How to secure clients as a starting Salesforce solo consultant or freelancer

This time we’re back with the most commonly asked question for people who are looking to start freelancing: How do I find clients?

It’s one of the big questions as it’s one of the largest challenges one could have when looking to start with freelancing. Through his practice at Talent Stacker, Bradley Rice gets to see first-hand several of his theories and strategies as he guides his students to get started with their Salesforce careers. Check out the video below for one of his top-recommended strategies to get started:

The Power of Volunteering for your first Salesforce Job as an Independent Consultant

Large organizations work in surprisingly similar fashion. It is not at all uncommon to do several proof of concepts absolutely for free during the pre-sales process. Or do blueprinting sessions for free to gain projects.

The only difference is the client size: Salesforce consulting organizations are chasing much larger clients than what you’d probably be chasing (something sub-50 users, basic Salesforce implementation on Professional or Enterprise edition). But “volunteering” remains a great strategy at any step of the process.

Converting Volunteering into a Paid Project

It's also extremely common that if you do a great job and you bring good work to the table and you volunteer your effort, you can then convert those volunteering opportunities a paid freelancer position. And the way that that works is: Let’s say you do a 20 hour free project and they really like your work because you knocked it out of the park. And maybe you even technically worked 30 or 40 hours just to make sure that it was amazing, and they loved the work that you did,

So when you come to talk to them, go ahead and propose: “Hey now I would like to get paid to do this work. And I have a non-profit rate (or whatever it is) and I have to transition this into a paid project as I can't work for free forever. I hope you guys understand, I really enjoyed working with you.”

By establishing that ground rule, you should be able to make a case for any reasonable company to seriously consider bringing you onboard as a freelancer.

You may be asking: Why wouldn’t they just drop me for another volunteer then?

The truth of it is if you've ever been in the volunteering space and you've ever tried to get someone to volunteer to work for you, you'll find that it is not as easy as just saying: “Hey do you want to work for free? Let me get you the people who are putting their names out there to volunteer.”

Many volunteers are usually very new to the skill they may not even be certified they may have never had any real world experience and the quality of volunteers is  vastly different. Once could argue about 19 out of 20 times your volunteer isn't going to be very good. They might even leave you high and dry in the middle of a project when things get tough. They may do things without asking or they might build directly in production.

There's so many varieties of things that can happen.

So what happens is they might they might go try to find another volunteer, but when they realize the quality of work they're getting from you (as a freelancer dedicated to make this happen), they're happy to come back to you and pay you to continue to help them with their Salesforce org.

According to Bradley, that's one of the best way for new Salesforce talent or people just trying to get their feet wet in the freelancing space: to jump right in with a low responsibility, low anxiety way to build your brand and get your name out there.

Check out Bradley and his amazing work at www.talentstacker.com (if you haven’t already) and sign up for his 5 day challenge.

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