How To Get A Meeting With Anyone In A Post-Pandemic World With Stu Heinecke
In this post-pandemic world, getting a meeting with anyone can seem like a chore. However, it doesn’t have to be. In this episode, our host, Chad Burmeister and his guest, best-selling author and cartoonist Stu Heinecke, field questions from leading sales professionals about how to get meetings going in this post-pandemic world. Tackling things such as work from home and Zoom meetings, Stu and Adam discuss what meetings mean in this post-COVID planet. If you want to know how to get that meeting done, then you’ve come to the right place.
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How To Get A Meeting With Anyone In A Post-Pandemic World With Stu Heinecke
We're going to look for an interactive dialogue. This is not about a presentation. This is a roundtable discussion. What we're finding, if you saw a post on LinkedIn, 1,408 people were interviewed or asked the question on one of those LinkedIn surveys. What's harder, getting a meeting or being a quota-carrying rep? Overwhelmingly 60% of the 1,408 people at the time said getting a meeting. I would argue there are probably a handful of people in the country that are excellent at getting a meeting with anyone. Stu here, who wrote the book called How to Get a Meeting with Anyone is probably one of those people. Stu, before we kick off, maybe we could share a little bit of your background with the cartoon work that you've been doing and also your book, and then we'll get started. Thanks for joining. Stu, welcome.
Thank you so much. Chad, I hope I'm pretty good at getting meetings. You're right. I wrote two books about it. How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. Get the Meeting! was the later one that came out in 2020. I do have a new book coming up about growth strategy that's inspired by weeds, which is going to be a lot of fun. That comes out in May 2022. I have a crazy background. I'm a Hall of Fame nominated marketer. That's where all of my education is. I'm also a cartoonist. I'm one of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists. I've been combining the two in marketing campaigns my whole career. One of the things I discovered early was that if I sent a cartoon to someone about them, I was breaking through. I thought, "That's amazing. This like is a secret weapon." I reached presidents, prime ministers, celebrities, countless CEOs and C-level executives. I thought, "How is everyone else doing? How was everyone else solving this challenge?" We all need to get meetings. It's the basic building block of life and certainly a business. I discovered there's a whole shadow form of marketing out there.
We have to get meetings with people if we're going to collaborate with people. If we don't collaborate with people, nothing happens.
No one knew what to call it at the time, so I called it Contact Marketing. In 2020, the American Marketing Association named me the Father of Contact Marketing because of that. Chad and I talked about doing this because things are changing. It was interesting to hear the results of that poll, Chad, on LinkedIn. That's incredible. I'm conducting other roundtables with my audiences. I'm finding that people are having a tougher time getting meetings. In fact, they were having an easier time in 2020, even though everything changed. Now they're having a tougher time. We're going to explore that and what's working. You probably would be disappointed if I didn't show you a few ideas that you might be able to take away. Chad, I'm so glad to join you on this. It's always a basic need, particularly for anybody in sales. We have to get meetings with people if we're going to collaborate with people. If we don't collaborate with people, nothing happens. It's the perfect thing, a perfect time to bring this up.
I'm glad we put this on the calendar. For those who don't know me, I'm the CEO of ScaleX.ai. We also launched a spinoff brand called BDR.ai. The tagline is Always on Prospecting. Setting up LinkedIn campaigns, it turns out we're seeing a 29% reply rate to LinkedIn outreach. Email on a good day gets a 1% to 3% reply rate and 60% to 70% of people say, "Take me off your list," especially if you're not doing the kind of outreach that Stu does. I'm sure you don't see a 60% take me off your list rate when you send something that's highly personalized. With a Wall Street Journal cartoon with the prospect's name in it, you're going to get a much higher open rate, a much higher reply rate. The use of big yard videos is another one we'll explore. Stu, let's start with you on this question. At the start of COVID, I'm sure you saw a massive shock to the system. How's it settled out? What have you seen out there for getting a meeting?
At first, we were all locked down in the office essentially. It was back in March 2020. A lot of people were suddenly forced to work from home and work on Zoom. They weren't quite sure how to deal with it but I would say within 1 or 2 weeks, it's not hard to do. Everyone was pretty much settled in at home. They're not commuting. They're not traveling. They are looking for a bit of stimulation. I was thinking back then that was probably a golden time for getting meetings and it was. It was very easy to get ahold of people, get together and have a cup of coffee on Zoom or something like that.
