How to choose customers

I have been working in the field of freelancing for more than 7 years and managed to go both as an artist and as an employer. You probably read more than one post about the selection of remote employees. And I would like to present a “look from the back”, from the face of a freelancer. Today we will learn how to select our clients.

I recommend working only on the largest freelance exchanges, where hundreds of projects are published per day. For example, free-lance.ru , weblancer.net and freelancejob.ru . Be sure to purchase pro-versions of accounts there - it will be inexpensive, but you and a person will not consider you as a person without them.

Check for adequacy

Always read the ad text carefully. If it is written in such a way that you cannot figure it out without half a liter, and even with a bunch of errors, it is better not to take the work. A customer who cannot clearly express his thoughts immediately, in the process of work will deliver a lot of inconvenience, you will constantly misunderstand each other. In addition, the literacy rate is directly dependent on the overall adequacy of the person.
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I once spent the whole weekend developing the concept of a site according to a complex description, proudly called by my client a “technical task”. On Monday, he disappointedly informed me that “well, this cho kakby is not right” and disappeared for a month, completely forgetting that he ordered the site. Idiots skip right away.

Collect more information.

Carefully examine the customer profile. We are important registration date, fullness of data and the quality of feedback about the person. A fresh account or lack of feedback should alert you, be careful with such customers. Read the reviews (only from freelancers, reviews of other employers do not interest us), often from 20 positive 19 are written “to order”.

If there are no contact details in the employer's profile at all, we leave immediately. Communicating through private messages is uncomfortable and unprofessional. Even if the customer offers you an icq number or postal address, there is no guarantee that he will not stop responding. You need to know several ways to communicate with a potential client, especially the phone (or Skype). Honest people have nothing to hide, their contacts are always indicated.

It's amazing how rarely it occurs to people to check the data of the person of interest. Just fill in contact information one by one in Google. You will be surprised how dramatic stories you can sometimes find out about your clients, including all their dark deeds. And this is a great reason to refuse to work with them.

Discuss the price

You should be completely satisfied with the project budget. Not every freelancer can afford such luxury as customer selection. When you really want to eat, rush to carry out any order, almost for food. But you are doing well, and you do not pay attention to ads in the spirit of “making a banner quickly for 100 rubles”.



Sometimes there are ads with an unspecified budget, they also need to be monitored. Most likely, the customer simply understands that most types of work do not have average prices, he is willing to pay for quality, as long as you need, if you justify your price and back up its portfolio. But more often in such ads “without a price” they write “I will give it to someone who asks less,” and in the comments a serious dumping flares up. Chasing them is not worth it. Anyway, the order will go to some student for review.

If the client wants to bargain, feel free to stand at your price. Thus, you will kill two birds with one stone - defend the price comfortable for you and do not allow the customer to take control in your further relations. But this is a topic for a future article.

Another moment at the bidding stage, which is issued by an incompetent (or even simply deceitful) customer - when a person asks for a discount, promising to throw a bunch of orders if you work together. Smart people understand that if both parties work together comfortably, their cooperation will continue.

Do not require prepayment

Among professional freelancers and web studios it is considered offensive to receive money only after doing the work. Many simply will not work without prepayment, and some require the full amount at once, and only then they start working.

We will not build a diva from ourselves. Even if you are a very cool specialist, do not ask a person to pay you before you complete at least some of the work. Why should a customer give you money for promises? Only if he offers a prepayment, then you should not refuse.
How, then, to check the solvency of your client? Well, you carefully read the reviews about it, looked at the number of completed projects and the availability of contact / billing information? A customer with a good reputation will not go anywhere. If the employer does not yet have impressive karma on the stock exchange, but it seems to be quite adequate, then ...

Pretend to trust the client

Of course, you can not completely trust anyone, unless you have been working with a partner for several years. As you remember from the previous paragraph, you can only ask for money after approved sketches / texts / layouts. But modern Ostapas are so sophisticated that they can leave you even at this stage. A request to “draw a sketch” can be sent out to several freelancers at once, after which the work is collected, the contacts are broken, and according to your brilliant sketches a student draws a finished product for a sausage sandwich. I'm not talking about the fact that at least one “test text” from, say, twenty freelancers is a good profit. There is no 100% panacea for “collectors of ideas”, but they can be calculated in time if you carefully read the comments on the project.

The solution is simple - give only protected versions. If this image, put such a watermark, so that the rogues should “wipe” them out, add meta data to the file (rarely notice, then you can prove the authorship). The easiest thing for programmers - I always put a temporary restriction in my games, programs, and even banners. If the client does not pay a week after the stipulated time limit, protection is included, which explicitly hints where to pay. It rescued me dozens of times, only one customer disappeared, paying only half.

In the morning money - evening chairs

When the project comes to an end, the principle of trust is rotated 180 degrees. Send the latest version of the product only after full payment. You have no reason not to send the finished work. All clients understand this and are easy to meet. But if you hesitate to talk about money, after receiving the finished product, the client may have bad thoughts, especially if he is on the other end of the Earth, and you are left with nothing.

Over time, you will gain many good partners with whom you will work constantly. Try to keep the most pleasant clients around you and give up on problematic ones, then your work will be a complete pleasure. I hope that attentive employers will find a lot of useful things for themselves in my article, learn their typical behavior and learn to hunt for real professionals.