Who is a Freelancer?

Freelancers are self-employed people who provide services to multiple businesses or clients. They usually take that in the form of a small contract with defined scope of work and deliver it as per the requirements and mutually agreed terms and conditions.

As the name suggests, Freelancers are usually identified as independent individuals who tend to work on their own terms, timings, place and have a flexible lifestyle compared to a typical 9-5 job.

Some of the examples of Freelancers may include but are not limited to fields such as Graphics & Designing, Digital Marketing, Writing and Translation, Video and animation, Music and Audio, Programming & Web Development, Business Consulting, Coaching, etc.

What is the biggest challenge faced by Freelancers?

The biggest challenge faced by freelancers apart from finding work is the inability to nurture a long term relationship with customers. Most of the work goes off as a one time transactional contract which is never renewed later.

This means now the freelancer is required to start searching for new clients again and try to get comfortable working in a new setup and try to build client confidence from scratch. This takes away a lot of precious time of the freelancer which could have been better spent doing things for which he is known for..

This usually happens when they do not have a standardised customer relationship management process and system in place.

What are the benefits of CRM for Freelancers?

• CRM helps Freelancers organize different contacts of a customer such as email, office phone, mobile number, website, social media, instant messenger, skype, webex ids, address, etc, in a single place so that they can access it quickly whenever it is required.


• Having all the customer meeting minutes documented in a CRM platform helps them easily refer and recall the exact discussions. This ensures the deliverables are of highest quality.


• It creates a repository of your interaction with your customer in a timeline view. It will serve handy when you are trying to gain insights on ways to nurture the client to get more work opportunities from the Account.


• You can integrate your CRM with your billing and invoicing apps so that you can quickly check the history and status of payment related interaction with the client.


• CRM gives a visual view of your future opportunity pipeline so that you can control the flow of work to manage your available capacity.


• Workflow automation of repetitive tasks can be a time saviour since they can automate a lot of customer interaction workflows such as meeting reminders, payment reminders, work milestone updates, etc.


• Having all the opportunities organized in a single platform helps you track them easily and take followup actions instantly without the need to exclusively dedicate time trying to analyze and figure out gaps.


• Reports and Analytics in CRM helps you measure your performance in real time and also gives an accurate forecast of your income based on opportunity pipeline and past conversion metrics.