That was an interesting change, and then things changed again. Many of us are being asked to come back to the office. The pandemic is essentially over. There are less shutters of it, but we're in a post-COVID era. We may be in a post-work from home era as well. Some CEOs are saying, "Come on back to the office. I need to see you. We need to be together to collaborate." Others are saying, "Let's adopt a hybrid version of this. We want you to come in a couple of days a week, three days a week maybe, and then you can work from home two days a week." There's this push-pull because workers, on the other hand, the people who left the big cities to go to Wyoming, the suburbs went to the ski area.
I'm hearing a lot of the California folks have made their way up to the mountains.
They surely did. They went to Idaho and Texas. There were the lucky few who made it to Park City or Jackson Hole. I don't think those people are coming back. I don't know. I don't visit the office once a month perhaps. A lot of these people are saying, "We're very happy with work from home. That's all we want." It's going to be interesting. It's like the drop of water before a tsunami. They all left and then a lot of them are coming back, whether they like it or not.
My wife's in commercial property management. In the first 6, 8, 12 weeks of 2020, she found 10% of people were canceling their renewal on their lease. Later in March, April of 2021, it's more like 50% lease cancellation. There is going to be a lot of folks who continue to work at home. Maybe it's 30%, 40%, 50%. Certainly, there'll be some level of hybrid. My answer is here's my new office and it turns out it's a green screen. If you want, go into your physical office, take a picture of your cubicle and then post it up on your green screen background. Who's to know the difference? That's what's changed.
One of the things I'll mention that we noticed in the first 6, 8 weeks was if you called someone on their mobile phone, dial to connect 8 to 1, 9 to 1, if you call someone on their direct line and would use to perform well, all of a sudden, they weren't forwarded to their cells. It was a direct line. It terminated at the office where they weren't at. All of a sudden, it took 50 dials to get to one person. A lot of people were like, "Phone doesn't work." It does if you call their mobile number. That was the thing we learned very early on. I'd love to get some other feedback of what's changed.
I'll add a couple more comments. What I'm hearing is that people suddenly become very busy because they're getting out. They're starting to meet face-to-face. There's a lot of activity that is happening that wasn't happening in 2020. The thing I'm hearing because of that with these people suddenly gotten much busier, it is much harder to get meetings suddenly. Is that what you're hearing as well?
Get the Meeting!: An Illustrative Contact Marketing Playbook
If I think of my June 2021 schedule, you'd get me. I'm in the office. My calendar gets pretty full, but there are times of day that I'm available. I'm about to travel to Arizona. I go to Kentucky. I got back from Florida. There are busy executives. There's pent-up travel. Think about what's going to happen in July and August of 2021. Cruise ships open up soon. All of a sudden, you think there's been a flush in prior years of people going out of town over the summer. Hang on. It's going to change. The next topic, Stu, is what's worked, what hasn't. There's one thing that I'll share and that's a voicemail drop campaign that we did. Beginning of the pandemic, Danielle calls and she says, "I work with this company called Bella+Canvas out of Los Angeles. They've been asked to convert their entire production line to masks. I need to get out to the market to offer this to help companies."
She had a compelling event, a need and a solution. This is the number one producer. They sold 1 million masks to Amazon. It might have been more than that. I'm going to get the numbers wrong. It's in the millions. They can produce hundreds of thousands a day. She's like, "I have unlimited capacity. It's all American made. I can solve a business problem." Most companies would have said, "Let me do an email blast for you. Let me do a social outreach campaign." They'd go the standard way. When you think of Gary Vaynerchuk, Stu Heinecke and Chad Burmeister, what do we all have in common? We go a road less traveled because we don't want to look like everybody else. What did we do? We pull the list of 1,400 chief procurement officers from Fortune 2,000 companies.
We recorded a 40-second voice greeting from Danielle. It was, "It's Danielle." It was very bubbly and awesome. "I'm calling because you probably have a need for a mask. My company is the largest producer. Amazon picked up 100 million masks. Call me back. Here's my cell phone number." We did 250 in one hour. Her phone lit up. She didn't know what to do with the demand. She ended up signing up Starbucks and Salesforce.com. The message there is to be unique and solve a need. I call it the shocking value statement. If you don't have a shocking value statement, why are you in business? "I have Stu. I'm calling with ScaleX. We're like everybody else. We hope people automate email outreach and LinkedIn outreach. Give me a call back when you have a chance." That's not compelling.
