Season 2, Episode 41: Stu Heinecke

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Jack Hubbard: So I mentioned in the introduction, my friend Brynne Tillman said, you've got to interview Stu Heideck for your show. So I reached out to Stu, and he sent me this updated edition about how to get a meeting with anyone. And we're going to talk about this today. It is an absolutely fascinating book. Stu so great to have you on the show.

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Stu Heinecke: Jack, I'm honored to join you. Thank you so much for having me on.

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Jack Hubbard: Well, this is so fun. And you are the final program of Year 2. We're going to take this rest of summer and kind of. Relax a little bit and start over. But I couldn't think of a better person to end the year with than you. It's absolutely an amazing book, and we're going to take a dive into this today. But if you all look behind, Stu.

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Jack Hubbard: he's got all of his. A lot of his cartoons. Probably many of them have won awards, and that's how you might know Stu Heinecke , because Stu is a Wall Street Journal cartoonist, a bestselling author. And so before we get into the meat of the book. Let's just talk a little bit about your history Stu, and and your work with the Wall Street Journal and others.

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Stu Heinecke: Sure. Well, it's interesting, because.

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Stu Heinecke: oddly enough, LinkedIn says it's my 13th anniversary of joining the Wall Street Journal, and so I'm getting a lot of congratulatory messages on LinkedIn. But the truth of it actually is, the Wall Street Journal has been a client on the circulation side, but otherwise, I am one of their cartoonists. But I do that through a syndicate. Actually.

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Stu Heinecke: So, it's really 13. It's more than 13 years. But you know, it's all those years with the Syndicate. Actually, not the Wall Street Journal. But it's what a blast to be able to pop cartoons out that appear in the Journal. It's an amazing thing to get to do.

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Jack Hubbard: Take us back to your youth. You know this just doesn't. You? Didn't wake up one day, and you're 42 years old, and you say? Geez! I think I'll do some cartoons. This had to have been in your DNA for a long time.

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Stu Heinecke: Yes, I have kind of an I don't know if it's an embarrassing story. But you know, as a as a little kid, my brothers and I used to sneak playboys out of our father's dresser doors, and so you know.

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Stu Heinecke: Playboy was many things, but it certainly had great cartoonists in it, including Gahan Wilson and Eldon Dedini, but others as well. Mr. Hefner went out and recruited some of the best cartoonists in the world. So as we were going through the of course, we were reading the articles. That's a given in the magazines. But I'm looking at the cartoons, saying, Wow! Who are these guys? How do they do this? And and

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Stu Heinecke: that really ignited it for me? I love to draw, anyway. But, boy, look what they did with these drawings. These weren't just drawings. They were great drawings, actually just incredible art. But these drawings were conceptual in that. You'd laugh when it would cause that reaction. If you go to a museum, you don't laugh at most of the things it's hard to make anything

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Stu Heinecke: funny enough to laugh at. So I was. That was the start, and it went on all the way through to starting my 1st agency, and I recruited a lot of my heroes of cartooning. So those same cartoonists, Gahan Wilson, Eldon, Dedini, and then a bunch of them from the New Yorker, became

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Stu Heinecke: part of my agency group, and also my mentor as a cartoonist. It was an extraordinary thing.

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Jack Hubbard: Well, and it's so interesting how so many people

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Jack Hubbard: are cartoonists, and they do a great job with that, but can't write, and a lot of writers couldn't draw a stick figure if they were forced to do it. But you've seen to merge these 2 together. You have 2 bestselling books. How to grow your business like a weed, and how to get a meeting with anyone. And we're going to talk about the new book, which is really a revision of the of the second book.

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Jack Hubbard: But I'm curious. What was it in your in your history where you said you know what I got to put some stuff down on paper. I got to write a book. What was the inspiration.

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Stu Heinecke: Well,

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Stu Heinecke: I have to start that by telling you a story. I just mentioned my 1st agency. Well, I wanted to create.

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Stu Heinecke: I wanted to create direct mail campaigns for the big magazine publishers. My education is in marketing, but then, of course, my passion, you know about the passion now, but it was was cartooning, and I thought, look, I was a member of the Cartoonist guild. They shared a lot of information about cartoons. One of the things that they did that changed my life is, they shared an article

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Stu Heinecke: from folio magazine which was discussing the results of readership surveys by magazines and newspapers, that what they were finding was that cartoons are almost always the best read and remembered parts of the publications.

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Stu Heinecke: and and so I thought those need to be mixed together. And so that's what I did. I pulled the 2 together and started creating direct mail with with cartoons and personalization. And so my entrance to

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Stu Heinecke: to contact marketing was that I created. I was lucky enough to get 2 assignments to create test campaigns, one for rolling stone, the other for bon appetit.

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Stu Heinecke: And so in that world you create a test campaign, and then it goes up against their their best campaign. The best thing they've ever put in the mail. That's their control group or their control just for short. And it went out and it beat the controls for those 2 magazines. So the 1st 2 times that I even created campaigns in this way. It was like a rookie walking onto the baseball field and hitting a grand slam.

