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 →

Barriers to Bridges: How to use people’s resistance and disinterest to turn the situation around

Professional Marketing Associates Posted on by

We might be addressing others at an important sales presentation, the monthly sales coaching session, or an annual conference.  We want the audience to give us their rapt and undivided attention. But that doesn’t always work out the way we’d like.

Sometimes people are bored and disinterested; sometimes they ask challenging questions or push back in frustration. That can be unsettling. Continue reading →

The Joy of Cold Calling

Professional Marketing Associates Posted on by

Really. What’s so cold about cold calling anyway?

Some say it’s because the recipient is caught “cold.” They had no expectation you’d be calling, so they’re unprepared, and perhaps a bit surprised. To the supporters of this interpretation, that’s a good thing because catching people off guard can be to one’s advantage.

Another school of cold call definers claim the term refers to the caller’s “obscurity” to the recipient. Since they don’t know who you are, they have no reason to take your call or engage with you. The challenge here is to make yourself more familiar. Continue reading →

A Cure for the Tyranny of Prospecting

Professional Marketing Associates Posted on by

The bitter taste of rejection, frustration, and discouragement makes prospecting for new accounts feel like the last thing anybody wants to be doing.

Those negative feelings – or the fear of experiencing them – can have a paralyzing effect on even the most successful sales pros. Fear of failure diminishes our self-esteem, drains our energy, and dampens our forward momentum. Continue reading →