If you are a beginner with just a gig or two in the
online arena, you will be pretty excited when a buyer contacts you for the very
first time. It immediately boosts your confidence just knowing that a potential
prospect has reached out to you for one of his projects based on what you have
uploaded in the portal as your portfolio.
When you realize it is not company branding, someone’s recommendation
or any sales pitch that has got you this first connect it does give you a high as
it sinks in your mind - that it just all about you and nothing else here – that
worked in your favor so fare. It is purely you and your online credentials that
encouraged the buyer to contact you and take this forward.
Now in your excitement, do not forget to evaluate who
you are working with. Here are a few clues to assess your buyer before you proceed.
Reviews
It is important to note what kind of reviews the buyer
has gained for himself. If you read of a few of them, you can use your
discretion to rate the buyer as per your mental map and decide, if you would like
to work with that buyer.
Badge
What kind of badge does he carry? Some portals
recognize a few of their buyers as top buyers based on their payment track,
dispute record and interaction with sellers through different orders.
Amount
spent
Some portals provide amount earned by sellers and
amount spent buy buyers on different projects. I somehow do not bid for buyers who have not spent a dollar yet. I am not sure, if this is the right
approach. I am too busy to deep dive in to their background to check whether they
are new, do they just initiate projects and not award it to any one and assess past records.
However if the project is interesting, well described
that hints at the earnestness of the buyer, it is green signal for me,
regardless of whether the buyer is new or yet to spend
No
of Bids
For a simple project if there are too many bids already,
it is better to let it pass. Either the buyer will award it to the first good
resource he finds, without checking the rest of the profiles or he may delay
awarding for an indefinite period (Read considerably long time) as he will
evaluate each and every profile. The buyer may actually be efficient, organized and in
one word great however, you cannot keep
yourself available for this project till the time he decides.
Project
expiry
If you notice the buyer is likely to take a call three months later about
the project it is a huge signal that he is either under-prepared for the
project or he must have uploaded his need/ project in multiple forums and he is aware this hiring will be a long time process.
Project
description
When you read a project, you can easily assess the
effort taken by the project owner to communicate
the dynamics of the project to the target audience and articulate their
current need. That is a huge hint about the genuineness of the need and you can
be sure to get adequate support from buyer in execution if you bid and win the
project
Buyer
queries
Some buyers tend to ask a lot of questions in their
projects along with the bids/ proposals – You can read the questions before you
bid. If those are experience related, then probably they are using them to
filter appropriate profiles. If they are new, or being cautious or had bad experience the questions will be mostly trust related and you got to answer them accordingly.
Intuition
Above all respect your intuition. You can ignore all
that is stated above and proceed with a project, be happy about your bid and submission if that is what your inner voices asks you to do.
Beyond
financials
Keep three things in your radar when you bid – How will
this buyer make you rich?
·
Add to your learning
·
Improve your portfolio experience and
exposure wise
·
Financially.
It is not always about the revenue. It is about how it adds value to your existing profile for better opportunities in future. How you decide who to work with and the qualifiers you use to filter them is the foundation for your success.
No comments:
Post a Comment