The 5-Step Client Filter Every High-Earning Freelancer Needs | The Multi 6-Figure Freelancer Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 359

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're an audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Last week on the podcast, we talked about creating demand for your services, or what we call a demand engine. Getting leads is a huge part of being a freelancer, or getting leads consistently is a huge part of being a freelancer, but getting leads is not the finish line when it comes to breaking multiple six figures. It is merely the starting line, because this is where the challenge really begins. As you break into six figures, trying to break into the multiple six figures, the game changes from how do I get clients to how do I protect my most valuable resource, which is my time, to not just get clients, but get the right clients. Most freelancers mess this part up. As you start building demand for your services, and you're finally getting leads and clients, and it starts to feel like things are finally starting to click, you never actually make that transition, that leap, from any client to the right fit client. So you end up getting on the phone with anybody who will give you time, talking over project details, wasting time with tire kickers, talking with people you know you shouldn't be talking to, and then you end up saying yes to the project out of just guilt for it, or a scarcity mindset, or just fear of losing the deal because you don't know what tomorrow brings. And so you end up with all these nightmare projects, ones with endless revisions, tons of scope creep, clients who are not happy no matter what you do, no matter how far you bend over backwards, they're still not happy with the work. And ultimately, you get burned out, so your creativity takes a hit. So your actual final product takes a hit as well. And not only that, what's worse is every bad fit client you say yes to, it's taking up a counter slot for those good fit clients. So you're working with fewer and fewer of the good fit clients, which means your portfolio is taking a hit. And when you do actually work with those good fit clients, the ones you actually want to work with, you don't have the energy or creativity to actually fulfill on it because you're burned out. So what ultimately happens is you end up burning out and going back to a day job because it's easier, or you end up taking a step back, taking some time for yourself and watching your income take a hit as well. Now, as you break six figures, you're trying to break into multi six figures, you work really hard to create the demand to get there. You know those freelancers out there who stay completely booked solid, just from word of mouth? That's the people I'm talking about. Those are the people who barely try and they have endless demand. If that is you, now you need to filter that demand because at this stage, your reputation is everything. Every single project, no matter who you're working with, every single project takes time, takes energy, takes focus, takes mental bandwidth, takes creativity. And you have to accept that not everyone who reaches out to you, not everyone who's interested in working with you, deserves that. Not every single person on this earth deserves your time, deserves your focus, deserves your energy, deserves your creativity. It's time to protect that. So in this episode, I want to walk you through how to define who exactly is a good fit for you and who's not, how to pre-screen the leads before they ever touch your calendar so you're never talking to bad fit leads in the first place, how to qualify people on your discovery calls like a pro so that you're not wasting your time with bad fit leads. You can cut those off early if they happen to trickle through your calendar, how to actually say no without feeling guilty, which is a huge sticking point for most freelancers. And if you can actually pull this off, you're going to get fewer bad fit leads, better clients, a shorter sale cycle, meaning that people that reach out to you close faster and a calendar that's filled with the kind of the work that actually lights you up, stuff you actually want to do, not the stuff that drags you down and burns you out. So to do this, I'm going to walk you through five steps to actually make this happen. So before we get into that, if this is your first time listening to the show, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. This is a podcast for creatives who want to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their soul. If you're a freelancer, you're offering freelance services, you want to break into multi six figures, this is the podcast for you. So like I said, we got five steps here. The first one is define what we call your hell yes client. The hell yes client is the person who is exactly qualified and who is unqualified. Most people don't stop to think about this. Who do I actually want to work with? What does a perfect fit client look like? If I could only work with this one type of client for the rest of my life, what would that client look like? And I don't mean like, we've talked about niching down. This is not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about what are the criteria that makes someone actually a good fit for you before you ever sit down and actually talk to them. Think about it as like a client filter. What does the perfect fit client look like as far as their industry? What sort of budget range do they have? Or what's the company size? If you're B2B, what kind of company size you work with? What are their values or their attitude? How hands off are they versus hands on? Do they want to be super collaborative? Do they want to have their hands in it? Or do they want to step back and let you be the professional? And the big thing is, do they fit your process or do they fight your process? A couple episodes back, I talked about how to create a service that actually scales. A service that scales is a process you have your clients follow. You are the expert, right? The worst clients want you to adapt to their process versus them adapting to your process. So again, you just want to think through these sorts of things and list out the things that a perfect fit client have. On the flip side, you also want to create a