One of the biggest challenges that you will face in your freelance career, particularly early on, is attracting and securing your clients. It’s also a challenge that will follow you throughout your career as, for better or for worse, many clients are not going to be around forever. There is a natural churn, and as such, you need to put in a constant effort to expand your clientele…. but how do you do that?
It may not sound like the most pleasant or the friendliest tactic in the world, but the “wedge and pry technique” could really be beneficial for both the service provider (i.e., you) and the customer (i.e., your potential client). You could say that it is quite related to the foot in the door technique, but applied to the context of an independent freelancer.
Phase One: Developing Your Wedge
There many different methods you can try for attracting new clients. You can offer referral bonuses, for instance, building up an army of folks who keep sending qualified leads your way. However, you still need to close the deal when that referral comes knocking on your door. And that’s where you need your wedge.
Think about all the different services that you provide. Then, focus on what you do best. Be as specific as you can and establish yourself as an expert in this particular kind of work. Leverage your reputation and turn this specific kind of work into your “wedge.” Think of it as the screwdriver that you see in the image at the top of this post. It’s thin and can get into that relatively thin opportunity… but it’s what gets the job started. That’s how you get their interest.
Phase Two: Getting the Right Fit
A specialist generally makes more money than a generalist doing the same kind of work. This is another advantage to developing your wedge. However, in actively promoting your wedge product or service, you might be missing out on clients who aren’t interested in that particular product or service. You may have what they want too, but they don’t know it. At the end of the day, you may need to take the 80/20 rule into consideration for this reason.
Your wedge is not going to be one size fits all. At the same time, it’ll also need to be adapted and tweaked until you find what works best. When you find the right fit, then you have yourself an effective wedge.
Phase Three: Prying Into Other Opportunities
Just because you’ve narrowed down your wedge into a very sharp and specific tool doesn’t mean that it is the only tool at your disposal. After you’ve used the wedge to establish a strong working relationship with a new client and you’ve earned his or her trust, you can start to “pry open” that opportunity into additional opportunities.
This is when you can start selling relevant products and services that may also be useful to this client. Say, for example, that your freelance writing wedge has to do with writing press releases. Later on, you can then offer to maintain the company blog and re-write the website copy too. The client doesn’t see this as an upsell; they see it as a valuable, supplementary service offered by someone they already trust.
The wedge gets your foot in the door. The pry is where you grow your business opportunity.
I liked all your analogies with the Wedge tool. Is this a technique you came up with on your own? I’ve never heard of it before, and I really like it!
-Jean
The basic concept came up in conversation during a Dot Com Pho lunch. I expanded on the concept and wrote this post. 🙂
Brilliant! I actually did a Google search after I read the post, and didn’t find anything else like it so thats why I asked! 🙂
-Jean