SPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Stu Heinecke

Christian Klepp  0:08

Hi, and welcome to the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. I’m your host, Christian Klepp, and one of the founders of EINBLICK Consulting. Our goal is to share inspirational stories, tips and insights from B2B marketers, digital entrepreneurs and industry experts that will help you to think differently, succeed and scale your business.

Hey, Stu like the last time you and I talked, you mentioned that you were working on a project that you’ve been extremely passionate about. You clearly are a very passionate person, but this one really got you going. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Stu Heinecke  0:48

So here’s the thing, I have a couple of worldwide exclusives coming up. Next week, I’m on the big growth summit with Dr. Barbara Weiver Smith and so I’m doing the first interview ever about this new book, it’s called, my working title is the WEEDS Strategies. So not the kind you smoke but the ones that are on your lawn. I’m writing this book. Its manuscript is due by April this coming year and it’ll come out precisely when the weeds show up in the Northern Hemisphere. So that’s one of the launch in 2022. I am really excited about this one. I’m excited. I love contact marketing, and all those amazing things that people are doing to get meetings but this one also just has me just crazy excited. Because we all know what it means to grow like a weed. We’d all like our businesses, to grow like a weed. In fact, we’d like our personal stocks to grow like a weed. And politicians dream of having their countries grow like a weed. I guess in some way, we’re all driven to grow like a weed and that’s sort of expressed in our Space Programs and so on. We really do understand it’s pervasive we all understand what it means to grow like a weed.

Now I’ve been putting together, just I’m still doing research, I’m still interviewing people, I’ve interviewed some incredible people. Kathy Ireland was unbelievable and some people may only know her as like the supermodel who was on asile a while ago. But man, what a brilliant thinker, she is! A brand! I mean like a brand genius. So the stuff that she had to say was just incredible and Henrik Fisker, the founder of Fisker automotive and the designer of some of my favorite sports cars from Aston Martin and General David Petraeus and T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil guy, he was the guy that I’m pretty sure he was the guy that the movie I started this TV show Dallas was founded on or based on, what I mean you know, just a legendary figure in the business world. And more, I think Daymond John’s is coming. And so there’s some really interesting people that I have been interviewing. And we’ve been asking them as well, I’m showing this WEEDS model it’s an acronym for Weed-inspired Enterprise Expansion and Domination Strategies. So it’s a system for dominating your market and expanding and, defending your turf and all this. The metaphor really holds up in an incredible way.

Christian Klepp  3:39

Okay, sorry. Just one more time for listeners. What does WEEDS stand for?

Stu Heinecke  3:43

WEEDS stands for Weed-inspired Enterprise Expansion and Domination Strategies. So it’s a whole system of strategies to follow exactly what weeds do to grow your business to grow your career to grow your personal wealth or stock etc… Grow anything a project was anything that needs to growth to go forward and grow. Weeds have incredible insights to offer us and really the framework to offer us and so that’s what the book’s about.

Christian Klepp  4:18

Wow that’s an amazing concept, Stu! Typical to Heinecke, there’s a story behind how you came up with that idea. So tell us.

Stu Heinecke  4:30

I was driving down the Santa Monica freeway many many years ago. I’m kind of imagining the traffic doesn’t move very fast on the freeway. But back then it did was just racing, just racing cars and roaring tires and all this concrete actually was, here’s this medium is 40 foot wide concrete medium between 12 lanes of freeway traffic. And in a crack out so prevalent, I noticed it growing out of a crack in the concrete was this dandelion. And you know, dandelions look so happy. They have those little cute little yellow flowers and they kind of blow around in the wind. I mean, it kind of depends on blowing around in the wind because that’s how they blow their seeds around. And I just thought: well that’s incredibly impressive in a sea of impossibility, all this concrete and roaring tires. This little plant found a way to make it work. I thought I really, I hope that I can live up to that standard in my career. Yeah…I think I have. And I will pay back the dandelion. But I just like, it’s just incredible because a couple things one, it was just so happily on unfurled and running its process and I just thought, isn’t that interesting? It’s not depressed about where it is, isn’t it? Didn’t say, I really had I really thought that I’d end up at the beach, the beach or something. It just did it where it did it. I think it’s really significant that, that wasn’t a rosebush growing out of the crack, because rose bushes don’t do that. And why don’t they do it? I mean, it’s not just because they’re more polite plants, I suppose. It’s because they don’t fling their seeds for miles and miles.

