How to Get a Meeting with Anyone: The Untapped Selling Power of Contact Marketing

The hard part just got easy.

You know how to sell—that’s your job, after all—but getting CEOs and VIPs to call you back is the tricky part. You’re in luck: That impossible-to-reach person isn’t so impossible to reach after all.

Hall-of-Fame-nominated marketer and Wall Street Journal cartoonist Stu Heinecke discovered that he could get past traditional gatekeepers to reach those elusive executives by thinking outside the box and using personalized approaches he calls “Contact Campaigns.” Including presidents, a prime minister, celebrities, countless CEOs, and even the Danish model who became his wife, Heinecke found that getting meetings with previously unreachable people was easier than ever. Now he shares his tactics and tips in this essential guide for anyone who needs to make contact.

In How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, Heinecke explains how you can use your own creative Contact Campaigns to get those critical conversations. He divulges methods he’s developed after years of experience and from studying the secrets of others who’ve had similar breakthrough results—results that other marketers considered impossible, with response rates as high as 100 percent. Through real-life success stories, Heinecke lays out 20 categories of Contact Campaigns that anyone can research and execute. Tactics range from running a contact letter as a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal to unorthodox uses of the phone, social media, email, and snail mail to using personalized cartoons to make connections. He also packs in plenty of tips on how to determine your targets, develop pitches, and gain allies in your contact’s circle of influence.

How to Get a Meeting with Anyone provides you with a new toolkit you can put to work right away so you can make the connections that are essential to your success.

If ever there were someone born to write a book like How To Get A Meeting with Anyone, Stu Heinecke is that person. A Wall Street Journal cartoonist, Hall of Fame-nominated marketer and author, Heinecke discovered the magic of "Contact Marketing" early in his career, when he launched a Contact Campaign to just two dozen Vice Presidents and Directors of Circulation at the big Manhattan-based magazine publishers. That tiny $100 investment resulted in a 100% response rate, launched his enterprise and brought in millions of dollars worth of business.

Heinecke is the host and author of the How To Get A Meeting with Anyone podcast and blog, and founder and president of Contact, a Contact Marketing agency, and cofounder of Cartoonists.org, a coalition of famed cartoonists dedicated to raising funds for charity, while raising the profile of the cartooning art form. He lives on an island in the pristine Pacific Northwest with his wife, Charlotte, and their dog, Bo.