger firms and publications who can pay well.
Based on my experience, smaller firms have smaller budgets vs bigger firms. Plus, they need to plan ahead.
Though smaller firms may be more flexible and responsive, bigger firms on the other hand move more slowly (sometimes) as most things are decided by committee, but they pay better.
So to anyone reading this, I’d like to say, FOLLOW THE MONEY. Whether it’s the small firm next door or an internationally recognized Fortune 500, as far as they can (and are willing to) pay YOUR rates, grab them. That’s what the whole thought in point #2 above is all about.
Sophie Lizard says
My unbreakable rule is: never work for a business whose annual revenue is lower than your *own* target revenue. The million-dollar figure is useful if you’re pitching relatively cold, and less important if you get to know your leads for a while before proposing to write for them.
Revenue is a poor indicator of actual blogging budget because it doesn’t tell you anything about the business model, expenses, and priorities. But it gives you a sense of how the company is doing sales-wise, and provides a potential anchor for your pricing: “If your annual revenue is £5 million and my services create just a 1% increase in sales, that’s worth $50,000 per year — but it’ll only cost you $10,000 per year to hire me.”
Plus you can usually find revenue data online, and it often comes with other info about the company, so it’s an easy way to learn a bit more about your lead. 😉
Irene Enriquez says
Thanks for weighing in, Sophie! I personally don’t look at income when I’m prospecting, so the pieces of advice here are really helpful. I have a question in narrowing down the potential clients you want to work with. Should I include my rates on my blog? That way if a client can’t afford a 500-word blog post, for example, he/she can move on and find another writer. Right now, I don’t put my rates per post. I get quite a few inquiries and answering them takes time. I was wondering if I display the rates that would limit the serious clients versus the ones who are “shopping” for the cheapest rates.
Sophie Lizard says
I publish rate guidelines on my business website for exactly that reason, Irene. (Wrote a whole post about it here: http://www.firepolemarketing.com/raising-price)
Call them your *minimum* rates and you’ll always have the option of increasing them for projects that involve extra time/effort. 😉
Irene Enriquez says
Thanks, Sophie! I appreciate the response. 🙂 It’s exactly what I need right now.
Katherine Swarts says
Great article! I’ve been wrestling with the question of how to decide whom to approach for some time now. One way I keep up to date on whom to investigate is by subscribing to the Blogtrottr press release service, which sends out daily digests of companies that are keeping the public up to date on their activities (the list can be programmed for any industry).
Zoe Uwem says
Hey Katherine,
Thanks for your comment!
Yes, Blogtrottr is a great tool for locating leads, but I’ll advise you still sift those leads even after they’ve landed in your inbox to see the ones that are worth your chase.
Katherine Swarts says
You’re telling me. If I insisted on following up *everything* that landed in my box by that route, I’d not only spend three hours a day on it, I’d be bothering some potential clients three times a week (or day) in their busiest events seasons.
Peggy Carouthers says
Great tips, Zoe. I always use Manta when I’m looking at new clients. I hadn’t thought about job postings, but it makes sense. I’ll be adding that to my process.
Lem says
I am thinking of starting to pitch prospective clients since I only get most of my freelance writing work in job boards. Do you have any samples on how to pitch clients?
Sophie Lizard says
Lem, you’ll find a ton of useful tips and ideas on pitching clients here: http://beafreelanceblogger.com/category/get-hired
Zoe Uwem says
Tell you what, Peggy?
Found this great prospect and wanted to send a pitch email to them but just before I did that, I looked up their “Career” page and found that they were even advertising for a content creator. I weaved that into my pitch and had them respond back to me favorably.
Try it.
LuanaSpinetti says
I’ve never thought about looking at my prospective clients’ annual income and current job openings to pre-qualify them.
However, I have contacted a few companies on the basis of their Careers page — that sometimes listed technical writing and/or editing — and I introduced myself, asking if they used freelancers.
Alas, the ones who replied to my emails said they don’t. 🙁
~ Luana
Katherine Swarts says
How about checking their own blog and/or Resources/News page? If an organization already has articles of their own posted, they may be easier to sell than someone who has none and may not care to. If the blog author tags indicate multiple writers, they may be more receptive to adding another. If they posted regularly and then broke off a few months ago, they may be more than willing to have someone revive that aspect. And, of course, there’s hardly a better way to gauge whether any publisher might like your ideas (and which ones they’d consider “been there done that”), than to read what they’ve already published.
Zoe Uwem says
Good ideas, Katherine.
Thanks for the addition.
Katherine Swarts says
Kudos for your mentioning “team members’ bios” under “Transparency.” I have encountered umpteen sites that seem to guard their staff members’ names, let alone contact information, like war secrets. And pity the tech writer who wants to even leave a general message for a real human being on a major technological-services website!
Joy says
Hi Zoe,
I’m glad you found my guest post on BAFW helpful. 🙂
And thank you for this great post on BAFB. It’s a great read plus the comments I read above are helpful.
Zoe Uwem says
Hi Joy,
Thanks for your comment!
Katherine Swarts says
Regarding #2: Hoovers.com is easier to use, but for those who are “only” doing basic research (as opposed to being actual logged-in subscribers) it’s also a nuisance. Every time (and I mean EVERY time) it downloads a new page, its “Let’s Chat” popup jumps in to nag you to let a salesperson try to talk you into a “Free Trial” subscription.
Katherine Swarts says
Right now–because I need more clients to the extent of needing some quantity in inquiries to go with the quality, and so as not to turn marketing procrastinator by insisting *everyone* meet *every* criterion–I’m concentrating primarily on #1, 2, and 4–although #3 and 5 usually turn out to be givens, and #6 figures into my evaluation of #4. Generally, I review Facebook alone on the social media points (sometimes going to Twitter as a “second chance” if a place looks really intriguing) because that’s where most of my market niche are most active; and even if the organization fails to pass the other two points, I usually “Like” the page and share one or two recently posted items. I’m not all that strict about insisting that a new prospect make #s 1 AND 2, either, if it comes out favorably on one or the other.