list of your red flags for your non-ideal clients. What are all the bad fit clients show you again and again and again? What are the common criteria that they have? It could be that they don't understand what their own goals are. It could be that they don't have a respect for your time. It could be that they have vague answers to everything. It could be that they're asking for discounts. It could be that they don't even understand how long the process should take. If you hear quotes like, this should be quick, this should be easy. In my background as a music producer, anytime I had a band reach out to me asking for a quote for a project, especially like a full length album, and the band's like, this should be easy. This should take two days max. And I know as a professional who does this for a living, it should take no less than 15 to 20 days. Red flag, deny, go away. The reason this is the first step is because a lot of the freelancers that we work with, especially on the client acquisition side, is they never really thought through this. And so they're getting on sales calls or discovery calls, whatever you want to call them. They're getting on discovery calls with people, and then they're getting nos from clients. Usually based on pricing is a good example of this, where the freelancer is too expensive for the client. And when you dig into it and you look at the people they're talking to, and you look at all of the things on their pre-call questionnaire, which we'll talk about in a second, you realize that the clients who are saying yes, the very small percentage, are a certain company size, for example. Maybe they're five to 10 or more people in the company, or 10 plus, or 20 plus, or 50 plus, whatever the criteria are. And all of the people saying no, that is too expensive, are five and below, five employees or less. Or it could be that the projects that get drawn out into revision hell are all solopreneurs, or small business owners, where the founder works very closer with the freelancer. So there's a lot of emotion in it. There's a lot of fear in it, versus working with a professional who has a clear vision for the project, who's not going to be emotional about it, which means it's usually going to be a larger company where you're working with a department head. These are examples of creating a qualified lead versus an unqualified lead. An unqualified lead, we don't even count those in sales metrics. With the clients we're working with, we only focus on qualified leads. Are people getting on the phone with you that are qualified? If they are, all your marketing is working great. Now we need to focus on closing the qualified leads on the sales calls. If all you're doing is getting on the phone with unqualified leads, there's usually a breakdown somewhere in the qualification process. And it starts with, again, defining what your hell yes client is. If you don't have a clear version of what that is, list out those things. What are all the ideal client indicators, and then what are all the red flag client indicators? Once you have a clear look at what that is, we get to the second step here, and that is pre-screening. I want you to drill this into your head. Questions before calendars. No one should ever have access to your calendar, your sales calendar, your discovery call calendar, your calendar to take you to lunch, your calendar to meet at your studio or at your office. No one should have access to that until they've filled out a questionnaire. So in order to stop wasting time with bad fit leads, create a pre-call questionnaire. You can call it an inquiry form, but it's gonna ask key questions around these things. Budget, their goals for the project, the timeline for it, and in certain industries, what the decision-making process looks like. So in B2B, it could be that the person that's filling the form out, it's not the actual decision maker. In an ideal world, you're not talking numbers, and you're not gonna get on the phone with a non-decision maker. You want to talk to the decision maker for the project. Or in some cases, where there could be multiple decision makers, you don't want to have a great sales conversation with one person when they start to go convince four other people about it. You want to try to get on the phone with everybody. It's gonna slow your sales process down considerably. You're gonna have a lower sales close rate. An alternative to budget, where if you don't want to ask their budget in the inquiry form, which can be effective or not effective, the best way to do that can be asking some other kind of qualifying criteria. It could be company size. It could be an indicator that says our projects start at $5,000 or our projects start at $10,000. Is this within your budget? Yes or no. You can also put questions in there around process. Anything you think is potentially going to derail the project. So the goal is to make it clear who it's for and who it's not for. Who are you for, who you're not for, especially if you've niched down. Once you've built this inquiry form out, you can automate 80% of this or more in some cases. You can automate 100% of this if you have a good CRM. So you can create logic in the form so that if they answer certain things, you can bring up more questions. So if they say, our budget is X amount, you can ask some follow up questions to see if maybe there is other alternatives or let them know maybe if their budget's below the certain threshold that you say, then you qualify and say, our projects start at 10,000. It sounds like this is out of your budget. Do you still want to move forward? Once you have all these questions down, you can automate 80% of this qualification process. Most good form builders have logic built into them. Logic to either show or hide questions based on previous answers, which is helpful in some cases when you want to maybe, depending on one answer, you can ask additional questions for some follow ups. But the better power is depending on answers in a form, you can send them to a different page. So if they answered no, they aren't within the budget, you can send them to a rejection page, which we'll talk about later. And then only if they seem qualified based on the pre-call questionnaire, it immediately sends them to your calendar to book a call. Now, you need to be clever about this.