In the next 2 articles I will try to cover some aspects that you should have in mind when making a first contact with your potential partner. The first impression counts a lot, so if you start on the wrong foot, you may miss the chance to find out if the person that you have established contact with, is what you are looking for (you may not even receive a response).
The article bellow highlights some of things that you need to take into consideration, from an “employer’s” point of view.
Here it goes:
1) Provide some information about you!
If you use email, contact the potential “employee” through your “business” address. If you are too afraid of sp@am and you want to make contact through a “disposable” email address, at least provide some details about you and/or your company and make sure you mention your website (or the website of the company that you work for).
A respectable freelancer or a studio that is used to working with foreign clients won’t even bother to respond to an email from someone that only asks for details but doesn’t reveal anything from his/their part.
You might not realize it, but the competition among freelancers or studios from countries like China, Russia, Indonezia, eastern European countries, etc. is very sharp. Therefore, a lot of people try to pose as employers just to know the rates practiced by the competition, or even worse, sabotage them by sending fake jobs (without paying a dime, of course) Trust me, I’ve been “around the block” a couple of times and I know.
2) Use a personal approach!
As an employer, you are probably looking to find more potential “employees” for you to choose from. However, don’t compose just one email starting with “dear sir/madam”, and send it to everyone. I am not saying that you should write a different email for each person you contact; I know that that takes a lot of time. I am saying that the best way to do this is to start with a template and “personalize” it a little, for each one. For example, the details you request and the information about you/your company will remain the same, but you should write at least a phrase to mention where you have seen their work (on which website or forum), and maybe even what particular work was that.
It may sound a little time consuming, but this way it won’t seem like you are sending mass emails, and the other part will feel “honored” to have been contacted by you.
3) What details should you ask for?
Ok, so you have introduced yourself, you have mentioned that you have seen their work and where, what do you ask for now? Most people just ask for some representative renderings along with prices and timelines. Although this is absolutely necessary, it is definitely not enough. You have to ask for some proof of the freelancer’s/studio’s experience; and there is no other than written testimonials and contact details from their clients (so you can check their authenticity if you feel like it).
If you don’t ask for this, you might find out the hard way that a lot of so called studios have 0 experience regarding working with clients, and their portfolio is done at their ease with no constraints whatsoever (or even worse, they could not even be the real authors of the visuals that they show you; believe me, this can happen also).
Regarding the rendering samples that you ask for, it is better to mention that you would like see as much diversity as they can show.
You never know how good a person is at modeling furniture for example, if you have seen only exterior renderings of steel and glass office buildings. You don’t know how he can handle a night rendering if you have seen only “classic” mid day renderings.
As you know, each project has it’s particular difficulties, and you must evaluate your potential outsourcing partners on how they handle different situations (you may chose one to do an interior rendering of a living room, but you may choose somebody else to do a dusk rendering of a high-rise office building).
The second part of this article will cover the same issue, but from the freelancer’s point of view.
Stay tuned!
