It goes without saying that good clients are invaluable. While getting a new and well-paying customer is very difficult in the current highly competitive environment, losing one is very easy unfortunately. Read what kind of approach I apply to keep the existing and get customers.
To reach success, it is necessary to find a competitive edge that will differ you other translators. There are many options available in this area. As for me, some 10 years ago I used the low-price incentive for hunting new customers. This is not bad approach to start with, but with time this brings high volumes of work and the money stays always the same. This is quite demotivating.
If you are a really good translator, you will soon find out that you do not want to sell yourself under value anymore. It is not only about money, but also about personal pride. Why should I put myself into the group of low-cost and not so respected translators? I also underwent this process. The things developed from getting less work for better rates thus making the same money, through to getting a lot of work for nice rates. The fate of busy translators is tiredness. But this is another story.
In my translation practice, I always try to keep my customers happy and provide them little services that I do not expect to be compensated for. Very often, I upgrade the overall layout of the document, make the formatting better, etc. to make the result more appealing. My clients got used to this and I consider this a small extra duty – one of the things that drive them selecting my service, which is usually more expensive that the average.
Do you give your customers such extras or you just give them for what they pay?
