So you land an exciting new writing commission or a contract that will cover all your bills for a couple of months. You put your head down and get on with delivering the goods. Six weeks later, however, you come up for air and realise you’ve got nothing else in terms of income coming in. You’ve been so focused on getting the work done on this gig that you haven’t had time to pitch ideas or network with contacts.

As writers we could probably learn from Aaron Ross, a former Salesforce executive famous for reinventing sales for the software age. One of his key ideas, and the title of his multimillion bestselling book titled Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine, was ‘predictable revenue’. It became the template for how tech companies sell to this day, and several of his ideas translate surprisingly well to our world. They can help us think smarter about finding work, keeping clients and deciding what’s worth our time.

Regular work beats glamorous work

Have you noticed everyone wants to get you on a subscription these days, from your Ring doorbell to your word-processing provider to your food delivery app? That’s because, as Ross understood, predictable revenue is the most valuable. It means you’re not starting from zero every month.

Say a magazine you love offers you $800 for an interesting feature that will take a week to research, write, then go through several drafts. Meanwhile, a B2B tech company offers you a retainer to produce two monthly blog posts – not sexy, but not hard to do – at $450 a month for a guaranteed minimum of six months. While the feature feels more prestigious, the blog retainer pays $4500 minimum.

Regular retainer clients must be your priority. Think of them as relationships to invest in, not projects to execute – and negotiate accordingly. Recently I’ve gone in high with two new clients and then taken a modest cut with both in exchange for a guaranteed monthly commitment. It’s a modest price to pay for knowing I’ll have money coming in over six months’ time, especially across the traditionally dry summer months.

Ringfence prospecting time

One of Ross’ key insights was that sales pipelines stall because one person is expected to do three very different jobs: find new clients, nurture them, and close deals. His fix was to split the roles, and make sure prospecting is ticking away at all times. We too can ‘ring-fence’ prospecting/pitching as a non-negotiable regular activity, regardless of how much work we’ve got on our plate.

Prospecting might mean pitching new editors, messaging a periodic client signalling your availability, or following up with an interested contact who’s gone quiet. It might mean reading through jobs newsletters one morning a week and firing off a few pitches or CVs.

I try and do one thing a day that counts as prospecting, no matter how busy I am. The key is to make it a habit. Every little effort helps. For instance, the editor you email in October may not commission you till January. Keep track of your output, so you can follow up after a suitable interval.

Measure what’s happening

Ross looked hard at sales metrics to understand where to focus future sales efforts. Even a few basic numbers can give us valuable insights to act on if we think to look at them, e.g., average monthly income by client, commission frequency, or number of revisions per project. You know. . . the stats that dictate your income.

You might discover that the client who feels like a lot of work is actually your most reliable source of income. Or the client you’ve been loyally serving for years now commissions you half as often as they used to, so maybe they need more love.

Ross’s model is a reminder that creativity and commercial thinking don’t have to be seen as opposites. In reality, thinking about one can actually support the other.

BIO – Dan Brotzel’s latest novels are Thank You For The Days and The Wolf in the Woods. He also writes widely on Medium