Ever wondered how you can get the attention of that elusive, hard-to-reach prospect you’ve been chasing? You know the one. The big fish that is your ticket to President’s club and a huge commission check.
You know how to sell – that’s your job, after all – but getting CEOs and other VIPs to call you back is the tricky part. So what if that impossible-to-reach person weren’t so impossible to reach after all?
Hall of fame-nominated marketer and Wall Street Journal cartoonist, Stu Heinecke, discovered that he could get past traditional gatekeepers and reach those elusive executives by thinking outside the box and using personalized approaches that he calls “contact campaigns”.
On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Fanatical Prospecting author Jeb Blount and Stu discuss creative ways to get meetings with anyone. You’ll learn that the secret is about being creative, thinking out of the box, demonstrating authenticity and sincerity, and having a little fun along the way.
5 Ways to Get Meetings With Hard-to-Reach Prospects
1. Build a contact campaign, not a cold call. Instead of one generic outreach attempt, plan a short sequence of personalized touches — a handwritten note, a relevant article, a follow-up call — aimed at one specific person. The goal is to stand out from the dozens of generic emails hitting their inbox every day.
2. Make it personal, not generic. Reference something specific to the prospect: a recent company announcement, an article they wrote, a mutual connection. Generic pitches get deleted. Personalized ones get noticed.
3. Use humor and creativity to break the pattern. Executives are flooded with the same three or four outreach formats. A genuinely clever, well-targeted approach — a custom cartoon, a small relevant gift, an unexpected channel — interrupts that pattern and gets remembered.
4. Lead with curiosity, not a pitch. Your first touch shouldn’t ask for a meeting outright — it should make the prospect curious enough to respond. Save the ask for touch two or three, after you’ve earned a reply.
5. Stay authentic and persistent. Contact campaigns work because they’re sincere, not because they’re tricks. Stick with a sequence over 2–3 weeks rather than giving up after one attempt.
Get more meetings with effective Prospecting Sequences. Download our free how-to guide here: https://salesgravy.com/seven-steps-prospecting-sequence-guide/