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Stu Heinecke: and so I brought it out to the rest of the publishing industry by putting out a little contact. I didn't even know what to call it a contact campaign. It went to about 2 dozen people. It was a just a print, an 8 by 10 print with a note saying, This is the device I just used

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Stu Heinecke: to beat the controls for rolling stone and bona petit. And I think we should put this to the test for your titles. And I ended up getting a hundred percent response rate to that campaign, and not only that, they all responded, but they all agreed to meet, and and then they all became clients. So from one campaign that I spent about a hundred dollars on.

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Stu Heinecke: I got 100% penetration in a market, and almost overnight I had to go to New York to to meet with them, but almost overnight. And that was what led me to. I just thought that was extraordinary. What's everyone else doing to get meetings, and that led to writing the book that's over my shoulder, the one that we're talking about how to get a meeting with anyone.

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Stu Heinecke: There are just so many amazing, creative, audacious.

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Stu Heinecke: I just wildly imaginative things that people have done to get meetings, and I got to sort of amalgamate all of it into one book, and that was what I just thought. I've got to do this. I've got to write a book about this. This stuff is amazing. We're not supposed to get 100% response rate to anything. And I was getting I was, I got that 100% response rate to my 1st contact campaign. And and so then the exploration of what everyone else was doing is what really lit it up.

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Jack Hubbard: Well, I gotta dive into the book, but I but you mentioned stories. I'm sure there are some just a couple, and they're in the book a couple of just amazing stories of what people have done to go out of their way to be creative, to get meetings. Talk about a couple of them. Stu. They're fabulous.

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Stu Heinecke: Well, well, there's 1. There are a bunch of favorites, but one of them involved

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Stu Heinecke: a sales Rep, who 1st for a software company who was calling on a company that I can't. I'm not. I've promised not to identify who they are publicly. But if you ever watched the movie Forrest, Comp. You remember a certain fruit company that reference to a certain fruit company? That's the that's the

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Stu Heinecke: the company we're talking about. So one of the biggest companies in the world. And anyway, the engineer, the salesman, was calling on the engineers at the Fruit Company, and they loved his solution, and they said, Look, the next step is, you got to talk to purchasing? We don't control any budgets. So okay, great. Well, my gosh, I've got a big commission coming here. So they went and reached out to the

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Stu Heinecke: purchasing department. But they wouldn't talk to him. They didn't respond to him at all, and so they thought, fine. I'll go around you. I will go to the CEO. And and well, this was the one that this at the time this was probably the most famous CEO in the world

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Stu Heinecke: not going to be easy to reach him, and he discovered that. So he's sending faxes and letters, and leaving messages and all manner of trying to get a hold of this CEO, and nothing was working. So

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Stu Heinecke: one day this plywood box shows up at the front counter with air holes drilled into the into the box.

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Stu Heinecke: and a handwritten note saying, Dear, I can't shouldn't say his name. But, dear Blank, you know I have the software solution. I've been calling on your engineering department. They love it that they told me to talk to purchasing. They won't talk to me, so I've been trying everything I could think of to reach you, and nothing has worked. So this is my final attempt. That's probably a good part of it. But just it's a handwritten note, and he's saying, This is my final attempt.

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Stu Heinecke: Okay, I better pay attention to this one. So he said, if you would open the box carefully and inside the box is a pigeon, and on the pigeon's leg is a capsule, and in the capsule a little slip of paper, and if you'll take that little slip of paper and write the name of your favorite restaurant a date and a time. Put it back in the capsule and

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Stu Heinecke: release the pigeon. I'll meet you there, and obviously I wouldn't be telling this story if the pigeon didn't come back. So he came back, and he or she I don't know. But anyway, the pigeon came back.

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Stu Heinecke: and there was the name of a restaurant, a date, and the Times crawled on a little piece of paper, and so they met, and he walked out with a $250,000 deal.

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Stu Heinecke: So that's you know. Think about the audacity of that, and think about how, when we reach out to people who are very important to us, if we could reach them, if they could become our clients and they ignore it.

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Stu Heinecke: There's some good reasons why they ignore that, but they ignore it, and they ignore it, and they ignore it. And everywhere you turn, you're just being ignored. Most people will give up. But but contact marketers that's the term that I

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Stu Heinecke: I used in the book. Contact marketers don't give up

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Stu Heinecke: so easily because he knew that what he knew was there was. There was just a resistance to connecting with someone he didn't know the CEO on behalf of the CEO. And so that's fine. He didn't know who I sales. Rep is probably thinking he doesn't know who I am, but I have a solution that's going to help his company, and the engineers

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Stu Heinecke: in his company already know about it. They're ready to implement it. This needs to happen. And so it's sort of this unreasonable confidence and perseverance that you see, maybe in the movies

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Stu Heinecke: that you have to adopt in contact marketing. So that's 1 there are lots of them. I don't know. Do you want me to share another or.

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Jack Hubbard: You just got to go get the book. There's so many amazing stories in this book about creativity, thinking outside the box, etc, etc, you should really think about that. So I'll tell you a quick story. So, as you know, I only work in banking. And so I had been talking to this bank president for a while, and suddenly she ghosted me, and I've known them

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Jack Hubbard: person for a long period of time, and I thought, well, that's odd. And so I went to chat, Gpt. And I plugged in all the data that we had been talking about over several conversations, and I said, write me a 4 paragraph poem.

