Sales 101 for Freelance Devs — Avoiding the Pain You’re About to Experience
Back in March, I made a fake tweet for a blog post draft.
It was a blog post about how not to handle a situation where your large, only client (i.e. your salaried employer) abruptly breaks up with you. But given that the economy collapsed in on itself like a neutron star a week later, the post seemed in poor taste and I never published it.
Still, no sense letting a good fake tweet go to waste. So I’m going to use it instead for a post about freelance dev sales, which is basically a rounding error away from salaried dev job interviews.
What I’m going to do is walk you through the sales strategies that a dev freelancer will suffer through, in numbered order, before figuring out something that actually works. I’ll also have a couple of interludes to explain a little bit about sales along the way. The goal is that hopefully you can skip some of missteps and create a strategy for faster joy.
1. Introduction to Affiliate Sales: The I Just Got Fired Tweet
Here’s something that seemingly every developer tweets at some point in their career:
Usually it has approximately 8 billion retweets and likes, a handful of comments, and, I’d assume, a conversion rate just north of the Planck constant into useful job leads.
Why would I presume that?
Well, because the call to action invites people to do something super easy. “Smash that retweet button and do your good deed for the day.” So people do… exactly, and only, that.
And then they call it a day, assuming that someone else down the line will do the actual thing that might help this person. And, if it ever happened, the “actual thing” would probably be just introducing them to a corporate recruiter or, maybe a dev manager or something.
It’s a classic case of vanity metrics in the world of marketing. But I want to talk about the sales strategy here. Let’s save freelancer marketing for another day.
