When you’re inquiring about a professional service, let’s say taxes, computer help or marketing consulting, which is more attractive to you: a service provider who seems ultra-competent and gives the impression that the process will be easy for you, or a service provider who charges low rates and gives the impression that the process will be cheap? While few clients are completely price-insensitive, Corinne McKay thinks that it’s important to always be looking for ways to make your clients’ lives easier and avoid bogging them down in the complexity of what you do.

She suggests that freelancers think about applying these types of scenarios to their own business:

• When you receive an inquiry from a client, assume that the client wants you to solve their problem, not give them a deal.
• Don’t get pedantic. Think: do you really care about the minute details of your service providers’ jobs? Right. Stick to the information that your client really needs.
• Think of simple ways to streamline things for your clients. If you always translate their quarterly newsletter, can you contact them on a predetermined date to talk about the next issue? Can you set up a secure file transfer site so that your clients can access their translations whenever they want? Can you send them a short survey to ask how you can better meet their needs?
• Try to frame things positively. Not “I can’t finish it by Thursday morning unless you can get it to me by Wednesday noon,” but “If you can get that to me by Wednesday noon, I could definitely have it back to you by the time you get into the office on Thursday.”
• Don’t make translation sound easy (we know: it’s not!), make the client feel that you will make things easy for them.

See: Thoughts on Translation