First marketing rule for freelancers

October 14th, 2007 by Klaus Wiedemann

At Freelance Switch, I just stumbled across an interesting article by Jonathan Fields on simple marketing secrets for freelancers. I especially like the first one, as it is almost too simple, but I think it is highly effective:

Call back first!

If you receive an inquiry on your mailbox or email, or you hear about an upcoming project: be the first to call back. As Jonathan points out (and this is definitely in line with my experience): most people do not call back in time, even if it’s about a potentially upcoming project.

A couple of months ago, we’ve been looking for some Typo3 support for our company website to resolve some technical issues. Through our personal network, we received a couple of recommendations, and asked them per email to give us a call (First test for responsiveness!). One never called, one took two weeks to return the call, one called the next day. Guess who got the contract?