735: Get the Meeting! With Stu Heinecke

Stu Heinecke, author of How to Get a Meeting with Anyone and Get the Meeting!, joins me again on this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS Russ Klein, CEO of the American Marketing Association, calls Stu Heinecke the Father of Contact Marketing. Stu admits to naming it. Stu is also a Wall Street Journal cartoonist. Cartoons offer a point of agreement. Stu used cartoons in direct mail campaigns for Rolling Stone and Bon Appétit and set records for responses. He wanted to penetrate the rest of the publishing industry. He put together what he called a ‘contact campaign.’ He sent a cartoon to two dozen VPs of big publishers. He needed a 100-percent response rate. All the contacts responded and became clients. Stu started a multi-million dollar business from an investment of about $100.00. Contact marketing means reaching out to a relatively small group of top influencers. Stu sometimes uses ‘big boards’ that cost him $250.00 each to reach a contact worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. Get the Meeting! is a field guide for How to Get a Meeting With Anyone, full of examples and case studies of what people have done to break through the noise and get in touch with people. Personal meetings have an impact. Stu talks about using personalization for gifts. Wide personalization uses the correct name and address. Deep personalization uses profile scrapes from social or AI tools to learn about your contacts before gifting them. Andy appreciates the human angle. Relationships are about humans. The customer is always thinking, “Why you?” Contact marketing makes you memorable. Daniel Kahneman taught about the power of peak events. Do your contacts love the way you think? Don’t fall into the landscape of identical competitors. How can you be one percent better than everyone else? Pocket campaigns involve engagement devices, such as multi-tools, imprinted with your contact information and a second step to get something more or to watch a video (that places a tracking pixel on the contact’s browser). Stu shares an example of a pocket campaign of a Z-CARD® that folds out into a cartoon poster. The marketer got a sale from the fourth card he shared. Poul Nielsen, a physical trainer, has a rubber card that was printed while stretched on a jig. You stretch it out to read it. People show it around. Poul gets three or four new clients for every card he gives out. Do something fun that resonates with the receiver. Make yourself memorable. One meeting can change everything. Without meetings, nothing happens. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI. Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content. _ Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul