How To Get A Meeting With Anyone

My new startup is looking to work with a particular government organisation that manages billions of dollars in public funds.

Last week, we blew our pitch to that, and the tier of management we are working with said, “No, thank you”.

But having spent over 100 hours with the org, I know what we’re offering will save our country millions.

Noodling on the problem, I decided to find another person in the org to pitch to who would say, “Yes.”

I went to the organisation's government Minister and got a meeting to get him to say yes.

Here’s how I did it:

• I went to LinkedIn and searched for the Minister’s profile, found their profile and then looked at our mutual connections

  

• I then reached out to people I knew well enough to ask for an intro to the Minister with the following message:
  

  

  Screenshot of the message I sent

  
  Here is a reply:

  

  Screenshot of the intro from a friend

• From there, I pitched the official from the office with the following email:
  

  

  Pitch to the minister’s office

We’ve now got a meeting with the Minister to pitch what we’re doing, but this time from the top down.

Here are the rules I followed when focusing on this outreach:

• Look at the incentives of the person you are pitching - In our case, the Minister we’re pitching is managing an org that needs to save millions, and they have an election cycle coming up.
  
  Which is what I pitched in our email.
  

• Make sure you’re getting a warm intro - I’m fortunate to have a good network of people in Aotearoa, but if I’d gone in cold, I don’t think the Minister’s office would have replied as swiftly as they did.
  
  Build your network now because the world runs on relationships.

Charlie Munger has said, "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome,".

Incentives drive people; you need to make sure what you are asking of them is aligned with their incentives.

Easy Sales

A thing I've been thinking about lately is - how do you get your customers to sell for you.

Every business has at least to some degree of word of mouth.

Someone buys from you, likes it, recommends you to someone else.

But that's as far as most businesses go. They kinda just hope that it happens and thank their luck when it does.

That's amature level.

At our gym we actively incentivise word of mouth. We offer $50 referral credits and tell new members about our referral program at least 5 times in their first month of membership.

You can go way further though.

Mailchimp adds their logo to every email sent from free accounts. Social media's like Facebook ask you to invite friends. Slack, Notion and other collaborative tools like them are useless without other users.

Sally trusts you, so I'll trust you. It's the whole thing behind the "warm intro" industry.

Any business can use these and there's lots of different ways to use them. And it's by far and away the easiest and most effective way to sell.

I've not come up with anything crazy for Compound or Gravy yet. I'll share them if I do. But it's on my mind and thought it's worth thinking about them outloud here.