Freelance Writing Guide to Managing Client Expectations

What’s the toughest aspect of your client relationship?

Managing expectations.

What’s the easiest aspect of your client relationship?

Managing expectations.

Both are true.

Hear me out.

In the 17+ odd years I’ve been running a freelance writing business full time, I’ve come to realize one truth:

[bctt tweet=”Managing your #freelancewriting client’s expectations is both the toughest and easiest thing to do.” username=”LoriWidmer”]

And it’s up to you entirely which way it’s going to go for you.

Let me give you two examples. Let’s start with one that shows how tough it is.

Robin’s client hired her to write thought leadership articles to place in trade magazines. In the initial conversation, they discussed what tone they were going for, the audience they wanted to reach, and the topic areas they wanted to cover.

Robin wrote and delivered.

The client came back immediately. Love them! Send them out.

Wait. What?

Robin had no magazine contacts in the client’s industry. She had no idea the client wanted her to also pitch these things. And who was paying her to write the pitch letter? And now she had to be marketing wonk, as well?

Delicately, she explained to the client that this wasn’t her area of expertise.

The client was upset. They thought it was included in her pricing and her services.

I bet some version of that has happened to you over the years. It did to me a few times until I realized one thing:

Writers have to spell out to new clients everything they will do and everything they won’t do.

Robin didn’t do that. She assumed the client understood she was writing. No one on that call mentioned pitching or how those articles were getting distributed.

Let’s move on to an example that shows how easy it is to manage expectations.

Darla is talking with her new client. The client wants 40 blog posts over the next two months. The client mentions topics and asks Darla to send some ideas around those topics.

Darla responds: These sound great. Are you going to need me to interview anyone in your company? And how will these get up on your site? Is someone doing that internally?

The client pauses: Hadn’t considered those points. Well, we’d need you to interview one or two people for each post. We can post them ourselves. And we’ll need you to turn those posts into an occasional article that we’ll send to magazines.

Darla: So you’ll need both posts and articles then, right? And then your team will send them to magazine editors, correct?

Client: We thought you’d do that.

Darla: I can, but I don’t have any contacts at the publications. If you do, I’d be glad to distribute that for you for an additional fee. Let me suggest this: I’ll make a pitch letter template for each article at a cost of $XXX per article. So if you want 4 article pitches per year, that’s $XXXX total for all four pitches and follow-ups. I follow up with each editor twice.

See what Darla did there? She asked questions that revealed her client’s expectations — they want her to interview (more work), write articles based on the posts (more work) and then distribute the articles to editors (more work).

She also told them what they can expect from her: she’ll agree to the additional work for additional fees. And she’ll agree to marketing the articles for another fee. And she puts limits on how many times she will pitch.

The Scope Creeper

Ah, but what about the client who gives you A, B, and C to do, but then says “Oh, can you do D, too?”

Easy answer:

Yes, I can do it this one time without additional cost. 

And that’s only a yes if it’s not something big, like “Hey, we need another 12 pages, okay?”

So what happens if the Scope Creeper comes back with “Please please, can you squeeze in E, F, and G, as well? I promise this is the end!”

I would do this:

I can do that. Let me work up a new agreement. Is there anything else you can think of that you may need to include?

Boom. You’ve covered your ass. And you’ve managed that client’s expectations. They may have expected endless additions, but you told them rather cordially (but directly) that they get one freebie, and that it’s at your discretion, not theirs.

Why not give in to the additional work? If you’ve been doing this for any length of time, you know the answer already:

Because you’ll find yourself 12 additions in wondering how you’re going to cut them off.

Do it up front. Set the expectation that there are limits to what your fee includes, and that you’re happy to do additional work, but not without additional pay for it.

And I can almost see some of you nodding your heads. You know it happens. It’s happened to plenty of us.

A writer friend and I were discussing this two days ago. She has a client who keeps boomeranging on the same project. Could she send him another version of the project, only move stuff around for him? And he needed her to give him yet another document that is basically a catch-all nondescript document that will apply to several situations.

She pushed back. She asked him to provide additional written info for her to get a sense of what he was asking for. The next conversation would have included her additional fee, but he never responded. Seems it wasn’t important when it involved no hand-holding.

Similar things have happened to me. I had a small freebie I did for a family friend. She asked for a tweak. Then a few months later, another. And then another.  Two and a half years later, I told her how she could tweak it herself. Never heard from her again.

Writers, have you been caught in an uncomfortable situation that involved your clients expecting more than you bargained for?
How did you handle it?