That's not going to happen. You have to have that compelling need or reason to connect. The other part of it and the part that I'm always drumming home are that I'm suggesting that the way that you reach out, you should do it in a way that has people saying, "Who is this? I love the way this person thinks." Do we have anybody to join us because that's the important part? It's not us. It's everybody in the audience.
Leonard, welcome. Thanks for being here.
As what I see Leonard is saying, he's happy to get involved in what we do need. It's a roundtable.
I don't know exactly what to say here but let me mention this. Stu Heinecke sold a package of cartoons or something through the Wall Street Journal many years ago. I got that. I started out in direct mail. That was not that successful for some things I wanted to do. When I saw that package, it was like someone discovering fire for the first time, is how I would describe it. What I did, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I would tell Mr. Heinecke, you had a conference table cartoon. You had a caption that read something like what we need.
We need someone with vision, creativity and great marketing instincts, someone like Leonard Knock.
I must tell you quite frankly that I had an illustrator. I'm very sensitive to intellectual property because I own a lot of it. I own domain names that are worth an awful lot of money, so I would not have copied that. The I Love New York concept's been imitated. I'll use that as a euphemism for a long time. What I did was I had a tough notch illustrator create a conference table with executives. I had my lines that I created. I went to a frame place and I had it framed. It wasn't a cartoon that was set. It was a beautiful frame. People freaked out when they got it. They responded. I could get through the door. I will name-drop here. I won't say who did it.
Everything that you do in person, not all of it translates on a screen. You can't pat somebody on the back. It's not the same.
I showed the concept to a friend who was trying to get through the dean. He came in, the guy who invented the Segway. He responded immediately to the concept. That's not an easy person. I love it. I have both of your books. The concept is pretty basic. I find the conference table is generally sufficient. Stu mentioned that someone sends a typewriter to Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks freaked out about that. If I have a problem, let's think of it as 1, 2, 3 step marketing. The first thing is we get the cartoon, but then they might get something. If I know their hobbies, I'll send that to them. It's effective. I'm here to tell you that is extremely effective.
Thank you, Leonard. That's very nice to hear. I don't know if I tapped on cartoons. I've been using them for a long time. You know about it. The campaign that you saw would have been from Ad Age. That's who we used it for. It worked well. It set all kinds of records. You see the effect of sending cartoons. In fact, Chad and I work together with one of my programs, Big Boards, to help his clients breakthrough as well. The thing is, if you do something, it doesn't have to be cartoons, but if you do something, put a little bit of thought into it, make it a little audacious.
I'm going to show you something. This is Dan Waltman's content campaign. He's a sales blogger, but he's also a turnaround specialist. When he spots a story about missed earnings estimate in any of the business press, he has a sword made up. This is one of them. That's his contact campaign. He sends that out to the CEO of the company that's in trouble in a beautiful wooden box with a handwritten note. You know the story because you read the books. The note says, "Dear Bob, I noticed you lost a battle recently. I wanted to let you know if you ever need a few extra hands in battle, we've got your back."
That campaign is getting 100% response. It's pretty obvious that Dan spent a bit of money and committed to his outreach to the CEO. They love the way he does it. The same thing happens with the cartoons. They love it and they respond. It's a wonderful thing. What's interesting is we have two cultures of marketing here. Chad, in your system, there's automation and AI. You use the phone. You plow through sheer numbers and get great metrics out of it. This stuff that I'm talking about is sniper shots.
We spend $1,000, which is what Dan spends to send the sword. You don't want to spend $1,000 on everyone because not everyone is worth it. By the way, when Dan gets an assignment for his turnaround services, then it's worth millions of dollars. It makes sense to send out a $1,000 sword in his case. He's using a visual metaphor to do it. "We can do it." Here's one of my favorite visual metaphors and it's all of $10. It's a realistic coffee smell. I love these little things that cause people to go, "Who is this person sending this to me? I love this."
How to Get a Meeting with Anyone: The Untapped Selling Power of Contact Marketing
Can I give you one idea here real fast? There was a copywriter who's departed to the next world by the name of Gary Halbert. He was relatively famous for people who followed copywriters. I want to give attribution to the guy who came up with this idea. Disposable cell phones are that cheap that you can get one for $5 or $10. What you do is you program in your cell phone number. You get a copywriter to come up with a very catchy line. Maybe send a cartoon along with it. There is a line in there that they could call you. The number is right there on the phone. You've made it easy for them to contact you, if you will. That's one way.
