How Much Should You Chase Potential Writing Clients?
March 17, 2007 by Anne Wayman
Filed under Freelancing
It happens to all of us. We meet a potential client one way or another and come to a general understanding of what writing we will do and how much we will charge. Perhaps there’s an email or two exchanged, and/or maybe even a face-to-face meeting. Or maybe it’s all over the phone, or some combination.
Then the client drops into a black hole. They don’t respond as they said they would. You wait a day or two and still don’t hear anything. What should you do? How hard should you chase them?
It’s a judgment call, but on the whole I don’t do much chasing. I may send a follow-up email or two, or make a single phone call, and if nothing happens, I let that possible job go entirely. It’s just not worth my time and energy to do more.
I have no way of knowing why they stopped responding. Maybe they found another writer or changed their mind about what they wanted and are embarrassed to tell me. Maybe, for all I know, they dropped dead!
There’s always good work out there and I’d rather focus on that, than on something that might have been.
Write well and often,
After an e-mail or two, I schedule another e-mail or call in 2-4 weeks (this is why a contact manager is essential).
Sometimes, clients go on vacation or have some other reason for disappearing, and you can pull a job back into the land of the living.
I don’t know how editorial writers deal with this since editors are so damned hard to reach in the first place.
When I was editing magazines and newspapers I had a short list of writers I’d almost always take calls from… they could get right through. Others had to wait, sometimes forever.
A
Hmm, good topic here. I’ve gone through this myself a couple of times. Usually I’ll send an email, then another 4 or 5 days later. After that, I pretty much let it go. Like you said, I don’t do a lot of chasing, either. If it’s one of the reasons Tom gave above, I figure they’ll get up with me when they’re ready.
;)
I agree — a few contacts and that’s it. Sometimes I’ll follow-up much later with a link to an article that might be of interest to the client, but only if I’m really excited about the potential to work with them.