Access to UpWork enterprise level clients

andrew_nikulin · ‎04-27-2019

Cheers, I'd like to share some concerns me and my team has, and also ask a few questions.

For the last half a year we can't see enough clients to work with, and we feel a drastic decrease in clients' size and their financial possibilities. I would also say we're overqualified for like 95% of everything that's publicly available to bid.

At the same time, UpWork has lots of enterprise level clients which is exactly what we need to make money for both our team members and platform. But it seems all of such clients are almost unreachable, and less than 1% of all jobs they have, are posted publicly. So I'm really keen to know how any team gets to work with clients of such level on UpWork. Is there any hidden way to get them or how it works?

AveryO · ‎04-27-2019

Hi Andrew,

There are two ways to work with Enterprise clients:

Submit a proposal to a publicly-posted Enterprise project; and/or,
Accept an invitation to be a member of a Talent Cloud network. This can happen when the Enterprise client wants to assemble a reserve of potential freelancers before specific project needs arise.

You may learn more about working with Enterprise clients in this help article.

~ Avery

andrew_nikulin · ‎04-27-2019

Hi, Avery, thank you for your input!

Though I should say this is something we already knew from the first days here. Still, after years of success, we have never ever received a single invitation. Now, having 3 agile teams, we see almost no opportunity to grow further and have no desire to expand business on UpWork. In my original message, I've highlighted the fact, that Enterprise clients post jobs very rarely, almost never. When such a job is posted, the competition is really high.

All of this makes us think that the process/approach you run doesn't work for agencies and cant' contribute to their growth. We could bring another dozen people to UpWork in a matter of a week, but why should we do this? We have top-notch senior European engineers who want a challenging and rewarding project, which is not a case for most of the publicly available jobs. So we have to get back to good old classics with other business tools to approach potential clients. We aren't happy doing this, as it's time-consuming, but you basically leave big agencies no choice.

petra_r · ‎04-28-2019

Andrew N wrote:

, I've highlighted the fact, that Enterprise clients post jobs very rarely, almost never. When such a job is posted, the competition is really high.

Enterprise clients don't often work with agencies. It makes no sense for them to add (and pay for) yet another layer.

Andrew N wrote:
We could bring another dozen people to UpWork in a matter of a week, but why should we do this? We have top-notch senior European engineers who want a challenging and rewarding project, which is not a case for most of the publicly available jobs.

Upwork has way, WAY too many freelancers. The very last thing it wants or needs is for anyone bringing on more, considering they turn down 98% of the 10.000 who try to join every single day.

If Enterprise clients is what those "top-notch senior European engineers" want, joining as independent freelancers makes far more sense (assuming they get accepted...)

In my personal opinion it makes far more sense anyway.