Here are our best practices to follow in order to receive more qualified opportunities on your dashboard.
This article covers each one of those best practices for you to maximize your amount of qualified opportunities.
Let's dive in.
Setting up your monthly budget.
First and foremost, you'll need to set up a monthly budget that you're ready to invest in your opportunities.
Indeed, your Sortlist+ membership allows you to receive opportunities on your dashboard, but you'll need to pay a certain amount for each opportunity you'll want to apply to.
Applying will allow you to get access to the entire opportunity's briefing and to contact the company behind it in order to set up a meeting. The price of the opportunity, which depends on multiple criteria, will be debited from your monthly budget.
In other words, no matter how many opportunities you receive, if you don't set a monthly budget, you won't be able to apply to them and you won't be able to win new clients on Sortlist.
Now, let's see what you can do to receive more relevant opportunities on your dashboard.
Defining your Target Markets
Once you've defined your monthly budget, the next step to follow is to define your target markets.
Target markets are based on two elements:
Your services,
Your prospecting areas.
Defining your target markets will require you to configure both of these elements properly.
Target markets: defining your services
To get started, go to the “Profile > Services” tab of your dashboard and select the services you provide to your clients.
Be careful to only select the ones where you truly are an expert.
We understand that it might be tempting to select as many services as possible, and to receive as many opportunities as possible. But that’s not the best way to go about it. Instead, you'll receive irrelevant opportunities, that don't truly match your expertise.
To add a service, just click on the “+ Add service” button. You’ll then have the possibility to choose which one you want to add:
You can choose between 41 services, split into 4 families:
Creative & Visual,
Advertising and Marketing,
Development & Product,
IT Services.
Once you’ve chosen a service, you can complete it with relevant skills, either by choosing the ones suggested or by directly searching for the one you want to add:
Again, just like for the services, only select the ones that are truly relevant.
Furthermore, you can also add a description and the starting price you ask your clients for the chosen service:
If you want to add another service, just repeat this operation.
Target markets: defining your prospecting areas
Once you’ve configured your services, the next step is to configure your prospecting areas.
To do so, click on "Opportunities" and select the "Preferences" tab:
You'll then have the option to add all of your prospecting areas, by clicking on the "+ Add prospect area" button.
And that's it! Once you've added all of your prospecting areas, your target markets will be fully configured.
Defining your Qualification Criteria
To receive more relevant opportunities, you need to tell us what kind of opportunities you want to receive.
As a service provider, you know better than anyone what kind of clients you want to be working with. Sortlist can help you meet and work with those clients, as long as you tell us who they are by configuring your qualification criteria.
To do so, click on "Opportunities" and select the "Preferences" tab:
Scroll down until you reach the "Qualification criteria" section:
That's where you'll be able to configure all of the criteria you want your clients to meet, whether it is:
The client's budget,
The project's maturity,
The audiences types,
The geographical scopes,
The business type,
The industry,
The company size,
The client’s annual turnover,
And the project holder’s decision making power.
Using both your target markets and qualification criteria, we'll know which opportunities to send you.
If an opportunity matches at least one of your target markets and all of your qualification criteria, it will be considered as qualified. You'll find those qualified opportunities in the "Qualified" tab:
However, we’ll also suggest you other opportunities, that might not be a perfect match but that we’d still advise you to consider. You’ll find those opportunities in the “Suggested” tab. Those opportunities won't match all of your qualification criteria, but we still estimate they're worth taking a look at.
Going further: Team and Languages
Of course, besides your target markets and qualification criteria, you can also go further by adding information about your team and your languages.
Adding your team size
Companies looking for an agency can say what structure they prefer to work with, whether small (1-10 employees), medium (11-50 employees) or large agency (51+ employees).
Make sure your team size is updated to fit the client's criteria:
Adding your languages
The client can specify the languages that must be spoken by the agency. Make sure you fill in the languages that you speak in order to receive those opportunities.
Know that language is a strict filter, so if you don't precise about what languages you speak, you won't be able to receive any opportunity!
By adding all these pieces of information, you increase your chances to receive qualified opportunities. However, even if you've received them, you've applied, and you've contacted the client, there is still some work to be done.
You need to get a response from the client and actually meet him.
How to increase your chances to meet the client
Clients can see your agency's profile through multiple channels:
By getting into a directory after a Google search,
By being notified after you've applied to their project.
In both cases, you need to have a profile that's convincing enough, so that the client wants to know more about you, to meet you, and to work with you.
That's even more true if you've contacted an opportunity you've applied to. The client behind it will definitely check your Sortlist profile before giving you an answer.
So let's see how to set up a convincing agency profile on Sortlist.
Brand your profile with a logo, a cover, and a team picture
First, be careful to customize your profile with your agency's brand assets.
This includes:
Your logo,
A cover picture,
A team picture.
Make sure to also add a convincing description, explaining what you do and who you do it for. By reading your description, the Ideal Customer Profile you're targeting must directly know you can help him.
This is how it will appear to clients checking your profile:
Once you're satisfied with the result, go to the next step.
Add clients reviews
Did you know that a profile with 3+ reviews gets hired 75% more than others?
Indeed, nothing's much more convincing than past clients praising your work. Reviews play a crucial role in reassuring prospects considering hiring your agency.
As you can see, you have two possibilities to add reviews:
Add an existing review.
Invite to review.
The first one will allow you to add a review a client already wrote and shared somewhere else:
The second one will allow you to invite your client to write a new review:
In both cases, the review will be added to your public profile and will build up your credibility. If you can, make sure that your clients mention the kind of services you’ve provided for them. That way, anyone who views your profile can get an idea of what it’s like to work with you.
This will reassure your prospects that you’re the right agency to accompany them on their projects:
Build your portfolio
The final piece of the puzzle: show your prospects what you're capable of by adding past works to your profile.
To complete your portfolio, click on the "+ Add work" button. You will then have the possibility to add your work and fully customize it with the following information:
Title,
Client,
Image,
Video,
Expertise,
Skills,
Budget,
Period of collaboration,
Description,
Challenges,
Solution,
Impact,
Result link.
Just like reviews, adding works will reassure companies visiting your profile. Make sure you complete them as much as possible.
This is what prospects will see:
Cherry on the cake: regularly update your profile
Final advice we can give you, we consider an active agency as more recommendable than passive agencies that never log in or never refresh their work. An old project from 2018 is not as relevant as a more recent one.
Being active means regularly logging in, adding new works and adding client reviews to your profile!
Not only will you receive more opportunities, but you will also be more convincing to potential clients.
Do you want more?
If you want to receive even more relevant opportunities, we highly recommend setting up a budget for your Visibility Module as well. This will allow you to be visible on relevant directories, which are browsed by thousands of potential customers each month.
Watch this video to learn more: