When you really need to make stuff happen

He pushed the Fortune piece across the table to me, just a hint of a satisfied smile sneaking onto his face.

I was meeting with an Inner Circle member while I was in his city. He’s at a big agency, and he confided that he feels like a foreigner there much of the time.

He was working on a new account, and they hadn’t achieved the top tier placements they had listed on their Statement of Work. The initial engagement was coming to an end, the review with the client was coming up, but others on the team had resigned themselves to the situation.

“Everyone seemed okay with this,” he explained. “It’s the way things go, I guess. This is a smaller client that isn’t doing very remarkable stuff.”

But that didn’t sit well with this guy. Whether they were going to lose the business or not, he felt like they ought to exhaust all their efforts in doing what they said they were going to do.

And even at the biggest agencies, there are no secret methodologies to making top-tier placements materialize.

He just made a short list of the journalists who’d likely be most interested, and vowed to “send them each two emails and follow up with three phone calls and see what happens.”

If that level of follow-up freaks you out, that’s okay. You’re applying it to situations where you don’t have a deep-seated belief that you have something of value for the journalists you’re targeting.

This guy was beyond that. He had that belief, and now he had the resolve to power him through natural reticence and fear of rejection.

Before the final client review, he had landed the Fortune piece and had booked calls for the CEO with two other top-tier outlets.

Speaking as much to himself as to his collective PR peers, his voice rising a bit, he explained the lesson this experience had taught him:

“Stop looking in the mirror after every failed pitch and evaluating whether you belong in this business,” he said. “If you know you have a good story, keep calling until someone runs it.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself :).

To your success,

Michael

P.S. This is the level we work to achieve inside the Inner Circle. We start with the tactics and research that allow you to KNOW what your targets want and how to frame it so they immediately recognize your value. Then we build on top of that mindset shift you saw in this pro's story. Register here to see how we do it.