When it comes to getting premium freelance clients, what's your single biggest challenge?
Trust.
I’ve learned it the hard way that even if the client is “premium”, you can still get swindled in the name of “samples” or “contests”. So I stopped giving samples or participating in contests.
And most clients (premium or otherwise) are hesitant to trust freelancers too. So social proof is what I offer, usually in the form of LinkedIn recommendations, or reference names and contact details, when needed.
The biggest challenge you will face is that bigger clients typically want to control more of your time. As a freelancer, most of the time you’re working a FT job while freelancing on the side. Or you are running a company and get work from freelance websites (or both).
So freelancing for a bigger client can often times impact your other responsibilities if you’re not careful.
The problem is, while the money can be good, if it impacts your ability to work with other clients you’re actually losing out on money.
Because of this, it’s important to set boundaries. Make sure you are only doing work you were assigned to do. Don’t do extra just because they are paying you more.
Trust me, you’ll thank yourself later.
The other problem is they always try and get you set up on “their” system. Which means you have to re-learn everything and how you’ve always done it in order to adapt to some CRM they are using instead of them just letting you do you.
Thanks for your request. Rather than one single biggest challenge, there are many challenges in getting premium clients—and those challenges change over time. At the start, the challenge for most freelancers is finding any clients at all and building up their experience to move from low-paying clients to premium clients.
The next challenge is discovering where the premium clients can regularly be found, such as industry-specific freelancing platforms, or building up their own website and marketing their services well. For a lot of freelancers, regularly finding the premium clients is the biggest challenge, because there’s a lot of clients out there not willing to pay what the freelancer is worth.
The biggest challenge for me personally is knowing where to pitch my prices to make sure I secure the deal—without knowing what anyone else is pitching to those premium clients. Of course, there are industry-standard rates, but they’re not broken down into experience levels, and they don’t factor our personal skills, so it’s always a guessing game.
There are a few challenges that come to mind when it comes to getting premium freelance clients. The first challenge is finding these clients in the first place. Premium clients are usually not actively looking for new freelancers - they already have a team in place. This means that you need to be proactive and do your research to find companies that might need your services. Another challenge is presenting yourself as a credible option for these companies. When you're competing against established firms with years of experience, you need to make sure that you highlight your unique strengths and value proposition. Finally, you'll need to be able to negotiate favorable terms with these clients. Many premium clients will want to lowball freelancers, so it's important to know your worth.
There are many challenges in getting premium freelance clients as Ameesha Green pointed out.
Let me first explain what “premium” means to me and maybe that’ll help frame my answer for you.
I equate this to the type of client I want to work with.
- One that’s respectful
- Values what I bring to the table
- Has thought about their project enough to a point where we can discuss candidly about budget, time, and expectations
- That we are a fit personality wise
These 4 things for me are critical to the success of the project.
My sense from this question is that premium is referring to higher priced projects.
In order to land higher priced projects, clients need to understand and be willing to pay those prices.
Remember price is subjective, you want it as high as possible.
Whereas the client wants it as low as possible.
To make the pricing conversation steer clear of other suitors, you and the client have to be a fit for each other from a personality perspective.
If you step on each other’s toes during the initial conversation. Or if there’s a language barrier. Or that your personalities don’t mesh well upon meeting for the first time.
It’s going to be difficult to have a candid conversation as well as have a mutual respect and understanding of each other.
So for me, that’s why personality mesh is very important in a successful project.
Premium freelance clients will have thought about their project and what it means for their business for more than 30 minutes after having a conversation with a friend at a party.
Premium freelance clients will also understand the value someone brings to them because they’ve thought about an ROI to the project that’s acceptable to them. They realize that by investing $X they plan to get $Y back.
Even if they don’t have that $Y back value, if you can prove and explain to them through your track record and past experience that they could get $Y back. That’s how you’ll land premium freelance clients.
CLOSE THAT GAP BETWEEN WHAT YOU CHARGE AND WHAT THEY WANT TO PAY
It’s also how you’ll diminish or remove altogether, the gap between your high price and their low price.
Bottom line is that the client wants their project to either save time or bring in more money.
Whether that’s foot traffic through the door of their business, online sales, blog writing, social media posting, or some level of manual updates they need to do that you can do for them instead.
All these things tie back to either money or time, or both.
If your service is tied to time and/or money and you explain and prove to the client that they are getting a 2, 3, or maybe even a 10x return on their investment, that premium freelance client will sign up to your services.
The thing I want you to do after all this though is to eliminate the word “premium” from you question.
Instead make your services premium so everyone coming to you automatically premium.