Bill Gross, founder and chief investment officer of PIMCO, had a great article in Fortune last month. He described the "sub-prime" financial mess this way:

"The tangled web of sub-primes has claimed more than its share of victims in the last months; homeowners by the hundreds of thousands, to be sure, but also those who created, packaged, insured, distributed, and ultimately bought what should have been labeled "junk mortgages" but which by a masterstroke of marketing genius received more respectable imprimatur.

Skim milk masquerades as cream," warned Gilbert and Sullivan over a century ago, and sure enough, today's subprimes, packaged into financial conduits with monikers like SIIV's and CDO's, pretended to be AAA - cubes of butter."

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As I wrote that, it sounded like something from Star Trek. But it's not.

I'll let you in on a little secret. Large corporations have spent billions of dollars collecting information on consumers. They can tell you what their ideal client looks like and where to find them. So when they do their marketing, it is very targeted. Can you do the same?

We are excited to announce the launch of a new service that will do all of that for you!

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The easiest sales we ever closed were the clients who had problems that we could solve.

Check out these headlines from the last few weeks:

"U.S. stocks are off to the worst start to the year on record, according to key market measures"

"2007 may be a record year for capital gains distributions from mutual funds"

"The Fed is signaling that it will be lowering interest rates"

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If you're like most of us, you probably generated a lot of qualified prospects in 2007 that didn't become clients. Maybe they were folks who sent RSVP's for a seminar but didn't attend or didn't book an appointment afterwards. Whatever the source, and whatever the reason the qualified prospect slipped away, the bottom line is the same: if you didn’t make the conversion from prospect to client, it was a missed opportunity to cultivate new relationships and grow your business.

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There was an interesting study reported last week about how a group of employees would relate to a potential new boss. They were given a resume for one person that was pretty generic. Then they were given another resume for the same person but it was written including words like "caring" and "nurturing." In communication circles this is called "coloring."

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