Would you like to meet me?
It would be a dream come true, right? Imagine sitting toe-to-toe with one of your top-10 favorite workplace humor columnists. You could tell me all about yourself, assuming I had already finished telling you all about myself. You could gaze into my chocolate-cake brown eyes as I borrowed money from you. You could even take me out to lunch, or dinner or both. I would order the most expensive items on the menu, and you would be totally astonished at how quickly I could disappear before the check arrived.
Alas, you may never have the privilege of meeting me. Why? Because you haven’t read “How To Get A Meeting With Anyone: The Untapped Selling Power of Contact Marketing,” a new book by “humble cartoonist,” Stu Heinecke.
To be honest — something that is very rare for me, as you would soon discover if we met — I have not read the book, either, but I have read a review by Forbes’ Chief Insights Officer, Bruce Rogers.
Beyond the unimaginable honor of meeting me, you may have other people you also want to meet. I’m not just talking about Justin Bieber. Jeez, the Bieb is almost impossible to avoid. But what about a hiring manager at Facebook, or the chief free benefits officer at Google, or even the disturbed human who hired you at your current position and you haven’t seen since day one?
That’s where “contact marketing” could be of inestimable assistance. I say “inestimable” because it is difficult to estimate the value of something that is never really defined in the review or the blu-bology on Heinecke’s website.
We do learn that Heinecke’s own application of his technique “uses his irresistible humor and irrepressible nature to make his own dreams come true.”
For people like thee and me, people blessed with totally resistible humor and an extremely repressible nature, this augurs difficultly in implementing the contact marketing technique, whatever it may be.
Fortunately, Rogers’ review of Heinecke’s methodology defines the discipline as the use of “micro-focused campaigns to break through to specific people of strategic importance, often against impossible odds, to produce a critical sale, partnership, or connection.”
In other words, if you want to fight the odds of meeting me, you first must identify specific people of strategic importance to me.
Actually, that shouldn’t be too difficult. I live alone in a yurt in Southwestern Utah, and I have no friends, so you will quickly focus in on Mr. Snuffles No. 2, my cat, as the one person of strategic importance to me. And Mr. Snuffles No. 2 is very easy to get on your side, assuming you approach him with a tin of smoked oysters and endless patience for dangling a strand of string over his head. (I won’t tell you about Mr. Snuffles No. 1, except to say that he was a person of extreme strategic importance, until he betrayed me.)
Another aspect of meeting with anyone is Heinecke’s ability to “use the power of personalization to break through the clutter and circumvent the barriers that surrounded his key sales targets.”
This makes perfect sense. If you want to meet with me, don’t stand outside the clutter of my rusting car collection, or try to circumvent the pit of rattle snakes I have positioned at the front door to my yurt, and keep yelling, “Hey you!” Use personalization and yell, “Hey, you, you moron.” I’ll know exactly whom you are trying to reach.
Whatever his techniques may be, Heinecke used them to “get a meeting with a stunningly beautiful Danish model,” with whom he “ultimately sealed the deal with a marriage proposal and the two remain married living the dream life on an island in the Pacific Northwest.”
Now, I may have made a tactical error here. I had planned to test the Heinecke technique by acquiring a Danish model for myself, but my current wife said she wasn’t going to allow it. She did say, however, that I could go live the dream life on any island I chose in the Pacific Northwest, and there was no need to wait before I packed my raincoat and my kayak and took off.
I suppose this puts the kibosh on your dream of meeting me, but in the true spirit of self-improvement business philosophers and chief insights officers, I don’t want to say anything is impossible. Just put on your raincoat, launch your kayak, and start paddling.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company, but he finally wised up and opened Bob Goldman Financial Planning in Sausalito, California. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com. To find out more about Bob Goldman, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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