That's a great one. In fact, if you know the movie Hitch with Will Smith, it's a great movie. He's a consultant that helps create meetings in a romantic setting. He used that same thing. He had a phone delivered to Eva Mendes's character to ask her out. It works. It's pretty amazing to see it in action.
To comment on your thought about the frequency outreach. There's a great friend of mine, Skip Miller, who's written a handful of books over the years. His model that I learned early on is the simple equation revenue equals frequency times competency. Early in my sales career, I was all about the frequency. I don't have competency yet. If my C is low, then I better get the frequency up a little higher. More calls, more emails, more and more. Over time, the competency moved up. Now I can do more of a sniper shot. To your point, what's interesting having looked across the cost per meeting, if you're doing an email campaign, it could cost you $500 for a meeting, maybe even $1,000 in some cases, if you're going outbound. If it's an inbound lead and you're getting some demand gen air cover, that might cost you $250 to $400.
Dan is spending $1,000, but he's getting a meeting 100% of the time with exactly the right audience. That's not that big of a difference than a $250 to $400 meeting. If you're doing a cold call, your meetings are costing you $1,000. Would you rather have a cold outreach that might be uncomfortable to the person or would you rather have a lasting impression that could end up showing up on a call like how Leonard up from I'm assuming many years ago? Being different means doing amazing things in this marketplace. Leonard, thanks for the feedback.
Leonard, thank you. That was great. I love the stories.
I'll be in touch with you because we spoke here. Thank you.
Thank you.
If we have time, I have this 50-second video. Here's a little bit of a setup. That's great that Leonard mentioned this. I send cartoons. I've been doing it my whole career. I send cartoons to breakthrough. The thing is, when I send them, they go out and I'm not there. I don't see what happens. People will say, "I got it. I loved it," but I'm not there to watch it happen. I sent one to Billie Jean, the Instagram marketing influencer. His assistant had the presence of mind to say, "This looks interesting. I'm going to film this while I open it." It's an unboxing of one of my contact pieces to Billie Jean. Her reactions are incredible. I got to see these reactions finally in this video. The point of sharing this is to show you this is what happens when people say, "I love the way this person thinks. Who is this?"
"I usually wait until you get here to show your packages but this one's pretty cool. I'm too anxious to wait and show you. Here's the reveal. Do you know how awesome this is? The tale of the hired gun. 'Did I ever tell you fellas the story of the Billie the Kid?' 'Sure did.' 'Well, how about Billie Jean?' 'You mean the marketing rep from San Diego? At least 100 times before.' 'You can say that again.' Look at the back. I'm in love with this guy. Mad respect."
That's the video. Here's the thing. That was Billie Jean's assistant. How many of us have encountered executive assistants who say, "Who are you again? He's traveling or something. Go away." We always think of that people always talk about executive assistants as gatekeepers but imagine getting that kind of a reaction from your outreach.
Personal connections are the thing. People buy from those that they know, like, and trust.
If it doesn't give you goosebumps, goose pimples or however you name those, the feeling of that, to me, it felt like a wine box. I liked good wine. I could smell the pine seeing the video. I'm imagining like she said, the reveal. That's a magic trick term. Get ready for the reveal. All those things normally unconsciously go through our mind when we're doing it. The beauty of that video is that it exposes. When you send a bland email that blasts out to 1,000 people, you're going to get the opposite reaction of what you saw there.
"This is spam or I don't know who this is." People don't want to be interrupted. When we reach out to that, we're interrupting them. You got to make that interruption fun and intriguing for them.
Let's continue the dialogue. What's your question?
My question is, we got some smart people in the room here. I'm wondering, what are you doing to get meetings? What's working for you? Would anyone care to talk about what you're doing to get meetings?
I see Bruce Captain Kirk is on the call. What's going? Bruce is doing some LinkedIn stuff in a very compelling way. In fact, that brings up an interesting topic, content done in an effective way. This is interesting. Let me go to my Instagram here. That's what brought it up because Bruce Kirk said, "Chad, I liked the videos that you're putting out on Instagram, LinkedIn and everywhere else. How do you do that? What's your hack?" Let me share this with you here and you'll see what I'm talking about. Who has time to sit there and build a video like this and then a quote like this? I meet with this guy named Garren once a month for an hour or I do webinars like this one. When I do them, I upload them into Google Drive. Garren goes in and his production team and they create these videos and these quotes. How to hire high-performing salespeople? How you 10X your outreach? These are very educational in most cases. I'll keep the personal one out of there. Those are important but simple.
