How a Cartoonist Landed $350M Meetings

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What if one meeting could change your entire career? What if you could get that meeting with anyone you wanted - including presidents, prime ministers, and Fortune 500 CEOs?

Stu Heinecke, dubbed the "father of Contact Marketing," has devoted his career to helping clients achieve explosive growth. Contact Marketing campaigns have produced response as high as 300% and an ROI in the millions of percent. This isn't theory. This is proven results from a method that breaks every rule of traditional sales outreach.

Heinecke discovered something that changed business forever. He found that getting meetings with impossible-to-reach people was actually easier than anyone thought. His secret? A system he calls Contact Marketing.

Who Is Stu Heinecke?

Stu Heinecke is a bestselling business author, a hall of fame-nominated marketer and one of The Wall Street Journal cartoonists. But his background is what makes his method so unique. He combines two skills that seem unrelated: cartooning and marketing.

Cartooning and marketing are both creative endeavors, the only difference is that one is expressive and the other is strategic. This combination gave him an edge that no one else had.

His first book, "How to Get a Meeting with Anyone," was released in 2016. How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, later named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. The book caused a stir because it challenged everything people thought they knew about reaching important prospects. And he just dropped an updated version of it as well.

What Is Contact Marketing?

Contact Marketing is different from everything else you've tried. It's not cold calling. It's not email blasts. It's not LinkedIn messages.

Contact Marketing uses micro-focused campaigns to connect with critically-important accounts and prospects. The key word here is "micro-focused." You're not trying to reach hundreds of people. You're laser-focused on getting meetings with specific, high-value targets.

The method works because it does three things traditional outreach can't do:

It gets attention in a crowded marketplace

It shows you care about the prospect as a person

It turns gatekeepers into allies instead of obstacles

The Mind-Blowing Results

The numbers behind Contact Marketing sound too good to be true. But they're real.

It's every salesperson's dream to have a 100% response rate to meeting requests, and Stu says it commonly happens when his Contact Marketing approach is used.

Let's look at some actual results:

Rick Bennett's client wanted a meeting with Oracle founder Larry Ellison. So they ran a $10K full-page ad in the WSJ—and scored a $350M deal.

Orabrush ran a $28 Facebook ad to connect with the right buyer at Walmart. It worked, producing a $20M result—and a whopping 69,500,000% ROI.

A sales rep used a live pigeon to score a meeting with one of the world's most famous CEOs— and a $250K deal. And the cost? Mere chicken feed.

These aren't flukes. They're the natural result of a system that works.

The 20 Categories That Change Everything

Using the twenty categories of contact campaigns in the book, readers have gone on to produce explosive scaling of careers, businesses and lives. These categories form the backbone of Heinecke's method.

While Heinecke doesn't reveal all 20 categories publicly, he shares several that show how the system works:

Deep Personalization Campaigns

Deep personalization, or gifting based on profile scrapes, works. Example: A rep sent this glove to a falconry aficionado and landed a six-figure deal. This isn't about generic gifts. It's about finding something specific to your prospect's interests or hobbies.

Cartoon Campaigns

Since Heinecke is a cartoonist, he uses this skill in a unique way. Stu uses his cartooning skills to create unique gifts that he sends to prospects. He creates custom cartoons featuring the prospect, then has his team call the executive assistant to say they have a cartoon by a Wall Street Journal cartoonist featuring their boss.

Sequential Delivery Campaigns

One sales professional used Cutco knife sets to get in the door – mailed directly to the prospect one knife at a time. His efforts resulted in a 6-figure deal. The key here is the sequence. Each piece builds anticipation for the next.

Over-the-Top Campaigns

One guy, he produced the contact letter to reach Larry Ellison as a full page ad and ran into the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes you need to do something so big that it can't be ignored.

Symbolic Campaigns

Dan Waldschmidt, who's been a guest on this podcast, sent an actual sword as an image of the message he wanted to communicate. The physical item represents your message in a memorable way.

The Psychology Behind Why It Works

Stu says that your primary goal in Contact Marketing is to set your message apart from the others your prospects are receiving. That's the only hope you have of convincing them that your solutions are worth consideration.

Think about it from the prospect's perspective. They get hundreds of emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages every week. All of them sound the same. All of them are forgettable.

But when something truly unique shows up on their desk - something that shows you took time to learn about them personally - they pay attention. They remember you. And they want to meet the person creative enough to reach them this way.

The Gatekeeper Advantage

Most salespeople see executive assistants as barriers. Heinecke sees them as allies.

Stu's team then reaches out to the person's executive assistant and explains that they have a cartoon created by a Wall Street Journal editorial cartoonist that features their boss – and they'd like to send it to them. The assistant is immediately intrigued and on-board for getting the cartoon for their boss.

The assistant becomes excited to deliver something special to their boss. Instead of blocking your outreach, they're helping you succeed.

The BigBoards System

BigBoards are large for a reason. They create outsized results. Measuring 18" x 24", they feature cartoons from our exclusive CartoonLink image bank, containing over 1,500 works by famous cartoonists from The New Yorker and WSJ, with personalization and marketing results in mind.

This shows how Heinecke has turned his method into a repeatable system. You don't need to be a cartoonist to use his approach. He's created tools that anyone can use.

The Updated Contact Marketing Model

In Even More Outrageous Ways to Get a Meeting with Anyone (10-2019), Heinecke adds more techniques, tips and strategies, more than sixty illustrated case studies, an updated Contact Marketing model that sets a new baseline for response—at 100%—and introduces "Pocket Campaigns" as a replacement for business cards.

Heinecke didn't stop with his first book. He keeps improving the system. The updated model raises the bar even higher - from high response rates to 100% response rates.

Real-World Implementation

The beauty of Contact Marketing is that it works across industries and situations. Stu's pioneering concepts have redefined how businesses approach client acquisition and retention.

Here's how to start using the method:

Step 1: Target Selection

Pick specific, high-value prospects. Don't spray and pray. Focus on people who could change your business if you got a meeting with them.

Step 2: Deep Research

Learn everything you can about your prospect. What are their interests? What challenges do they face? What would matter to them personally?

Step 3: Campaign Design

Create something that connects with them personally. It could be based on their hobbies, their company's challenges, or something meaningful to them.

Step 4: Execution

Deliver your campaign in a way that gets attention and enlists the gatekeeper's help.

Step 5: Follow Through

Be ready with a clear meeting request and value proposition when they respond.

The Future of Contact Marketing

Get the Meeting!, Heinecke, author of the groundbreaking How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, shares the latest tips, tools, and tactics to help readers break through to their top accounts in the most effective ways possible.

Contact Marketing keeps getting better. As more people use generic digital outreach, the contrast with personalized, creative campaigns becomes even more powerful.

The method works because it's based on human psychology, not technology trends. People will always respond to genuine creativity and personal attention.

The Bottom Line

If you can't get meetings, you can't sell. You can't do anything. That's the truth every salesperson faces.

Stu Heinecke solved this problem. He created a system that gets meetings with anyone. The results speak for themselves - 100% response rates, million-dollar deals, and ROIs that reach into the millions of percent.

The Contact Marketing method isn't just about getting meetings. It's about changing how you think about outreach. Instead of hoping prospects will notice you in the crowd, you become impossible to ignore.

Whether you're a salesperson trying to reach C-level executives, an entrepreneur seeking investors, or anyone who needs to connect with important people, Contact Marketing gives you an unfair advantage.

The question isn't whether the method works. The question is whether you're ready to use it.