Paul Williams of Idea Sandbox designed this nifty tool for filling your marketing pipeline with new contacts after attending a networking event. It’s based on the GET CLIENTS NOW! “marketing recipe” for following up with contacts in Chapter 7: Filling the Pipeline. Read more

I came so close, but I missed a golden opportunity. Billie Jean King, one of my long-time tennis idols, was a speaker at a convention I attended. At the end of her presentation, she pulled out her racquet and hit a bucket-full of autographed tennis balls into the audience. Everyone had remained standing after giving her a standing ovation and watched with anticipation to see where her next shot would land. Read more

If you’re an active networker, it’s likely that the organizations you belong to will offer you an exhibit booth at an upcoming conference or meeting. But is this kind of exposure a good investment for a consulting or professional services business? Read more

You know how critical it is to follow up your initial contacts or mailings with a personal phone call, but somehow your list of calls to make always seems to get longer instead of shorter. Days or even weeks go by before you place important calls, and there always seems to be Read more

Speaking in public can be a powerful marketing tactic for any professional. Public speaking increases your visibility, boosts your credibility, and establishes you as an expert in your field. It puts you in direct contact with potential clients in such an impactful way that you may find yourself closing a sale before you leave the room. Read more

Much of the popular wisdom about how to succeed as an independent professional seems to center around saying yes. You’ll hear that you’re supposed to market yourself constantly in as many different ways as possible, network with everyone you can find, and take as many clients as possible in order to increase your earnings. The implication is that you should say yes to every opportunity. Read more

This planning worksheet can be used to lay out the details of any business or marketing project. It includes space to record an overall goal, resources needed, potential obstacles, time and money required, a task list, and the project’s timeline. Read more

In the twenty years that I’ve been teaching entrepreneurs about sales and marketing, the most significant barrier to success named by my clients and students is that they simply don’t like to market and sell. 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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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