It's like an educational post. Over time, you start doing this once a day. All it takes is an hour of work a month where I meet with this video producer. I get more inbound leads than I used to get. I was getting 4 and 5 a month. I get maybe five referrals from customers. Now I'm getting 25 and 30 by doing these kinds of short video outtakes. There are a few companies out there that are starting to do that. I'll put in the chat here before we exit and give you Garren's information. I pay about $1,000 a month and all that gets well produced. Bruce Captain Kirk is going to be looking at something like that also. Personal branding matters. You're doing it on a one-to-one basis when you send a sword or you send a Wall Street Journal article. This is another mechanism to do personal branding at scale so that everybody in your LinkedIn network, your Instagram, etc.
One thing I'm curious about, too, Chad, is I'd love to hear from the audience on any of these. Are you experiencing Zoom fatigue? In 2020, we got used to meeting on Zoom. It was great. This is what person-to-person or face-to-face meetings became. I hear from a lot of people who are saying, "I'm tired of Zoom." I was dealing with one of our sponsors' accounts payable department. She wanted to get on the phone with me to exchange some information I didn't want to send on email. I said, "Let's jump on a call."
Post-Pandemic Meeting: Zoom is much more formal than a phone call. With a phone call, it doesn't matter what you're wearing. You could pick up the phone and talk, but Zoom is a production.
She said, "Here are my times of availability over the next week. Let's put together a Zoom." I said, "No. Look at it. Zoom is much more formal than a phone call. With a phone call, it doesn't matter what you're wearing, I suppose. You could pick up the phone and you talk, but a Zoom is a production." People may be a little bit fatigued by it. I'm not sure. If they're not fatigued, then I'm thinking maybe people are getting anxious to get together with people again face-to-face. What do you think about that, Chad? What are you experiencing?
It's interesting. Personally, I redeployed some of my travel spend over to other things. What's going to be difficult for my little $2 million a year business and then I imagine $200 million a year businesses also is that this marketing in-person events, the budget got redeployed into sales or maybe a different marketing spend. That's not reallocated. I've got to spend with a couple of them. I have a $30,000 spend with one company and $18,000 with another. That's $48,000. That's pretty much my travel budget. At the end of the period, which is coming up, I either have to call that person and say, "I'm canceling the $30,000 or I'm canceling the $18,000 investment.” I have to find something in the middle because I like what that investment produced and yielded. It's going to be a tough decision. I'll probably do something in the middle. I'll say, "With an $18,000 company, I can afford $6,000. What can you sell me for $6,000?" $30,000? I can afford $15,000 now. I need to get back on the road, but I'm not going to go back on the road to the exact same level that I was at. There'll be a short-term spike, I suspect.
That makes sense. I don't know if you're going to outbound, but I'm going to outbound.
I was signed up to go and then I had something else come up.
We'll have to meet skiing some other time. I'm excited about it. In fact, I had dinner with friends for the first time. We were closed in a restaurant. We weren't wearing masks. It was amazing. Everything that you do in personal, not all of it translates on a screen. You can't pat somebody on the back. It's not the same.
There's one that I found that's a hybrid that's pretty neat. It's called ViewStub. It's not expensive. In fact, they have a way you can pay on ticket sales, so you don't even have to license the tech. It's got a Zoom built-in with an event bright bell pin, with capturing ticket sales. It's all in one. They've done remote rodeo attendance. You want to be in the first row of a rodeo. They've signed deals with Corona that are remote parties where people are all sharing a beer and having music played live online. These are 100,000 person events down to 10 person events. It scales something in between. That is going to come back, the virtual hybrids.
Postal.io also put together an events platform. They've teamed up with, for example, Second City. You can have your Zoom with Second City if you want. We heard about these earlier. In 2020, wine tastings.
When things change, we need to change.
Also, remote magician. We heard this guy Dan Chan. Let me share his address because he's nothing short of fabulous. Him and his son performed.
Virtual events, they do make sense on Zoom. In fact, roundtables are another one, a third great one. Let's get Jennifer in here. The insight is when we hear from the people in the audience or the group. That's one of the attendees. That's when we start to gain new insights. It's fascinating. Even that is a low-budget kind of way of creating content but also connecting with people in ways that leave everybody enriched.
