Gaining and keeping clients during a Recession

I read a wonder post on Freelance Folder on gaining and keeping clients during a recession. The job losses over the last two years are staggering and competition amongst freelancers and small business owners is fierce. When prospects have the opportunity to choose from many businesses offering the same services, it becomes harder to stand out in the crowd. Excellent customer service is a great at helping businesses retain customers, but how do we gain customers.

You can read the post Retention During The Recession: 20 Ways to Get And Keep More Clients from freelance folder.

To this I want to add the benefit of volunteering.

Volunteering: Volunteering your time and services is a great way to gain new clients and benefit the community at the same time. As a volunteer, you will come to know people that are outside of your normal circle of associates. Even if they are unable to utilize your services, they may know of others who can. Another benefit is that people recommend people they know and like and although they may know personally of the services you offer, many will recommend you because they have had a good experience volunteering alongside you and appreciate the job you have done volunteering.

What techniques are you using to gain new customers?

What are you doing to retain the customers you currently have?

Are you a perfect client?

I read a great post on Freelance Switch blog today about finding your perfect client and it got me to thinking. Do we act as perfect clients?

We are all looking for the perfect clients to work with, the type of clients that cause us to enjoy our work and feel a sense of pride in the jobs that we do. My perfect client would be able to afford my fees, not grumble about the cost of my fees, and listen to what I say and implement the advice that I give them, but I wonder, am I a perfect client. Do I grumble about the fees of other businesses? Do I listen to what they say and implement the suggestion they give me?

Beating out the competition

I was reading an article that I found to be very information when it comes to keeping your cool and beating out the competition. It boils down to this: you only have to be concerned about winning against 40% of the competition in your field.

For example:

Let us say you sell dental insurance to corporation for their employees and the corporation sends request for RFP’s to ten dental insurance providers. The ten dental insurance providers will receive the RFP, of the ten only eight will respond the customer’s request. The eight that respond only six will submit the RFP to the company on time. The six that will submit the RFP, only four will provide all the required information that the company has requested. The goal is to make sure you are one of the four that makes it to the company’s final evaluation. In the end if you are one of the four finalist, you really only have three other competitors to worry about and have a 25% change of winning the business.