Selling Yourself As A Freelance Business Writer: Skills, Or Knowledge?
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- May 11th, 2009 |
- Comments
You know the arcanum to a long-term, and profitable, client relationship is delivering effective communication tools. But you may not realize that the impact of your writing has more to do with your ability as a writer than with your knowledge of the case.
And unless you help your clients believe the duration of your skills, you limit your opportunities to sell those skills again and again.
Every business has its own specialists, people who know more about their products and services than you’ll ever know. So why can’t they produce great marketing copy, clear person guides, or truly effective training for their employees and sales reps?
Because they don’t have the skills that you do, the endowment for communicating with impact to achieve circumstantial results. We’ve all met experts who “know their block” but can’t apportion their knowledge — perhaps your math or physics or French educator, or an engineer or programmer in a company you know, or even your doctor, lawyer, or insurance agent.
At any point, a company realizes they need help communicating, educating prospects, customers, and their own employees about the benefits and best practices associated with their products and services. They go looking for outside help . . . and so they forget why!
Your long-term achiever depends on reminding them of that need for communication skills. Most of these experts, whether clinicians or programmers or engineers or legal experts, are more comfortable talking to people just like themselves, rather than creative types like artists and writers.
Left to themselves, they’ll hire individual who knows a lot about their area, but perhaps writes only a little better than they do. And a year or cardinal later, they’ll be looking for individual else to help them when they realize that all the copy and training content and documentation they have churned out has produced mediocre results.
Help yourself and help your clients.
When you get an opportunity to talk to a prospect about creating effective communications for them, keep pushing the conversation toward the skills they need to pull it off. Make careful they believe their own need for individual different from the resources they already have in house. Help them recognize that your skills complement their knowledge, that it is that combination that produces results in the form of higher revenues, more customers, or enhanced employee performance.
Even if you know their content advantageously, your skills are more important. After all, should their product line change, or new markets open, they may be dealing with a new body of knowledge in a year or cardinal.
But their need for effective communication will remain, and, if you’ve positioned yourself as the “communication expert” of their group, you’ll continue to have opportunities for business from existing clients even as their business practices and markets change.