I started traveling and meeting face-to-face with customers. Not every customer is ready for that. I did find through that you have to pay attention to the onsite cultural cues. It's different, not region to region, but from town to town. I was traveling one hour away from another customer. The cultures within those organizations and towns were very different. It was, first of all, very energizing. Being with people is such a different experience than what we've been experiencing in 2020. There's the element of the conversations on the sides of the conversations that cannot be replicated online. "I see this over there. Tell me a story about this. What is this about?" The green screen doesn't capture all that behind us. I'm thinking of ways how can I use this and utilize this experience to try to leverage into new meetings or at least take this experience and use that as a ground level foundation to open up into new meetings. I don't know. I'm brainstorming. My experience is great.
My friend plays in a one-man rock band and travels up until 2020 with 250 shows a year. As it tapered off, he had the exact same experience. Now it's picking back up. You could go to Colorado, where I'm from, to one place in Vail and then you go to Aspen, a completely different vibe and different conversations. You drive down the street to Denver, Littleton and you have something totally different. That's a good perspective that we need to think about. When you're traveling to France versus different countries in Europe, it's different. A lot of times, we think New York's a little different than California, which is different than Nevada, but we don't think Vail's different than Aspen, which is different than Littleton, Colorado. That's a unique perspective. Thank you, Jennifer.
Jennifer, I want to ask. Where are you meeting these people? Are you meeting them at their offices? Is it Starbucks or something like that?
It's been at their facilities. Their corporations have set up their protocols for meeting with people. For those companies that still are not opening up to visitors, I am looking at having luncheons outside, looking at having coffee outside. That's harder than having an online conversation with them.
What I'm curious about, Jennifer, is you're there visiting these offices. There's going to be this trend in offices that they're going to change their nature quite a bit. I'm probably overstating it, but I think that they're going to turn into entertainment places, meeting places. You'll have people working remotely, but they'll come into the office for meetings, come in for events or other things. Any sense of how the offices are changing? You're the first person I've spoken to who has been out visiting anybody at their office.
Post-Pandemic Meeting: Being with people is such a different experience than what we were experiencing in 2020. There's an element of the conversations that cannot be replicated online.
You can't see me nodding, but I'm nodding. Yes. I've walked into some organizations. It is 80% completely empty. I walk in. That is a work-from-home environment or work remote environment where the meetings that are happening when I get there, people come in. It's a destination meeting. It's not because they're in the office every day prepared to meet. It's the destination meeting. In other cases, if I'm working with a manufacturing facility, most of the people are there in the manufacturing aspect of it. They've been there and continue to be there. They've been seeing others in a different level. I'm still getting my footing in this.
We're coming out of it, kind of related and not. I was in the grocery store. For the first time, they said, "It's okay to take your mask off,” what a relief to get rid of this thing that is happening metaphorically everywhere. I think that we're going to see some big changes in probably the amount of office space that's leased, not in the commercial real estate space altogether but in how offices function at whether people are coming back or how they're coming back.
Jennifer, let me ask you this question. Let me first tee this up. I feel like I'm a newscaster over to Leonard. Leonard Knock says, "For what it's worth, I don't see Zoom fatigue. What I see is a paradigm shift where a huge portion of entrepreneurs and business people prefer to work at home for a large portion of their workweek,” which is what you experienced, the destination meeting location thing. What I'm wondering is years ago in your business, what percentage of the time did you sell in person and what percentage did you sell online and on the phone? How has that changed? What's the mix now?
I would say that 70% of things got accomplished face-to-face although there was a lot of that backup work that had to be done online and moved forward a little bit. Everything had to progress via online, telephone, Zoom.
It's 70/30 down to 0/100. Where do you think it settles back? Will it go back to 70/30 or might it be 50/50, 60/40 or something?
I don't see it going back to 70/30 for quite a while, but it's going to be harder to get some of these destination meetings. With everybody that needs to be involved, it's going to take more coordination. Where it would be that people were in the office, you could pull somebody in. You expected them to be there. Now, you can't expect that they're going to be there.
This is a great conversation. It makes you think. If I would go to the RingCentral office in Belmont and I've got a meeting with Eric Lewis and Faizah, Faizah goes, "We need the head of presales. Come on down." They're there within minutes. Nowadays, it's okay. If you're at home, the new way will be Zoom meetings like you're in your conference room. You say, "Let's bring Stu on remotely for that conversation." It's this hybrid model that's taken over. Jennifer, thanks for sharing. I appreciate it. There's one other conversation there. Stu, do you want to read that one about the terminology, the small letter meetings one?
