Now that you’ve figured out who your ideal client is, it’s time to figure out how you can serve them.
Don’t be tempted to skip this.
Just because you do software development (or graphic design) doesn’t mean that is the only what you can help them with.
Clients don’t want someone with a skill. They want a problem solved.
- Maybe their website needs to integrate with their shopping cart.
- Maybe their whitepapers aren’t converting anymore.
- Maybe they’re getting complaints about how slow their customer support is responding.
All of these are problems – pains they are experiencing.
What you need to do is to take your skill and apply it to those pains. If your experience is software development, you could do something like this:
- Integrate the website into their shopping cart through the shopping cart APIs.
- Create a lead generation system to track whitepaper downloads that notifies their salespeople to follow up with leads.
- Develop a knowledge base for customers so they can self-serve and answer their most common questions.
In each case your skill (in this example, software development) is applied to each problem.
Sometimes your client will do this for you. This happens frequently when the client approaches you (later on we’ll talk about how to become the “go-to guy for X”).
The client identified one of their problems, decided how to fix it, and looked for someone with the skill to implement that fix (you).
The problem with this approach is that it’s very ad-hoc. You’re only getting clients who:
- Recognized the problem
- Understood the problem enough to think about a potential solution
- Figured out what skills are needed to implement the solution
- Found a person who has the skills
That’s a lot for the client to do. And I’m sure as hell that for every one client who does all of those steps, there are 20 others who got stuck somewhere and gave up.
This is why you need to clearly describe what you can do for a client.
For example, if you say that you “use software to automate and streamline customer support to provide better and faster service to a business’s customers”, you’ll be hearing from a whole bunch of people that problem.
I want to give you an example of what I used to do in my business but first, think about this for your own freelance business.
- What skills do you have that you’re currently selling?
- What problems have you had customers come to your with (or ones that they’ve mentioned to you)?
Next time I’ll give you my detailed example of what I do to help clients. Hopefully that will help you figure out your own.
Eric Davis