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Jack Hubbard: that you that I can send to this bank president to see if we can reactivate. And within 20Â min after receiving the email, she called me back. Here's my point.

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Jack Hubbard: In 2016 you wrote this book of

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Jack Hubbard: Hang on. You wrote this book

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Jack Hubbard: before AI started, but you've updated it now with AI. So talk about getting meetings in the age of AI, and how you've seen some changes happen from 2016 to 2025.

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Stu Heinecke: Sure. Yeah, thank you. That's a that's a great question. When when how to get a meeting with anyone came out in 2016, as you pointed out, things were very different. There was no work from home. Well, there was work from home, but not not as widespread

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Stu Heinecke: as now. There was no zoom. People worked in in their offices, and it was very easy to find them pretty easy to find them, anyway. Just figure out which which office they're in and send. If you wanted to send something physical, it's not always about that. But if you wanted to send something physical, it was pretty pretty easy to find them work from home complicated that because

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Stu Heinecke: now well, they might be, they may still be reporting into the office, or they may not, and if they're not.

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Stu Heinecke: you can pretty much. You can find. You can find people's addresses, and that's that there are search tools on the Internet to help you do that. But if you send something business, something that is business oriented to someone's house, then they feel stalked. It feels creepy. It feels like they've been

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Stu Heinecke: like their private privacy really has been invaded. But that's where they are. That's now where they're running their perfection. So what do you do? Well, so rules about that change. It's just what, how do you handle that? And and then, because we were working from home and we weren't in the office, and I think it's that. But

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Stu Heinecke: I guess it's probably that a lot of the people who were who were well, certainly scammers. But spammers really increased the volume of spam, and so I don't know about you. But I barely ever answer my phone anymore. I have Caller Id, but you can see that I don't know who this is, and a lot of times it's just it's just junk. It's just absolute junk. It's or scams

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Stu Heinecke: and and it just it'll happen all day long. And so it was like, where did they get my cell phone number out? You know it's out there, I guess. But so, peak, spam, I would say, is happening. And now there's also now Rto. Or return to office is a new term, and and

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Stu Heinecke: I guess, trend so where do you again? If you're going to send something to someone, where do you send it? How do you handle that? And then, finally, AI has has just exploded on the scene everywhere, in every industry. And I think AI is miraculous. Actually, I don't. A lot of people are afraid of it. I think it's incredible

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Stu Heinecke: the things that it allows us to do now, and the things that it will allow us to do. They're just amazing, like the poem that you just talked about beautiful and Chatgpt probably did a great job of it. So we didn't have that before. And that's what a wonderful thing to be able to just sit down, have it, and it probably popped it out, you said 20Â min later. But that's you must have revised it a few times, because it'll do it in, you know, under 30 seconds.

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Stu Heinecke: And suddenly you have something that you can use or you can modify. That's amazing. But AI is also helping us identify things like buyer intent signals and trigger events in real time. And certainly we can find people who fit our Icp or ideal customer profile. We can do things to

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Stu Heinecke: give a boost to our let's say a local boost to our brands, if that's necessary. In part of our outreach.

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Stu Heinecke: There are just a lot of things that AI is helping us do that weren't part of the landscape in 2016. So I think AI is amazing. And

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Stu Heinecke: again, it doesn't. I'm not frightened by it. I'm really excited by it. I want to replicate myself as an AI. So I think it's a wonderful thing, but I think one of the things that drove me to to update the book. That's a lot already. Actually. But one of the factors was

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Stu Heinecke: as much as as AI becomes more and more a force of of

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Stu Heinecke: well in what we do in all professions.

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Stu Heinecke: but certainly in the sales profession. And as things become more automated, and let's say, artificial.

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Stu Heinecke: I think that there will be a clamoring for things that that only a human can do. And and so those things will become highly highly valued, and I think cartooning is one of those. I don't mean to say that

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Stu Heinecke: that cartooning is the only way. Obviously I'm a cartoonist, so I'll use cartoons to reach out to people. But I think that cartooning is one of those things that it certainly is standing up so far as something that AI can't produce. It tries it just doesn't come up with to create something that's funny, and to create a

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Stu Heinecke: you have to work as a cartoonist. You have to work as both a writer and an artist. So just to create a style and a voice is not an easy thing to do, and so so far that's not something AI can do. So sending a cartoon.

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Stu Heinecke: and then a note with it under my signature. That's the same signature that's in the cartoon is a pretty impactful thing. And those kinds of things, those things that stand out as being very human are very important, because ultimately, if we're selling.

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Stu Heinecke: we have to create human to human connection. So that's that really is what drove writing this new update.

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Jack Hubbard: Well, it's it's so interesting that you talk about this, because in the book one of the things you discuss is contact marketing our contact campaigns.

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Jack Hubbard: I'm curious. Let me start that again. I'll edit that out.