We're in for an interesting period of time here where people and businesses readjust to these new realities.
I created a terminology called small letter meetings and large letter meetings. SLM, Small Letter Meetings, our initial meetings by phone or Zoom before I'll commit to a large letter meeting in person face-to-face. It's almost like, "First, let's meet virtually to get to know each other and then we decide if it makes sense to do in person." That's cool. I'm thinking of my FedEx days and Airborne Express. You knock on doors. We had a quota of six calls a day and four hours of meetings. What would we do? We'd knock on the door. We'd take a business card and we'd call that a one-hour meeting. It's how we did it. There's no way you could have four hours of meetings with six different people. In this world, you couldn't schedule six meetings. I had seventeen meetings in one day, Stu, on Zoom.
This is much more efficient. I'm not saying Zoom is dead. That's not at all. It's a permanent part of the landscape, as is work from home. As people are being asked to commute again or let's say, come back into the office, they're saying, "I don't like this four-hour commute. I didn't realize it before but I don't like this. I like walking downstairs."
ON24 posted something. I worked there years ago. They finally went public. It's one of those, "It's happening next year," and then the next year. They did go public. Their stocks are pretty big. They put out a report. The global report shows the use of webinars triples driving digital-first engagement across industries. They showed a 162% increase quadrupled 60 million attendees where they used to be 15 million attendees. Certainly, the reach has gotten way bigger and it's changed. I want to make sure before we start to wind down a little bit, Stu has made an offer. He's got an online course. Stu, I think you do live. Can you tell us a little bit about that? If you like what you're reading, you can go deep with Stu and learn how to get a meeting with anybody.
We have this online course. It's called How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. It's a six-week course. It's a brand-new course. I'll tell you what's interesting. There's all this video content from the two books, from How to Get a Meeting with Anyone and Get The Meeting! The exciting part is there's also weekly group coaching happening every Friday. There's this group dynamic going on there. Also, there's something that I call the assignment. Everybody is required to create their content campaigns. If they're sending something physical, produce them and test them during the course of the class. That's when things get interesting. During the group coaching sessions, everyone's saying, "What are you doing? What a great idea. Where did you do this?"
As people progress through the course, they're saying, "I got my first callback. I got my first meeting. Here's how it happened and this is what I used." Everyone gets very excited. The amazing thing is one of the people use their student assignments to score a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America thinking, "How did you pull that off? That was a nice job." Not only that but ten other members of the C-suite. This was all to arrange a meeting for his CEO of their new startup. That's the atmosphere of it. People go through this great transition from saying, "I'm not sure if I should do this. I'm not so creative. I'm not a cartoonist." You don't have to be a cartoonist at all. "I'm not that audacious or that outrageous." They go through this transformation of, "This works. Who do I want to go after?" It's like a new superpower. It's called How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. You can join it on HowToGetAMeeting.com. I have a discount code for your folks, Chad. It's CHAD100. If you use that, you can take $100 off the course.
It's interesting because I'm doing the AI for Sales Podcast and Living A Better Story. I'm reaching out through email and social. I'm starting to get questions of, "Who have you had on the show before me? I'm the CEO of such and such company." My response is, "Here, go look at the links. Here are some pretty prominent people." I haven't necessarily had the CEO of Bank America on the show. Everybody should be thinking about what would happen if I could get a meeting with 50 people in America or the world that I normally couldn't get a meeting with? How does that change your life?
One deal at $1 million is better than 100 deals at $100. It will hunt with these kinds of techniques. It's interesting. I'll talk a little bit about AI for a minute in this motion. You'll appreciate this. I don't think we've talked about this. This is our form of dart-throwing as opposed to shotgun hunting. It's an AI. We bought this company's code at the end of 2020. What it does is here are the 100 people I want to get a meeting with. Instead of calling, emailing and doing the things that everybody else does, we identify who in your network, both first and second-degree connections know those 100 people. We email them.
Post-Pandemic Meeting: Zoom is a permanent part of the landscape, as is work from home.
Imagine, Stu, if you got an email from me that said, "I see you're connected to the CEO of Bank of America. How well do you know that person?" You know me. You know the B of A guy. Here's why I'm trying to reach him. It's a sentence about why I'm trying to reach him. It's more of, "I know you, you know him. Would you please help?" We're seeing 20, 30 intros a month go out. Not everybody accepts it. The B of A person still has the authority to say, "Yes, Stu. I know you, but I'm busy." My likelihood, according to a Salesforce.com report years ago, is you're 181 times more likely to win a deal if someone makes a warm introduction then going through the normal cold calling list. I have to expect the same thing holds true. If you go in through the creative sword open, box open, I have to believe not the meeting accept rates but your close rates are much higher as well.
