As a freelancer, you always look forward to get your hands on heaps of work that not just keeps you busy, but at the same time ensures a steady flow of income. More than half the times, these freelancers get overburdened with the tasks at hand and fail to deliver justice to the allotted projects. Hence, it is crucial for freelancers to be able to say no to clients when required in order to avoid creating a lose-lose situation for both the parties. Let us now see how and when freelancers should be politely turning down additional client offers.
Ensure a Proper Match between Work & Individual Capacity:
As a freelancer, you already have predecided schedules with regards to the work priority, amount of time alloted to every task at hand and so on and so forth. This in reality comes out to be an appropriate blueprint, which can come handy as far as taking up additional projects is concerned.
If you already have your hands full with work, then in that case it would be wise on your part to turn down the approaching client, instead of making false professional promises. You might be of the view that, that particular client would hesitate to come back to you in the future if you turn down his offer, but on the other hand what you fail to realize is that if you take up the additional work, but fail to keep up with your commitments, then it would mean heavy loss of reputation for you leading to negative word of mouth publicity as far as your services go.
Hence, all said and done it is critical for you to take up only that much quantity of work that you can handle with utmost focus.
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Stick to a Polite Approach:
None of the clients out there would enjoy being turned down by freelancers. For some of them it might also become a matter of ego. A couple of them might also take the denial personally. Hence, in order to avoid any of the above mentioned circumstances, it is vital for freelancers to understand the right approach that needs to be adopted by them in order to avoid damaging or bringing a crack in the relationship shared by the freelancer with the client in question.
First and foremost, you need to give a patient ear to your client before turning down the project. Whatever be your reasons, it would be in your best interest to give a satisfactory explanation to your client as far as denying a project is concerned. You need to take special care as far as your tone and voice modulation goes. From no angle you should appear rude and arrogant to your client. It is always good to go that extra mile and say pleasant things to your client such as “You consider this as a worthwhile opportunity lost”, “You would be more than happy to associate with this client in the near future” and so on and so forth.
If you make it a point to take all these steps, then it is quite possible that you will end up having an amicable parting with this client who would then be more than willing to associate with you on his or her new project.