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Jack Hubbard: So

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Jack Hubbard: you talk about contact campaigns. How are they different stu than traditional marketing that a lot of us understand?

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Stu Heinecke: Sure. Well, one thing is that it's not mass marketing at all we're going to in my book. I talk about developing a top 100 list. But really I would say there are 10 people that if you could connect with them, and they became your clients or your partner, your strategic partners or your mentors even.

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Stu Heinecke: But there are 10 people out there who can absolutely change the scale and and quality of your life.

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Stu Heinecke: So so how do you reach these people? And so that's the question that contact marketing answers. But again, it's focused on these people that could be as few as I mean, I've heard of campaigns just to one person, so they're very, very tightly

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Stu Heinecke: personalized approaches. They're often audacious, very, very clever, often very, very clever, but they're meant to to reach out to these people these Vip prospects and obviously break through to them, but break through them to them in a way that has the person on the other end, saying instead of Well, you're obviously you're interrupting them.

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Stu Heinecke: But so, instead of saying, Who's this? They're saying, Oh, my God! Who is this, I got to beat this person. So what is it that flips that switch, or rather should say contact marketing seeks to flip that switch in the people that we're reaching out to, so that we can connect with them and make make those differences in our lives happen.

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Jack Hubbard: Well, it sounds expensive to me which gets me to a point

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Jack Hubbard: you in your in one of the chapters you talk about several things that cost a certain amount of money, and then there are other things that you say you can do them for free or for very little talk about the expense and of of a typical contact campaign.

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Stu Heinecke: Well, that's a that's a really interesting point that you raise. Because.

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Stu Heinecke: yes, you can spend a lot per piece or per effort in a contact campaign. Dan Waldschmidt, for example, a turnaround specialist and sales blogger, well-known sales blogger sends swords and the cost of a thousand dollars. The Ceos of companies that are in trouble cost of a thousand dollars a piece every time he does that.

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Stu Heinecke: But he's getting an almost 100% response rate. And when that means that they're taking his call, they don't all do business with him, but when he's a turnaround specialist, so when he, when he gets an engagement. It's worth a million dollars and up

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Stu Heinecke: his. I don't know what his roi is, but I know it's high, and and so you have to wonder. Well, he spent a thousand dollars to reach the CEO, and then got a million dollar assignment from it. The numbers are just. I guess I'll just say the numbers are different. I don't know that I would call it expensive. Well, $1,000 per effort is expensive.

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Stu Heinecke: but but I guess the big compensating factor is that whatever it is, you're spending per person in your outreach, you're not sending it to a mass audience. So I would say that traditional marketing in general is much more expensive. Not not email.

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Stu Heinecke: email is really quite cheap, but but just other, other, more traditional methods of mass marketing. Because you're reaching masses.

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Stu Heinecke: It's just it's much more expensive. But these can come, as you've rightly said, that they can come all the way down to things that cost almost nothing. So one of those I just mentioned email, email, we have computers, we have Internet connections. We have accounts. So we're spending a little bit just to have email connectivity. But sending an email doesn't cost anything really incrementally. It doesn't cost anything. So

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Stu Heinecke: that's also why it's so crowded as a channel and and not not easy to stand out in. But Mark Hunter shared with me a couple of tips that I've taken to heart and I use, and and I think it makes a lot of sense. One of those is to watch the the timing of the of the.

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Stu Heinecke: But when you send the email, so if you're reaching out to a CEO. Try sending it to them either Saturday morning or Sunday evening. So Saturday morning before early Saturday morning, before they're starting their their weekend. It's a great time to reach out to some of these very important people. And likewise Sunday evening they're back at their desk. They're saying, Okay, what's ahead?

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Stu Heinecke: What's what's coming up in the week ahead? What do I need to pay attention to what's they're they're they're getting organized and and set to go. And and so that was a great tip by mark. Also cut another tip about

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Stu Heinecke: Well, just short copy, I guess, is maybe the best way to put it so his name will come back to me. But another author friend was telling me that he had sent out an email to Mark Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.

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Stu Heinecke: And he said, I like to keep my email messages under 12 words. Who writes? Who among us writes emails that are 12 words or less. It's hard to do, actually. But but so he sent this note to Mark pretty pretty easy to guess what his email address was. So he sent it to Mark and said, Mark, we do this. I don't know what it was, but we do. This

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Stu Heinecke: is is that is, that of interest, and he said, he got a reply back within 30 seconds.

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Stu Heinecke: I thought, That's okay. That's just too mischievous for me to resist. So I got to try it. And and I sure enough, I did the same thing. And yes, he responded, within 30 seconds I got a response back. So so that's that's I mean, those are that's interesting uses of email. And and they are

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Stu Heinecke: contrary. They are contrarian uses of email. It's not sending page long or pages long and endless sequences of emails with the slugs at the bottom, saying, I'm subscribed here and all. It's just an email from one person to another, saying very simply, this is what we do very, very quickly. This is what we do is out of interest. Would that be useful? And I think just being able to write, or.

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Stu Heinecke: let's say, disciplining yourself to confine your email to 12 words or less, says something nonverbally as well. It says, I respect your time, and I'll take the very, very least amount of it that I can to communicate with you, and I think that they appreciate that as well.