Here’s something that I’ve just been filling into my infographic about the book. So I just come across this research that says that every dandelion produces 15,000 seeds in its lifetime. They live 5 to 10 years. They’re perennials, not annual. So when you see the top falling off and dying. That’s just the process of senescence. It’s just yes, just the top, it’s that stuff is it has been used up and it’ll It goes into hibernation and recharges, I suppose. And then poof in the last week of April / first week of May, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it’ll pop back up again. So it’ll produce 15,000 seeds, 25% of those will germinate into plants. So that’s 33,750 plants, which is a 37,500% growth factor from the one plant to 30,750 plants. And that an acre of dandelions produces 240 million seeds every year. So you know, look at that. That’s really impressive.

Christian Klepp  7:42

Yeah, no kidding.

Stu Heinecke  7:44

I guess the big difference between us in the weeds is that we have brains and freewill, we go where we want to go, we do what we want to do.

Christian Klepp  7:54

We complain a lot more. (laugh)

Stu Heinecke  7:56

We can be lazy. We can be depressed we can be, I don’t know, we, there are a lot of ways that that can get that freedom can work against us. Yeah. Whereas weeds have been around for… the fossil record says 140 million years. So they’ve been around a long time. And they don’t, they don’t have brains. But what they do have instead, is this genetic programming to run a set of processes that have been honed over 140 million years. They’ve really worked out well. those are solid processes. And, and then part of that programming is that they have these attributes. They’re aggressive and resilient and persistent and they don’t, like as I say, they don’t give up but that is persistence. But they’re nimble, adaptable. You know that we know exactly how that weed grew out of that crack, in the medium dandelion and blows, its seeds blow all over the place. I know some dandelion seeds have actually travelled thousands of miles or maybe 10s of thousands of miles. But typically they’ll disperse around a 10 mile radius. Rosebushes don’t do that… like very few things do that. So it’s a very aggressive approach it exploring and probing all of the opportunity within a 10 mile radius. So no wonder it found its way to the crack, it flew around and blew in and then germinated. It’s such a beautiful thing. And we think of weeds as being such a negative thing, but I suppose they are when they’re showing up in our lawn, but what I hope so I want, the book will be launching in that last week of April, 1st week of May timeline, in 2022, and there’s a really specific purpose for that. That’s when the weeds start showing up all over the northern hemisphere. And I want all the weeds to serve as my memes. So like people will say, Oh my god, like what’s showing up on my lawn again. Oh, wait that book. It’s that book, Wait, yeah.

Christian Klepp  10:04

All Stu’s fans right there. Speaking of which, are those dandelions behind you?

Stu Heinecke  10:13 

That’s true.

Christian Klepp  10:14

Stu, that was such an incredible story and that, you know, it’s again, it’s testament to your creative prowess, sir. I mean, and I think it was to your point about like, why you came up with this strategy because it’s so applicable to our, our lives, not just professionally, but in general it’s… correct me if I’m wrong, but like creative adaptability, resilience, perseverance. And to a certain degree, if you see weeds, they always I’m gonna say they operate in clusters. So there’s a little bit of a herd mentality. Right?

Stu Heinecke  10:47

Oh, yeah, they’re definitely. There’s a collective man. There is no mentality, but there’s a collective strategy.

Christian Klepp  10:53

Yes, behavior. Absolutely. That’s something fantastic.

Stu Heinecke  10:59

Can I just point something out? These books are a lot like cartoons actually, I think it’s all the same process. So I haven’t tried it yet. I’m going to… there’s one that is just on my mind. So I’ll recycle some. It’s one that I’ll be submitting to the Wall Street Journal at some point. So it’ll be two dogs, and one of them is turning to the other thing, I lost my train of thought… what was that barking about? So, if you think about politics, we’re all barking. I mean, there’s a lot of truth that you can pull out of that right a lot of their insight. All I know is it was a funny idea. But then when you think about it, just that’s what humor does. It just it provides insights. There’s a reason why it’s funny, and that’s why it’s funny and you discovered it sort of the backway, backhanded way but that’s what I think all these books are about. It’s just, there’s an insight like that. And some of them turn out to be cartoons, and some of them turn out to be books. But all of them I just want to get how people on come away with it a little more enriched for having had the experience.

