Why incubating sales leads makes such a huge difference

Professional Marketing Associates Posted on by

Anyone who earns their living in sales (or has seen the movie Glengarry Glen Ross) knows that not all leads are the same. Some are “sales ready” from the get-go and others need to be nurtured and coaxed along.

Nurturing leads is the popular expression these days, but we like the term incubate better. Incubation is a process that provides optimal conditions for growth and development.

You might be getting new business leads from trade shows, your own teleprospecting efforts, referrals from other clients, or even from a serendipitous meeting at a dinner party or your kid’s soccer game. Continue reading →

The Door You Want To Open

Professional Marketing Associates Posted on by

Think your prospecting emails might be landing in the same folder as those confidential requests from that Nigerian prince?

Take heart, today we’re going to show you seven proven strategies to get your prospecting emails opened and read. Let’s be clear up front though, that we’re talking about direct messages to individual targets, not bulk email blasts to purchased lists. That’s another thing entirely.  Continue reading →

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

Professional Marketing Associates Posted on by

Are we?

When we realize that the challenge before us is more daunting or complex than we thought, the tendency is to want to throw more resources at it – more money – enlarge the team – extend the deadline…

But maybe all that’s needed is a fresh approach. Maybe there are some other details or data that can tilt the game in our favor.

Sometimes we’re just looking at it from the wrong angle and seeing it from a different point of view will enlighten us.

And sometimes it just may not be worth wrestling with at all. Without giving in to discouragement, we can agree that there are other and better ways to spend our time and more promising channels to get where we want to go. Continue reading →

Don’t Let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good

Professional Marketing Associates Posted on by

Hey readers, this is our one hundredth issue of MarketPulse! To celebrate we wanted to do something special, so we decided to focus on excellence, flawlessness, impeccability, and getting things 100% right.

Everyone strives for perfection – at least some of the time. But that drive to be perfect can be a huge trap, an alluring phantom of mind that drains energy, siphons off time and lowers morale.

From sports to business, performing to parenting, investing to inventing — since time immemorial, humans have been setting new records and breaking old ones. Yet no one has ever run the perfect mile or played the perfect chess game, or raised the perfect human being. Continue reading →