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Stu Heinecke: So, but.

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Jack Hubbard: I'm glad I'm really glad you brought. I'm sorry to interrupt.

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Jack Hubbard: Glad you brought up time, because one of the one of the chapters you talk about the the time of the Vip and the CEO as you've been discussing, and you talk about big boards, and how big boards can be used to grab attention and to help you get appointments. What's a big board.

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Stu Heinecke: Let me reach behind myself here. Hello!

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Stu Heinecke: So this.

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Stu Heinecke: That's a big board. So it's an it's a an 18 by 24 inch quarter inch thick foam core board, and on one side is a cartoon about about the they're always about the recipient.

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Stu Heinecke: So this one for for those listening, this one shows 2 women having coffee. One of them is telling her friend making a statement, and she's saying, I'm going to. Actually, I'm going to personalize it because I have to put somebody's name into it, and and also another part of it I'll personalize. So I sent one of these to Mark Cuban.

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Stu Heinecke: and so she's telling her friend. Mark Cuban says you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their Mavs tickets. I tend to agree.

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Stu Heinecke: And of course Mark did as well. It's framed. It's up on his wall in his office.

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Stu Heinecke: And so that's I love these because they're they're you know. They're well, they're substantial, too. I mean, that's that's actually indoor signage material and and and the cartoon is about about Mark in this case, but about the recipient, and it's not something they're going to throw away. They're not gonna it's too big to file away as well. And and that goes out in a in this cardboard packaging, and it's it's a it's a big event when it shows up. That's pretty cool. But

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Stu Heinecke: I have another sort of an alternative to that.

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Stu Heinecke: This

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Stu Heinecke: is also one of those contact devices. So here we're using something I'm calling. It's a patent pending development. It's called the Heinek window. And so it's just a square window in the face of a Fedex envelope in this case, but it could be in any any envelope sent through the mail whatever. And and so the point is that you you see a crop of the cartoon.

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Stu Heinecke: but you have to pull it out to get the rest of the cartoon, and it almost to me when I pull it out. It looks like a magic trick. Oh, there's a whole cartoon there. But the point there is again, we know that

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Stu Heinecke: cartoons are the best read and remembered parts of magazines and newspapers. I've seen it attract a lot of attention to mailings and other devices. So here we're saying, well, you can see there's a cartoon here, but if you want to get the payoff you've got to open it up now and get inside. And I like that like the whole dynamic of that. And that costs

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Stu Heinecke: 10 bucks a piece to do. That's just shipping. It's the price of shipping a free Fedex envelope because Fedex provides them for free. So it's just putting some things that we printed from our our desktop laser printers into this, and and the only cost is

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Stu Heinecke: $10 to to Fedex to deliver it.

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Jack Hubbard: Well, we got to talk before the end of the program about your mastermind group and how you help clients. But we're talking with Stu Heinek today about his amazing book. Second edition, how to get a meeting with anyone. And one of the things you talked about was this top 100 list. And really in the book, you say, really, it's a top 10 list, but it's dynamic.

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Jack Hubbard: Where do I find them? I'm a commercial banker. Where do I find my top? 100.

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Stu Heinecke: Well as a commercial banker. I'm going to make a few assumptions that your Icp. Probably I'm going to guess at the Icp. But you're probably reaching out to company owners, I would think Ceos or

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Stu Heinecke: or company owners. They're busy. These are the perfect people to reach out to, too, by the way. But but so then, and you probably, or you might specialize within an industry. So obviously, you're going to pare it down that way. But AI can help you find these these people pretty easily

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Stu Heinecke: there, there and there. Well, and if you use, let's say seamless, that's 1 1 of many. But seamless or or clay, or well, let's say even zoom info zoom info has been around. It's it was around before AI proliferated. But but all of these now have AI, it's just part of the part of the

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Stu Heinecke: part of the platform, just like when we when we use Google right now and or Bing, and you you ask a question. It'll give you an AI answer. It'll actually give you a composed answer and then give you the search results. So AI is being infused into everything, and I think it makes it easier than ever just to plug in at least those elements of

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Stu Heinecke: of of what? What comprises your Icp or your ideal customer profile and then there are other. Well, I've well, okay, then, then I mentioned buyer intent signals and

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Stu Heinecke: and so you can. Those are actually present in zoom info and and seamless, and I think clay as well.

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Stu Heinecke: So they're just tools out there that'll help you actually put this together really quickly. And and I think actually, in the future we'll have AI

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Stu Heinecke: hosts of these of these sites, let's say Zoom info, or Hubspot, or seamless, and you'll just ask it. These are my criteria. And, by the way, also, I'm looking for people who haven't, who've been on the job 6 months or less. That's a trigger event, and and it'll just find it for you in seconds. And there it is. So it's

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Stu Heinecke: AI is making this very, very simple, but it but it really, I would suggest using some of those services. I mean, I use seamless a lot. I was an early investor in it. So I'm kind of partial to it. But but there are a lot of really really interesting tools to help you find those people fast.

