A Case for Cold Outreach
One of the oldest techniques in the book remains effective even today.
Many people brush off cold outreach in favor of newer methods. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest mistakes a young professional, especially a freelancer, can do. Not doing it leaves money on the table, something we can’t afford in these times.
The implementation of cold outreach into my business plan has been a game changer. It took my struggling business and made it into something livable. I just wish I would’ve done it sooner.
For the first few months of my career as a freelancer, I primarily used specified job hunting sites like UpWork and Fiverr to find work. But things didn’t work out for me very well on there. The jobs were few and far between, and the work I did find wasn’t exactly high-paying.
After that, I moved on to Facebook and the job boards scattered across it. Things went a little better for me there, but the competition was fierce. Finding clients was easy, but landing them was an entirely different story.
But I kept with it. I returned to the boards every single day and pitched to anybody who would listen. Things were rough for awhile, but eventually they got better. I started landing a few clients and then they returned to repeats. Repeat clients are what keep us alive in this business.
After a month or so of exclusively hunting for work on Facebook — I’d hopped off the job boards by this point, they just weren’t making me enough to justify staying on — one of my mentors told me about LinkedIn. He said it was the same as Facebook, but only for business owners and other professionals.
Once I got on LinkedIn, I began sending out mass message blasts to any and everyone who would connect with me. Now I’m not going to lie, the vast majority of these cold messages were complete and total failures. Most people just ignored them or politely declined my services. I didn’t begrudge them for it, but it was disheartening nonetheless.
Some of them were receptive, though, and I ended up landing some of my highest paying clients out of it. Looking back, I’d chalk that time up as success. But there was definite room for improvement, that much was obvious.
After taking a few steps back and looking at the big picture, I realized what I was doing wrong: the stock messages. I don’t know why I’d thought obviously copy and pasted messages were a good idea. They reeked of spam, so it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that people ignored them.
There needed to be a reason behind each message, they had to answer questions businesses didn’t know they had — I needed to be solving their problems instead of shouting at them from the void.
Chances are that they’ll read your first message, and if you manage to give them a solution to one of their problems right away then the chances of them hiring you for the job drastically increase.
Why would they go through the hassle of outsourcing when you’ve already proposed a solution? It just doesn’t make sense.
Now that you’ve sealed the deal, it’s time to get to work. All of this was just the work we do in order to have the opportunity to do the real work.
There’s one last step left to do once you’ve delivered the goods and left the client satisfied. You’ve got to follow up. While it’s the easiest part of the process, it’s also the most delicate. Don’t overdue it, or you’ll turn them off and they’ll look elsewhere for their next project.
Find the sweet spot in the middle and they’ll be coming back to you for years. Do that enough times, and you’ll be well on your way to a successful freelancing career.
