Most of the information and effort aimed at getting more clients focuses on promotion and attraction. You’ll find plenty of advice on how to tell the world about your business, make the phone ring, or get inquiries to arrive in your email inbox. But once you’ve been marketing yourself for a while, you discover that turning those prospects into paying clients can be pretty darned difficult. I find that many professionals are simply not prepared to sell to the prospects they attract. Read more

“Every person who has ever started a business, I imagine, thought he had a good idea. It’s the smart person, and the rare person, who tries to find out the most important thing: do other people think it’s a good idea?” Read more

Blogs and ezines are both useful tools for using your writing to market on the web. There are many similarities between the two, but there are also differences. They are delivered in different ways, often differ in their content, and are created using different tools. Here are the chief differences between the two forms. Read more

In a national survey of independent professionals, almost 50% of the consultants, coaches, and other professionals declared that they were currently not earning enough to meet their expenses. This result shouldn’t be surprising, since according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, more than half of all small businesses fail Read more

Doing a good job at follow-up is a piece of cake. You just capture every lead or potential referral partner you run across, then place a call or send them something, or both. If you don’t make a sale right away, you calendar them for the next follow-up and do the same thing again. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? So why is follow-up such a problem? Here are the four most common reasons, and what you can do about them:

1. Prioritization. With an activity that you must initiate, it’s easy to let other tasks come first: responding to incoming calls and mail, reading what drifts into your inbox or crosses your desk, going to meetings and conferences, and oh yes, doing the client work you get paid for.

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Many independent professionals believe cold calling is a complete waste of time, while others claim their cold calls produce plenty of sales. Why is there so much disagreement about the effectiveness of this approach to selling professional services? Read more

If you’re starting a new business or expanding the one you have, a valuable first step is developing a written plan. You’ve heard about business plans, but did you know there is more than one type? Depending on your situation, you may need a complete business plan, a simple business plan, and/or an action plan. Read more

Have you noticed there seems to be a fine dance between taking specific strategic actions to cause your intended results, and having an attitude of faith and trust in order to allow the results to manifest? Read more

I talk with a lot of marketing strategists who extol the importance of branding for a company’s success but it’s like pulling teeth to drag most of them down from the conceptual clouds and get specific about exactly what they mean. Read more

A good friend of mine is an information technology consultant. He’s been an independent contractor for the twenty-plus years I have known him, and gets all his consulting contracts through agencies. Even when he works a year or two for the same client, the agency takes 20-25% of what the client is paying for his services. I once asked him why Read more