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Jack Hubbard: Well, I also have to put a plug in here for one of our sponsors. Relpro, who does an amazing job of that in banking. And here's another tool stu that was around when you wrote the 1st book.

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Jack Hubbard: But boy has it exploded, and that's linkedin over a billion people on the planet now are on Linkedin. I'm curious as I was reading your book, and there's there's details about Linkedin in the book. I'm curious how Linkedin starts to figure into contact campaigns.

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Stu Heinecke: Well, I think Linkedin is an interesting platform, and as it gets more and more crowded, some of it, I think, starts to break down.

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Stu Heinecke: It's still easy enough to reach people. If you want to reach an author, you just actually, I guess really, you should just know something about the person before you reach out, and that's true whether you're doing it through Linkedin or in any other, any other channel. So it's a channel, and and if you if you post

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Stu Heinecke: content. I mean that that it's really up to reward that. So if you talk a lot of and share insights and and experiences, and you'll get a following pretty quickly

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Stu Heinecke: if you just reach out to people to pitch them. It's probably not a good idea, and I don't. I get a lot of. They're probably automated Dms, now that say, Hey, listen. I noticed we share a lot of people in common in our like. We know a lot of people in common. And and I thought you looked interesting, and it's all just generic junk like you haven't even done the least bit of

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Stu Heinecke: research to say, Hey, I noticed your book just came out. I just bought a copy of it. Just wanted to say I love it. I would. I would connect with people like that all day long.

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Stu Heinecke: But anyone who sends one of those, I mean, I'm much more apt to connect with someone who sends no message as opposed to those canned generic messages that are that are coming out over Dms. It's like any other anything else. People are always there, being lazy and ruining it for everyone else. But

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Stu Heinecke: but it's still quite useful. It's a great way to to find people to find the people you're looking for. People find you. It's a really great way for people to find you, and you wouldn't have known about them otherwise. And so yeah, I would say, indispensable.

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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, I want to do 2 lightning round questions with you. One, you talk about flip moments. What's a flip moment.

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Stu Heinecke: Well, it's just my, it's my term for it. And it's just what is it that causes someone to go from from one

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Stu Heinecke: one position to another. That's probably the simplest way to put it. But in sales I ask new clients, I ask them all the time, what's what is it that causes the flip moment that we're

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Stu Heinecke: the the prospect goes from. I don't know. I don't need this. I don't want to talk to you. I don't have time.

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Stu Heinecke: This doesn't make sense, and any of that to Oh, my God, really, that's what you do. It is like flipping a switch like flipping a light switch. And I think that can happen in a lot of it's not just in sales. Just everywhere we have.

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Stu Heinecke: We all take positions and we change them over time, and occasionally we change them really quickly. And I think those are. That's what I call flip moments. Just what is it that causes? I guess it's just a sort of a quick burst of persuasion that causes someone to change their position on something.

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Jack Hubbard: Here's another person you need to persuade in our lightning round, and that's gatekeepers. You talk about them.

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Stu Heinecke: Yeah.

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Jack Hubbard: Throughout the book, talk a little bit about working effectively, or, as I like to call it, collaborating with gatekeepers because they're a bridge, not a barrier. If you do this right.

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Stu Heinecke: Yeah, you know, I used to get this question a lot. Not that question, but that's a great question. But

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Stu Heinecke: but just how do I circumvent the gatekeeper I was like. No, you don't do that not at all. Actually, I mean, you should be glad that there are gate. What the people that you call gatekeepers. Others will call gatekeepers, I should say, if we're talking about executive assistance, they're usually, and let's say it's the executive assistant to the CEO of the company.

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Stu Heinecke: I will bet you that's 1 of the sharpest people in the organization that assistant, and, in fact, look what they're doing. They're reporting to the CEO just like the rest of the C-suite is. So they're I mean in the book I call them, either. Well, I call them both vps of access and talent scouts, because that's really what they are.

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Stu Heinecke: They, you know. We know that they protect their executives. Time. They need to do that. That's part of their job. So they're going to screen out things that they that seem irrelevant and just it's totally understandable. But at the same time they're listening. And they're watching for things. They realize that they're in a unique position because some things just come in over the

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Stu Heinecke: we'll call it over the transom, over through the phone line, whatever it is, but they come in directly to the CEO's office, and no one else in the company has been contacted about it or sees it. So they realize they're also a 1st point of contact for a lot of things that the company and the CEO really should know about. And so they're also. That's why I call them talent scouts. Because I think you're

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Stu Heinecke: I think we're we're auditioning a bit. When we do this. I mean? Are we jerks when we call in? Why, then, why would you? Why would you get the job, or why would you get any further? And I'm not calling. Everyone jerks. I'm just saying if that's how we, if that's how you would act, then that's their job. Get rid of that. That's not going to be useful, but they are looking for signal in the middle of the noise as well, and and they're very adept at identifying signal. And you need you just need to be

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Stu Heinecke: ready to help them find that signal, or to present the signal to them. And when you do that everything changes. They're very, very helpful. Now, I'm always relieved when someone has an executive assistant, because I know then something. I think they might be some of the most efficient people in the companies as well, because they actually get things done. They'll make sure that their executive

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Stu Heinecke: knows that you called and why you called, or when I send the big boards. I often use a little bit of a script, and my clients do as well. But just Hi! I'm Stu Heineck, and of course you don't know me, but I'm 1 of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists and and I sent a print of one of my cartoons.