Those personal connections are the thing. People buy from those that they know, like and trust. That trust and know portion is greatly boosted. If someone says, "Would you talk to Chad? We work with them. I think you get along. You should be working together."
You're coming in at a trust level, but normally, you come into a call. Think of this call. If you don't know me or Stu, it took the first 5 to 10 minutes to go, "Do I trust these guys yet? He's got a book picture on his wall. That looks cool. That interaction sounded good," but it took a while to get there. If you were invited to this call by somebody that you know, then you're like, "I trust that person and therefore I think this call is going to be interesting." I'm going to make another. You've made me think about this. I hadn't thought about it ahead of time, the BDR.ai technology that we've launched. It's a LinkedIn tool that automates sequences. We call it Always On Prospecting. If you're going to pick your top 100 accounts, you got to go with How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. There's not a lot of creative ways to go in and get a meeting with anyone.
There might be another list of, "I got to go reach these 10,000. I'm not going to spend $500 to send a sword to all 10,000." That's where you would use LinkedIn automation. It's 29% reply rate. We're seeing 50% positive reply rates. We have a new affiliate program. It's half price. Typically, customers sign up at $500 a month. This is going to give you the ability to sign up at $250 a month as an affiliate for ScaleX/BDR.ai. When you refer other companies to us, you also can earn a commission on that as well. That's a cool offer. Final thoughts on what did we learn. Stu, why don't you go first and summarize? What were your biggest takeaways from the call? I'll wrap up as well.
The biggest takeaway is that we're in an exciting time. There were exciting times, but we're in another one where things are changing. When things change, we need to change. We kept hearing the word pivot in 2020, but we need to change with them. It's one thing that never changes. Things always change. Here we go. People are coming back to the office. The office looks totally different. Thank you, Jennifer, for describing that. That's pretty crazy. It's 80% empty, but we're seeing a whole redefinition of office, work, getting meetings and ultimately selling. If we track it, if we stay ahead of it, then we're going to have a great time. Those who do will have a great time with it. Those who are disrupted and don't know what to do about it are not. We're in for an interesting period of time here where people and businesses readjust to these new realities.
I want to thank Leonard for stepping up. The fact that he saw, has your books, has leveraged this and it works for him, that's a true testament like the weed theory book that you're putting out. When things work and people like what's working, then they're going to tell their friends. That's the weeds concept. I'm excited to read that book. Jennifer, that's so intriguing to me, what you've experienced in a short period of time that not many of the rest of us have yet. I thank you for sharing as well. Hopefully, everybody's gotten some business value out of this. Thank you for investing your time. Stu, thanks for coming up with the idea to get together. It's always a real blast to have a conversation with you.
Thanks, Chad. What a pleasure. This is great.
Everybody, thank you for joining. We'll catch you on the next one. When is your next six-week course starting so people can sign up?
It's online. It starts. You jump in and start. Use that code.
Everybody, thanks for joining. Make it a great rest of your week.
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About Stu Heinecke
Stu Heinecke is a hall-of-fame nominated marketer, a Wall Street Journal cartoonist, best selling business author, and founder of Cartoonists.org, a group of prominent cartoonists from around the world who donate their art to help charities raise funds. The American Marketing Association just recognized him as “the father of Contact Marketing,” a term coined in his highly successful book, “How to Get a Meeting with Anyone”. Stu is a noted speaker and furnishes agency, training, and consulting support for clients all over the world, from his base on a beautiful island in the Pacific Northwest. He also conducts island strategy sessions aimed to produce rapid growth of client enterprises.
Stu Heinecke’s cartoons are seen by 2.1 million readers when they appear in The Wall Street Journal, but their greatest effect is seen in the results they achieve in marketing campaigns, with a long track record of direct response controls and Contact Marketing campaigns reaching as high as 100% response rates.
Stu took the business world by storm with his original book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. Filled with practical advice, tips, and insights, this is the book that started the Contact Marketing furor, helping sales teams, startups – even CEOs – change their results by opening doors to mega-important prospects, accounts, and contacts. Inside you’ll find 20 categories of Contact Marketing campaigns to help you explore your scale.