Christian Klepp  12:02

And they’ll be all the better for it too.

Hey, it’s Christian Klepp here. We’ll get back to the episode in a second. But first, is your brand struggling to cut through the noise? Are you trying to effectively reach your target audience and boost your sales? Are you trying to pivot your business? If so, book a call with EINBLICK Consulting, our experienced consultants will help your B2B business to succeed and scale. Go to www.einblick.co for more information.

We’ve been talking about your craft for the past several minutes and you’ve shared like, really like amazing and incredible anecdotes. And I just want to throw this ball into your court for a. In your professional opinion, what do you think is with regards to your area of expertise… what do you think is the most underrated tactic?

Stu Heinecke  12:53

And you’re not talking about weeds though you’re talking about content marketing during meetings. You know, underrated? That’s a really tough question to answer because everybody uses email. And they, I don’t think they use it properly. So and it’s a very crowded channel. So they all… that’s all the things I’m telling people to avoid. When people say, How do I stand out using email thing? I’m saying, Well, first of all, you’re probably one of the most crowded channels you could be in. So maybe one of the things you should step out of that channel use something else, or at least be multimodal in your communication. I don’t know whether it’s underrated but maybe just disregarded, method or of using email, which would just be to, you could figure out who anybody’s email addresses right. Anybody. So you know, but if you’re gonna reach out to someone or just hear from too many people. What’s gonna make that email stand out? I think one of the things, they’ll make a few things. One is, it’s going to be brief. If it’s 12 words or less, that’s really good. Because everybody else’s are long, there’s several, I was gonna say chapter, like was gonna say chapters long, but they’re at least.

Christian Klepp  14:13

Well, some email do look like chapters, right?

Stu Heinecke  14:18

So nobody’s gonna read that. And you’ve just shown you have absolutely no regard for their time. So if it’s really brief, if it’s 12 words or less, you are showing respect for their time. It’s much easier to respond to you, and do it in a way that has some saying, How would you do that? I think they probably gave me this, this advice. Say it in a way that has them saying, Well, how would you do that? How would you make that happen? How does that work? So send it Mark Hunter then contributed this one. He said, you know, send that email on the weekend, not during the week, because during the week, there’s all kinds of levels of screening and noise on the weekend, and if you do it, time has to be just the right time to do it early Saturday morning. So they wake up and there it is. And if you’re reaching out to a CEO or someone who’s a C level executive, they’re probably they might check into their email real quickly before they move on with their weekend. So that’s a good time to do it. Another one is on Sunday evening when they backup their computer saying what am I doing this week? Just about to happen. So the way, Yep. And then you know, actually, you could do it other times you could do it just before work starts for everybody else. So high achievers are usually in early, so maybe eight o’clock instead of nine or you know, after nine o’clock, but do it before hours or after hours. So if you do that, then you can actually get your emails responded to by some pretty impressive people. Not guaranteed but nothing is really. But that would be one.

Another one might be using profile scrapes in a very thorough way to produce something some very, very well I would call the deep personalization in get the meeting, but use deep personalization to fashion, something some outreach device or gift that is really going to resonate with that person because you did your homework. You know it’s going to resonate with them because you did your homework. And there’s this really interesting story, one guy who, who sent actually a picture of a falconry glove. The fellow he was trying to reach was really interested in falconry. So he sent a picture of it. He said, this is the glove I’m sending you. And the guy wrote back immediately someone that they couldn’t make no one on his team to be able to respond at all. He wrote back real quickly, and he said, thanks. That’s really cool. But I’m not a prospect for your services still, I really appreciate what you’re doing. Thanks so much. Then the glove arrives. And he gets right back in touch. And he says, Hey, remember I wasn’t a prospect? Well, no, but I know three people who are, three CIOs who are in the market for what you’re selling. And I’m going to make introductions right now. So, three deals, three, six figure deals, just because he paid attention to who the person is and did something relevant to who they are. So I call that I guess I just call that deep personalization. And in this book, get the meeting, you’ll find that.

Christian Klepp  17:33

Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing that one. So, one more for the road. What’s the best piece of career advice that you’ve ever received that you apply to your life?