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Stu Heinecke: or I'm sending a print of one of my cartoons, and it's about your boss

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Stu Heinecke: that usually changes the conversation pretty quickly. They're going. What? Really? And oh, that's interesting. And yeah. So would you mind if I send you an email? Just so I'll give you my contact details. And I'll you know I'll describe this again to you. But of course I want it to be a surprise to your boss. Yeah, no, no. Here's my email address, and then often I'll send them a card in the mail, as well to thank their own personalized cartoon.

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Stu Heinecke: But and then I send them the Fedex tracking information. And so by the time it shows up they're quarterbacking your campaign for you, and like the campaign wouldn't be as effective if you weren't collaborating with them as you put it.

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Jack Hubbard: This is just so awesome. And all of this is in this amazing book. One of the things you added, we started talking about AI at the very beginning of this program, and we'll kind of wrap it up with with this.

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Jack Hubbard: You talk about some amazing AI tools that you use on a regular basis.

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Jack Hubbard: What what can you share with us around that.

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Stu Heinecke: Well, I mean the and the tools that I use are they're more creative tools.

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Stu Heinecke: But I know that there are. There's a whole many classes of tools that that AI is serving. You mentioned Chat Gpt. I.

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Stu Heinecke: You know I'm a copywriter, and that's how I came up. But in in the world is writing. Remember, I was creating direct mail campaigns. So I was writing copy.

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Stu Heinecke: and and

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Stu Heinecke: I have found Chat Gpt to be indispensable. Sometimes. I just you know, I'll just ask it. Okay, here are the factors. And and the interesting thing is, it gets to know you. So you don't have to mention everything over and over and over. You know I don't have to mention that the name of my book is how to get a meeting with anyone it knows that it's like, come on, relax.

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Stu Heinecke: I already know, and it'll put things in that that we had come up in. Let's say I'll call it conversations, but in earlier conversations, so I find it indispensable. It'll give you turns of phrase that you may not have thought of, and and there it is, and it's very, very quick, and it polishes it polishes your writing. I wouldn't take what it writes and use it verbatim, but I end up using a lot of it, you can edit it, and

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Stu Heinecke: so it's already very, very useful as a copywriter. And of course Grok is is there, and

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Stu Heinecke: I try to think of. Anyway, there are a bunch of them that do that that's indispensable. If you're not using that man, you're really missing out. And, by the way, it's not just for writing copy. You can ask it anything.

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Stu Heinecke: and it's like a research assistant. It's just you're you're working at a too small of a scale. If you're not, or leverage, I should say, if you're not using that a few of them, I'm in the process of creating an AI

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Stu Heinecke: an AI persona digital persona of myself, and it's sort of half me half Max headroom, or, let's say, half me or half the guy who wrote how to get a meeting with anyone and Max headroom. And so I've been playing a lot with 11 labs, which is text to speech. You can record.

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Stu Heinecke: let's say 2 or 3Â min of yourself speaking into a microphone, and it will build

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Stu Heinecke: a voice model for you, so you can then type in anything and you and it's saying it in your voice. And and you describe sort of like what character it should be like. And I I guess I must have essentially described Jeff Goldblum. So

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Stu Heinecke: so when it says it, it's sort of like Jeff Goldblum is doing it, and and that's pretty, I mean. But it's in my voice. So it's fun to use that. And there are others that I use to animate it, that one of them is called d-id. And so that's text to video. But you can. I can have that video that I've just output on 11 labs and load it up with my an image of my

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Stu Heinecke: my AI stu character, and it'll have AI stu talking about it. So I make videos that way. There are a lot of I don't know. It's just an amazing set of devices, not devices, but tools. I don't even know if you could. I don't know how I have a really hard time even describing AI, because

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Stu Heinecke: words kind of fall short, we don't. It's it's outside of what we've experienced ever before in our lives. So it's not just an it. It's sort of like it's it's, you know you could. You could be excused for thinking of it as a person, almost, because that's really the

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Stu Heinecke: a very talented person, I should say, as well, or a collaborator a research assistant. If you've ever used perplexity. I was taken through a session on that recently with someone I'm working with, and, good God! That it just

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Stu Heinecke: pulls intelligence on anybody or anything out of thin air. And, in fact, you mentioned. And I think this. I want to know more about relpro.

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Stu Heinecke: because I think that sounds interesting, because because you described to me before we got on on the zoom that it gives bankers a chance to know who they're talking about quickly, like just a quick dossier on them. I'd love to hear about that. That sounds that's exactly the kind of tools that we need to use. And obviously, it's using AI.

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Jack Hubbard: Wow!

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Jack Hubbard: Well, we can talk about AI all day. But here's 1 piece of good news for those of us that are in their seventies or a little older. We still have books to read.

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Jack Hubbard: This one is a must read for you. I gotta ask you before we wrap this up. You've been talking about your clients.

