Upwork Retainers The Fix For Your Broken Pipeline

If you're an Upwork freelancer, you're on a hamster wheel and you know it. You're running harder every single month. More proposals, more connects, more hours, and you're still in the same place. There's 2 reasons for that, just 2, and I'm gonna put them on a board, rip them to pieces, and hand you the fix. Let's get you off that hamster wheel today. Whether you're an established Upwork freelancer or you're looking to win your first job, where your proposal is dying is the number one thing that you should be focusing on. And they all have individual metrics alongside them. This funnel's gonna explain it. So at the top, we have the amount of sent proposals that we have. Everybody looks for volume whilst trying to hit accuracy. The two don't really work together, but you're sending proposals and a certain percentage of those get viewed, and then a certain percentage of those get replied to. And after that, you end up in a situation where you get hired. Naturally, you send more proposals than what get viewed. You have more proposals viewed than what you get replied, and you have more replies than you do hiring. Now, there are key and core components for each section, and where your issue is is totally dependent on the problem that you've got. If you're sending proposals and they're not viewed, then you have to take a different action to what somebody who's getting replies but isn't getting hired has to take. So if we look at this and we say here the proposal is not viewed, if the proposal is not viewed, then you're in a position— the only thing that you need to focus on is the first 2 lines. That is the biggest thing. The first 2 lines of your proposal ultimately determine whether you get viewed or whether you end up in a situation where you're in the also-ran pile. This is the number one thing that beginners struggle with. If you are now in a position where you're looking at your proposals and you're like, well, I'm not in a position where people are viewing my proposals, go and fix your first 2 lines. Now, if you've conquered that and your problem is that you are getting viewed and no replies, this changes again. If you're getting viewed with no replies And I've been here where once I conquered my sent proposals, which I did by fixing my first 2 lines and my headline, I ended up in a situation where I was getting viewed, but then I wasn't getting any replies. Well, why? The biggest mistake again that people make with this is talking about themselves. When you're submitting proposals, you're in a sea of proposals, especially if you're in some of the bigger industries, marketing, AI automation, these individual areas, you're going up against established profiles consistently. And the solution to getting no replies is to talk about them. And specifically their actual issue. You must be conquering that fear underneath their proposal. There is an underlying fear around what they're actually struggling with. If you're in a position where you can help that individual and you can knock it out of the park, tell them how. Tell them what it's going to look like once it is done. That I can't explain to you when I'm hiring on Upwork how important that is. If I feel like someone understands my problem, they get hired. Talk about what their issue is. And then finally on this, if we're talking about you're in a situation where you're getting replies, which is a strong place to be because this is a relatively easy fix. You're getting replies but no hires. Then we need to focus on the call and what you are actually providing after that. Clear and concise communication. No bouncing around. Improve your availability. Then goes into being a situation where you're getting on the calls but you're not actually converting them. The call is the problem. So to put that plainly, the call is the issue if you're having the conversations and if it isn't, your aggression to get on the call is off. Calls are fundamental. To success. This is where I've got these ideas from. But my free school community is filled with people saying this, where they struggle to get on calls. Maybe English isn't their first language and they're speaking to an American client. That is debunked by just telling them, saying, hey, you know, my English isn't fantastic, I'm happy to hop on a call. Preface the call with it. You remove the anxiety that you've got, but ensure that when you're arranging a call, it is smooth. If they want a call there and then, drop whatever you're doing as long as it's not going to harm anything and set up the call properly. If you're not getting viewed, it's your first 2 lines of your proposal. If you're getting viewed with no replies, you need to talk about their problem. And if you're getting replies but no hires, it's either on the actual call or it's how you're going about arranging the call, i.e., next steps. Now, this second beautiful hand-drawn image is the most critical if you want this to be more than just a side gig. When it comes down to Upwork, one of the biggest things is settling for one-off projects. One-off— and beginners, they should really struggle with this. If you're in an industry where it feels like you can't charge retainers because the project is one-off, I'm telling you now, you are wrong. There is only a very, very finite amount of individuals who fall into that category. Anything can be flipped. So web design, for example, is a great, great example to use. Web design, people think, well, I build them all a new website, maybe some automation, and then I have to let them go. Well, what about the maintenance? What about the upkeep? Retainers don't have to be the same amount as the project that you won. They have to be consistent and pay you every single year. So this time next year, and then the year after that, and the year after that, you're earning more than you do in a month now just off of the monthly retainers that you have. Why is it important? Retainers will naturally grow, and if you don't continue to win at the same rate, you still have significant revenue every single month. If you're starting the month on zero, you don't have a business. You are— you're just self-employed trying to win individual projects consistently. That's the harsh truth of it. You need to start looking at freelancing like it's a business, because it is. Just because you're a freelancer, the clients don't judge you any differently to how they do if they charged a business. They want high-quality work. They want you to deliver consistently, hit deadlines. They want to be retained in the same way, or they need to be retained in the same way. If you're not looking at the approach to winning projects as being, I need to win retainers, then you're in a position where you're never going to grow. This ultimately removes the stress on the previous image because once you have retainers, you can be pickier about the clients that you onboard. You can start charging more money. You can start getting access to the larger clients because they don't smell desperation when you are speaking to them. This has a knock-on effect. To many areas of freelancing, but the graph pretty much does— it's not a graph, the drawn image pretty much does all of the talking. Retainers, as long as you win a certain amount, as you get bigger, that number will change, but it will consistently grow. Your revenue will get to a point where you're extremely comfortable. If you have one-off jobs, you have months where you effectively don't win anything. The pressure builds. You're waking up every day trying to work out how you can earn the money that doesn't feed your family or pay a mortgage now. Does it? This change is a simple mindset shift. You can prep them for retainers in the original calls that you have about the one-off jobs. Just drop it in, upsell them later. If 50% of them take it, 50% of your clients then go on to retainers that ultimately earn you an income, and your bottom line will cover your lifestyle and everything that you need. Plus, let's be honest, businesses are used to it. This is what we do. When you own businesses, you sign up for services, you sign up for retainers. Somebody looking for a one-off job who refuses to even engage in a retention— retainer-based conversation, is probably not the right client for you, and you're having to take them on because you're so focused on one-off jobs. Those 2 things will fix your pipeline. If you want support like this every single day, join my free school community. My name is Michael Elliott. Hit like, hit subscribe, and let me know which one of these 2 images most relates to where you're at in your freelance career in the comments. See you in the next one.