Stu Heinecke  17:46

There was no one piece of advice, but I really have to sort of redirect that to who my mentors were because, he was like I was raised by wolves in my early career. Those wolves were the best cartoonists in the world. These were, this included Gahan Wilson, Eldon Dedini, Leo Cullum, Bob Mankoff, the former editor at the New Yorker. They didn’t even realize they were just, they just became part of my group. I hired them into be part of my stable of cartoonists, for my business for that creative business that I started all those years ago. And by working with them, I learned, it was like a classroom. Well, I don’t know what, more than a classroom it was just this mega mentorship program that I put together for myself. So those guys were just they were amazing. And I derived so much from them.

And I think there’s one other person who served as a mentor from a distance. And that’s Jay Conrad Levinson, the author of Guerilla Marketing.  And what a big honor. I got to have him write the foreword to how to get a meeting with anyone. So really my first published book, he was the contributor of the foreword. So I don’t know, if it’s one piece of advice, it was just, I just got such an incredible set of values. And I don’t know just instructions on how to do thing. I don’t know just how things particularly how things worked in cartooning. And then from Jay have how things worked on the on the sort of audacious side of marketing.

Christian Klepp  19:46

That’s incredible. And I think, to your point, it’s something that a friend of mine and I discussed a couple of weeks ago, it’s never underestimate the value of a having a good mentor, number one. And number two, you’ll be surprised how many people are out there. If you ask them, know how generous these people are with their time. But I think that comes with a, I’m gonna throw in a caveat there, that comes with a condition attached. And the condition is you have to be ready and willing to put in the work, you got to be all in. You can’t just be like kind of half baked. It’s kind of like hiring a personal trainer. And then you don’t want to you don’t really want to go to the gym a workout, right? So, and a couple months later, how come I don’t have muscles? Right?

So Stu, thank you so much for coming on. I mean, this has been such a fun and engaging and insightful session. What’s the best way for people out there to connect with you?

Stu Heinecke  20:32

Well, first, I just want to say thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Best way to connect is probably LinkedIn. You know, it depends on what level of connection you’re talking about. You can find my books. And I would suggest you read them because if you want to get meetings, they will.

I think it was Andrei. That’s how we connect with this sort of circle, kind of story, Andrei Zinkevich got in touch with me in one of the interview with me, because he had read my book again, probably both of them, but particularly how to get a meeting with anyone. And he told me that he made $300,000. From one of the things that he read.

Christian Klepp  21:10

Yeah, that was an incredible story.

Stu Heinecke  21:12

That’s a good ROI on the book. So get the book, and then connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty open about it unless you pitch me.

Christian Klepp  21:24

Or send to a creative direct mailer.

Stu Heinecke  21:28

And figure out where to send it. You’ve got to impress me that way.

Christian Klepp  21:33

Exactly. Oh, speaking of books, I got a surprise here for you to write in the mail yesterday.

Stu Heinecke  21:39

Classic. Hey, do you know? Like that thing… When we write books, we write them in isolation. You know, I mean, you’re not out in a coffee shop doing it. You’re just isolated. I was in my basement when I wrote that book. But now I just got to say that, I didn’t know how… nobody knows how their books are going to do. But that book was named earlier this year was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time.

Christian Klepp  22:10

I saw that on Linkedin. Congratulations!

Stu Heinecke  22:14

This week both of them, Get the Meeting and How to Get a Meeting with Anyone turned up in the top 50 sales books for 2020. But I wasn’t writing a sales book. I’m not a sales author, I’m just writing about getting meetings. But of course we need to get… all of us need to get meetings.

Christian Klepp  22:32

All of us need to get meetings. To drive your original point back, drive at home, everyone needs to get meetings regardless of like what profession you have. I mean, amazing. And quite frankly Stu, if we were doing this in-person, I’d ask you to like, autograph the book, but well, a virtual signature will have to do for now.

Stu Heinecke  22:51

Here you go.

Christian Klepp  22:54

Stu Heinecke. Thank you so much for coming on, and I wish you all the best. Stay healthy, be well and we’ll talk soon.

Stu Heinecke  23:02

Thank you. My pleasure.

Christian Klepp  23:03

Take care. Bye.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. To learn more about what we do here at EINBLICK, please visit our website at www.einblick.co and be sure to subscribe to our show on iTunes or your favorite podcast player.