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Jack Hubbard: and I mentioned earlier that there's a mastermind group.

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Jack Hubbard: Talk a little bit about

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Jack Hubbard: who your clients are, how you help what you do, and a little bit about that mastermind group stu.

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Stu Heinecke: Well, I mean, thank you. Just in general, what I do to help clients is I help their sales. Teams break through to their top accounts and prospects.

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Stu Heinecke: and we do it with big boards, and we do it, and we do it with other tools, and and and certainly go well beyond just cartoons.

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Stu Heinecke: but but cartoons are still. I mean, I'm I'm probably the probably the top.

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Stu Heinecke: the top authority on how to use cartoons in marketing, anyway. So it belongs there. So we can do that on an enterprise basis. But we also have a mastermind. It's a new something new that I've just started. And it's really interesting. I'm just working with people individually in the mastermind to help them break through to their top accounts or prospects as well.

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Stu Heinecke: but on a much more intimate basis, because it's just a few of us on

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Stu Heinecke: well, in a relative, few of us on the zooms every twice a month. So the other thing. That's funny fun about this is that while we explore all kinds of devices and approaches to to getting meetings in the mastermind, and we help each other with

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Stu Heinecke: with feedback and hot seats, and so on. But I have this new tool. I actually showed it to you a few moments ago the Heinek window. That window, that square window in the face of either a Fedex envelope or or just a regular mailed envelope that shows a crop of the cartoon. That is, a portion of a cartoon inside

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Stu Heinecke: that's waiting inside, but it causes you to open, cause the recipients to open it up and and engage with it. And so so every one of the mastermind members gets a set of

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Stu Heinecke: tools that's comprised of of editable Pdfs.

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Stu Heinecke: and so that they can personalize the cartoons. So we've got. I have this sort of this very condensed set of cartoons from an image bank of about 1,500 cartoons that are personalized, but these are the ones that are the most effective, the best of the best. And so they have editable Pdfs, so they can drop in anybody's name into the caption and print it out on their laser printer, and

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Stu Heinecke: they can either print it as a print that shows up through the window in the Fedex envelope, or as folded cards that you can write a note in, and then templates to be able to cut the windows into those 2 envelope sizes real quickly. So that's kind of cool. It's fun because

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Stu Heinecke: they're they're saying, Okay, great I'm going to change the caption. Wait, don't do that. So we have a lot of discussion about that. But every new client I have always wants to change the they're going. I love this cartoon, but can we change the caption, and it's always

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Stu Heinecke: in service of how do I get my identity into the? We've got the identity of the recipient in there. But how do I get my identity in there? How do I get my brand, or my offer, or my solution mentioned in the cartoon? And I always have to counsel them away. No, but test experience says, Don't do that, it kills it. So there's just a there's a lot of brainstorming. I just mentioned this one thing, and that I'll wrap it up. But we just did a session

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Stu Heinecke: last Friday on QR. Codes so QR. Codes that they're just kind of ugly and impersonal. And

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Stu Heinecke: and and you know, if somebody sends you a link in an email and you don't know who they are, you're not. Gonna you shouldn't follow that link. That's kind of a scamming thing. So why would you do that with a QR. Code? And so I've always felt a little bit suspicious of them, but

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Stu Heinecke: felt that if you can turn it into, let's say maybe a piece of art, or maybe even a piece of personalized art, maybe even put the prospects face in the in the dot matrix of the of the QR. Code. I'm thinking that they're probably a lot more likely to engage with it. And so that's what we're playing with.

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Stu Heinecke: And and you can actually do that, you can actually put somebody's face. And I don't mean like a little color thing in the very, very center. But I mean a mosaic piece of art in it's throughout the QR. Code of their face. And I just can't. I can't imagine someone would say, well, I'm not going to click that like, because it's obvious it's just for them.

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Stu Heinecke: So anyway, we end up going through a lot of really interesting solutions, ways of of breaking through to people who can change everything about our lives. And it's a lot of fun to do.

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Jack Hubbard: Well, here's the other thing you need to know. Stu does very little work in banking. So if there's a banker out there in a marketplace where you don't have much market share, where you have a lot of really good bank to business prospects.

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Jack Hubbard: Stu Heinek is the guy you should call, and if I want to call you Stu, or reach out to you, how do I do that?

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Stu Heinecke: Well, you can. You can find my, you can if you go to my author site. That's 1 1

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Stu Heinecke: one avenue. So that's my name Stu heineck.com, and if you go there you can join my list. That would be wonderful. If you join my email list, you get the 1st chapter from How to get a meeting with anyone for free that gets delivered right back out to you. Connect with me on Linkedin. We mentioned that mentioned that you heard me talking on

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Stu Heinecke: Jack's. Podcast I'm happy to connect, or that's probably the best, either of those are. That's probably the Easiest ways to connect with me.

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Jack Hubbard: Terrific congratulations on an amazing book for the second time, and congratulations and thanks for all you do for putting marketing and salespeople together in a smarteting moment that creates opportunities to get a meeting with anyone. Thanks to Heinek. For your time today.

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Stu Heinecke: Thanks, so much.