Marketing Yourself as a Freelancer
As a freelance web designer, you may wear the hats of designer, marketer, accountant, project manager, and salesperson. With such multi-faceted responsibilities, it’s understandable that the sales aspect of running a business may be a learning curve. Planning and implementing a sales process ensures your business grows strategically, allowing you to devote more of your time to exciting projects rather than converting prospects into clients.
A sales process is not just a refined and documented workflow; it also encompasses how you market yourself as a freelancer. When you can clearly communicate who you are and how you work with clients, you'll attract more business and instill confidence that you can handle potential clients’ projects. A well-structured process makes it possible to scale your business by reusing successful strategies and avoiding missed touchpoints that could result in losing prospective clients. This means less guesswork, more repeatable successes, and a smoother client experience.
The essential steps of a sales process and what to consider when building yours
Regardless of the industry, every sales process boils down to three core steps: finding prospects, building a relationship to complete the sale, and onboarding them as clients. Missing one of these steps can cost you a sale, meaning it's important to create a tried and true process that serves as your guide from start to finish.
Your sales process is entirely dependent on your business, so the steps you add are contingent on your goals. Before penning a detailed sales process, start by conducting an audit of your existing business and gain a clear, informed understanding of where you are now versus where you want to be.
Identify your business goals
Asking yourself key questions about your business and having clear answers is a great way to find your north star—the way forward that guides your vision and keeps you on a well-defined path to long-term success. Your north star goal should encourage revenue growth, show client value, and help you measure your progress. Remember: A strong goal should be specific, quantifiable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Your business goals will naturally change as you grow your business—a new freelancer may have different goals than an established or full-time designer. It's good practice to revisit your goals quarterly to track performance and readjust as needed while your business develops. Consider which step (finding prospects, completing the sale, onboarding) is smoothest, and which is lossy. Start by improving one step at a time to test into an optimized sales process.
Think through the following questions as you map the path to your north star through your sales process:
What is your most important goal for your business right now?
What resources do you need to achieve this goal?
How much time do you need for this goal?
What are the exact steps to meeting your goal that should be completed along the way?
How will you measure success?
Can your sales process be repeated as you continue to grow your business? If not, how can you optimize it to be more scalable?
Analyze and optimize: dive into your customer data and past projects
Taking the time to look at clients and review past assignments will help you decide the types of projects you want to do.
When examining past work, take note of your favorite clients and industries, as well as how you won their business. Identify why you liked these clients and how you can reach your north star goal by working with businesses in the same industries or with similar goals. Knowing who you want to target will help you fine-tune a sales process that better supports your niche.
If you haven't already, begin tracking every lead that comes your way via customer profiles, or connect to an external customer relationship management (CRM) platform. A well-kept customer database can help you gain valuable insights such as why or why not a prospect completed a purchase. Within Squarespace, use customer profiles to log your customer data, which you can regularly review to apply data-driven insights as you refine your sales process.
You’ll also want to note standout projects and assignments that align most with your interests and skills. Doing so can help you determine opportunities for finding clients and marketing your services.
As a jumping off point, ask yourself the following:
What part of your web design business excites you most? How can you increase the time you spend here?
What part excites you least? How can you decrease these pain points through automated processes or hiring help?
What are your favorite projects? How can you secure more of them?
What roadblocks do you face? Can they be resolved by automating part of your process?
Refine your sales process
As you align your personal preferences with your business goals, developing a repeatable sales process is essential. You can continually iterate on the process when you've determined a baseline for what does and doesn't work for you. Apply this knowledge to your sales process–adding, removing, and reworking steps as needed.
Plus, as you gain more experience and build more customer data, you'll get richer insights into your client journey. If you’re just starting out, it’s important that you take the time to create a sales process that is as smooth and seamless as possible. You can use the following example as a foundation for developing an effective sales process.
Example sales process
Step 1: Identify and research your target audience
Look back at your review of customers and projects. Ask yourself: What do they all have in common? What are their challenges and pain points? Where can they be found online?
Once you’ve determined who you want to work with and what assignments interest you, you can define a target audience and start building connections. Being as specific as possible will help you define your niche and stand out as a designer.
There are many ways to find freelance clients within your target audience or industry. Be vigilant in your research and willing to test different approaches and marketing tactics, such as leveraging word of mouth business and referrals. For an in-depth breakdown of client acquisition strategies, read our tips for moving from working freelance to full-time.
Step 2: Market your services
In order to sell your services, you’ll need to implement a strong marketing strategy. Your website is the building block of establishing a credible and professional platform to pitch your services. Infused throughout your website, your brand identity also influences clients and should encourage prospects to do business with you. Use your brand audit to create a strong brand identity and find ways to communicate your voice, values, and mission whenever possible.
Learn more about marketing your services and establishing your brand identity from our guide to becoming a freelancer on Squarespace.
Step 3: Qualify your leads
Not all leads will be the right fit for your business. Using the data you’ve mined from your client profiles, you should have a good sense of what leads glean the best results. Develop a set of questions to weigh as you review new leads, for example:
Does this lead fall within your target audience?
Does this lead fall within your web design niche?
Is this project in your wheelhouse, and can you deliver quality work?
Does your potential client understand the value of your services?
Do they have a budget that matches your cost of services?
Creating a qualifying scorecard or checklist helps balance the above factors and establishes a baseline for you to measure leads against.
Step 4: Pitch potential clients
Once you know your ideal client and where they spend time online, it’s time to determine how you will reach them. At the core, your leads have a problem they need help solving. It's your job to build trust and communicate to prospects exactly how you can help them meet their business goals.
Your pitch should educate prospects about the benefits of working with you and address your service offering as a professional web designer. Learn more about how to inform and pitch your prospects in our guide to client education.
Step 5: Follow up with leads
To get ahead of client questions or concerns, proactively address objections and concerns within your sales process. While you should be prepared to handle these during your initial pitch, leads can get cold feet. This shouldn't be a deterrent—you should view a prospect's hesitations as an opportunity to re-engage.
This part of the process takes a bit of practice and iteration, so think of your client’s full journey. Map out your sales process to support each touchpoint and document common objections and concerns in areas where prospects tend to drop off.
Step 6: Book your client
Once you’ve pitched your services, aligned on project goals, and agreed to work with each other, it’s time to move into the onboarding phase of the sales process.
You can leverage automation tools such as Squarespace Scheduling to support your business plan at crucial moments. Use Scheduling to book calls with clients, send polished and professional invoices automatically, and provide seamless project off-boarding through custom payment terms, such as taking half of your fee upfront and the other half when the project is complete. Furthermore, automation makes for a smooth client experience while freeing up your bandwidth to focus on the project.
Step 7: Nurture your client pipeline
While winning new customers is rewarding, it can also be time-consuming to source leads. Your customer relationship management (CRM) process can result in a gold mine of opportunities to continuously show your value to both potential, current, and past clients.
Whether you send a monthly newsletter, deliver relevant content through email marketing, or provide regular check-ins, keep your past clients top of mind for additional projects or referrals. As part of your quarterly business review, take time to identify successfully completed projects and weave a re-engagement strategy into your sales process. Learn more about re-engaging past clients.
Step 8: Rinse and repeat
As a web designer, the nature of your work is incredibly hands-on and labor intensive, so there's only so much bandwidth to devote to sales and marketing yourself as a freelancer. A documented sales process helps you do more in less time while scaling your business to reach your goals.
Remember: your sales process serves to help you. If something isn’t working, iterate and try another route!
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from all across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
