Damn You All to Hell

typewriter
I often hear Members telling me that getting appointments with the people they really want to see is very, very difficult. I’ll be honest, I give them pretty short thrift.
My own approach is to think that, “If my life depended on getting a meeting with X….what would I do?” 
The answer, so far anyway, has never been that I’d do what the people who are complaining have done.
Dropping a business card in for the attention of the Manager at your local David Lloyd Gym and then being surprised when he never returns your call and telling anyone that will listen that it’s “just so difficult to get appointments” is a really poor strategy.
People, I have news. If you want to get meetings with people that you perceive are hard to get then the secret to securing your desire is simply to THINK.
Let me give you one such example. Let’s just suppose that you wanted to get the actor Tom Hanks (a genuine Hollywood A-Lister) to be interviewed on your podcast.
What would you do?
Well, Chris Hardwick who runs Nerdist Podcast was faced with exactly this scenario.
He did what all smart marketers do. He researched Tom Hanks. Found out lots about him and, amongst his discoveries, was the fact that Hanks is a collector of vintage typewriters.
Hardwick procured a very special 1934 Smith Corona typewriter and sent it to Hanks with a short letter asking for the interview.
The reply he received, just a few days later, is shown on this page.
And that’s a big, big lesson. Get out of the bland banal, same-old, same-old approaches that everyone else is taking. I know those approaches are easy, that they require no effort, little cost or anything else on your part but, and here’s the kicker, THEY DON’T WORK!
Whereas THINKING, researching and crafting a compelling personalised message does work many more times than not.
Now, who do I want on NBTV next year…