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How To Get The Meeting, with Stu Heinecke Ep #99

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The skills required to be a great negotiator are also powerful tools in the arsenal when it comes to getting the meeting with the decision-makers on your list of prospects. Both require savvy, knowledge, and people skills that go beyond the ordinary tactics most salespeople and negotiators are willing to employ. Stu Heinecke explains how those who are willing to go outside the normal channels and to use unorthodox but personalized approaches can not only get the meeting but close sales at unprecedented rates. Listen to hear all the details on contact marketing.

Outline of This Episode

  • [0:30] Why we have a cartoonist on the podcast for this episode
  • [2:48] Why Stu (a cartoonist) wrote a book about booking meetings
  • [8:55] Factors that go into making your outreach stand out
  • [13:12] Personalized, direct, targeted, and in an “open” channel of contact
  • [15:05] Touchpoints for the executive assistant
  • [18:01] Social media — and why most are insignificant and must go offline
  • [20:50] Ideas for how to reach out in creative but effective ways

100% response and 100% conversion from a $100 campaign

Stu is a cartoonist for the Wall Street Journal. He’s not the kind of guy you’d expect to be teaching people about marketing and appointment setting. It was his own experience in making contact with someone he wanted to get an audience with that convinced him he was onto something. In his first campaign (that’s what he called it), he created an 8 X 10 cartoon print of the decision-maker he wanted to meet, personalized it, and contacted the man’s Executive Assistant to tell her it was coming. In all, Stu spent $100 and wound up converting the man with his offer. That was the beginning of his “contact marketing” approach and he’s got story after story that proves its effectiveness.

Why Stu believes so strongly in contact marketing

When Stu looks at the marketing and prospecting landscape he sees most sales and marketing professionals taking a shotgun approach. They spray their contact attempts out en mass and do so in the most crowded and noisy channels. His approach is a sniper shot by comparison. He takes the time to identify the clients who could change the scale of his career or business and then crafts an approach uniquely suited to them and their needs. He calls these “micro-focused campaigns” that use clever means to reach out to those ideal prospects in a way that cuts through the noise.

What does it take to get the meeting?

When I asked Stu what the factors are that go into a successful contact marketing campaign he said that you have to start by realizing that you can’t reach out using the same crowded channels everyone else is using. To him that’s like trying to get the attention of someone in the oncoming lane on the freeway by waving at them. It’s not going to work.

Your next step is to discover a unique area of interest or need your perfect prospect has that you can use as the focal point for your mailer content. Once you have that identified and know how you’re going to personalize it to them, you make contact with their Executive Assistant. That’s where the brilliance of Stu’s approach shines.

The Executive Assistant is a gatekeeper, so make them your ally

Many of the questions sales professionals ask about the Executive Assistants of their prospects have to do with how to circumvent them so that they can touch base with the decision-maker directly. Stu says that’s the wrong attitude entirely. Don’t try to circumvent them, do your best to make them your ally. You only have to listen to the first ten minutes of our conversation to understand what Stu means when he says that. It’s not difficult to do and the payoff is huge.

Listen to Stu’s stories to fuel the fire of your own creativity and to learn more about contact marketing. You’ll soon be coming up with ideas of how you can reach out to the important prospects on your list and get the meeting you’ve been trying to pin down.

Resources & People Mentioned

Episode Sponsor: ScoutRFP

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