When searching for your next project, you’ll often see people referring to “leads”. What a lead is depends on your goals.
- If you’re trying to find a full-time project, a lead could be a posting that looks interesting
- If you’re trying to find a freelance client, a lead is a potential client
Sounds simple, right? If you develop a process or system, leads help you track how successful you are at landing the project.
Your goal should be continuous improvement. What you measure can be improved.
So if you measure the total number of leads in, compared with the number of successful leads that turn into gigs, you’ll have a measurable, predictable success rate.
Then you can improve it!
For example, if you know you’ve applied to 10 jobs, and you got 3 interviews, then your lead conversion rate is about 30%.
Or if you have 5 people contacting you for freelance gigs, and about half of those turn into clients who pay you, your conversion/close rate is 50%.
From there, it’s testing and tweaking different parts of your approach to see how you can improve.
- Should you tweak your application?
- Does one resume format work better than another?
- Is there a sales script that leads to more closed freelance contracts?
Etc.
As you continuously test, measure, and test again, you’ll find that you’ll have more and more of your leads turn into work opportunities.