We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Stu Heinecke. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Stu below.

Stu, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

To be successful, we have to believe we can succeed, and work toward making our vision a reality. Nothing happens without consistent, meaningful effort. But the one factor that stands out to me is unfair advantages. That is, advantages your competitors cannot match. And one of the most decisive unfair advantage is the ability to confer unfair advantages upon your clients and customers.

As an example, my education is in marketing, but by the time I had earned my degree, I was also a published cartoonist, and I had discovered that I could use cartoons as an incredibly powerful engagement device in marketing campaigns.

That led to the start of my marketing agency, which specialized in using cartoons to supercharge response rates to direct marketing campaigns. By recruiting many of my heroes in cartooning, I widened the gap from all of potential competitors. No one had these cartoonists but me, and eventually, no one had the test experience I had.

Having both gave me a superpower. I was able to do something no one else could, and that superpower allowed me to help my clients generate response rates no one else could match, either. Both are examples of unfair advantages leveraged in business.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a bestselling author, consultant, twice-nominated hall of fame marketer, and one of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists. I help companies grow by helping their sales teams to connect with their most important accounts and prospects at the highest levels. How to Get a Meeting with Anyone introduced the concept of Contact Marketing, and helped sales professionals and entrepreneurs to get meetings that changed their lives. My later book, How to Grow YOur Business Like a Weed, explores a new business growth model based on the attributes, tactics and strategies weeds use to spread quickly and protect their turf. In my consulting practice, we use both models to create rapid growth; quickly connecting with their top prospects, and applying Weed Strategy to explode their scale.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Studying weeds as a source of inspiration for growth has taught me the importance of collaboration. If weeds could speak to us, they’d tell us to team up with the smartest, most accomplished people we know, as fast as we can. And that is exactly what I’m doing now, teaming up with the top sales and business authors I know to produce mini-masterminds and other events together. When you collaborate, you help each other to grow your networks. They have clients and contact you don’t know, and you offer the same. By working together, your scale changes.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

In How to Get a Meeting with Anyone and my later book, Get the Meeting, there are many inspirational stories of how someone used audacious means to make life-changing connections. One of my favorites is how Kris Kristofferson met Johnny Cash.

When Kristofferson was flying helicopters for the Army as a young man, he realized his life’s dream was to become a singer/songwriter and work with Johnny Cash. When he was discharged, he moved straight to Nashville, and quickly got an introduction to Mr. Cash backstage, before one of his shows. A friend introduced him, and Johnny barely noticed.

Undeterred, Kris got himself a job as a janitor at the studio where Johnny recorded. Employees were under strict orders never to hand Johnny their demo tapes, so Kris handed his to Johnny’s wife instead. But still, nothing was happening. So he turned up the heat.

Kris was still a pilot, now in the National Guard. So one day, he checked out a helicopter, few it to Johnny’s house and landed on on the front lawn to deliver his latest demo tape.

This time, it worked, and the two men became lifelong friends from that point on. Attaching a story to a contact helps us create deeply human connections, and Johnny loved to tell that story of how he and Kris met.

The ability to create those kinds of experiences, and to produce human-to-human connections is at the heart of business success. After all, if you can’t get meetings, you can’t sell. And if you can’t sell, you won’t remain in business long.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://stuheinecke.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stu.heinecke.1
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuheinecke/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@stuheinecke8457

Image Credits
Stu headshot by J. Chu Images. All other images are by Stu Heinecke.