This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Take a room in town
Zig Ziglar was a door-to-door salesman of pots and pans. In the 1960s, this
was a thing.
Most of the three thousand representatives in his company followed the
same plan. They filled their cars with samples and hit the road. They’d visit
a town, make all the easy sales, then get in the car and drive to the next
town.
Early adopters, as we’ve seen, are easier to find and easier to sell to.
Zig had a different strategy.
He got in his car, found a new town, and moved in. He took a room for
weeks at a time. He showed up and kept showing up.
Sure, he made the same early adopter sales as everyone else. But then
people noticed he didn’t leave like all the other salespeople that they’d seen
before. He stayed.
By continuing to organize demonstration dinners, he got to know the
people in town. He might engage with someone in the middle of the curve
five or six or seven times over the course of a month.

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Which is precisely what this sort of person wants before they make a
decision.
Zig did the math. He understood that while most salespeople would flee
when they hit the chasm, he could build a human bridge. There’d be days
with no sales at all, but that’s okay, because after crossing the local chasm,
the volume would more than make up for the time invested.
The easy sales aren’t always the important ones.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 
Some Case Studies Using the Method
“How do I get an agent?”
That’s the question that screenwriters, directors, and actors get asked all the
time. The industry has gatekeepers, and you don’t have the keys to the gate,
so an agent is the answer.
As Brian Koppelman has generously pointed out, it doesn’t work in this
direct a manner. Sure, the agent will field calls for you, but he’s not going to
become your full-time sales rep, making calls night and day and tirelessly
promoting you to the industry.
The method isn’t to go out and find an agent. The method is to do work
so impossibly magical that agents and producers come looking for you.
You, the one who cared enough to put it all on the table, who fell in love
with your viewers and your craft, and who made something that mattered.
It doesn’t have to be a feature film or a Pulitzer-winning play. In fact, the
approach works best if it’s not a fully polished and complete creation.
The best work will create an imbalance in the viewer, one that can only
be remedied by spreading the word, by experiencing this with someone
else. The tension this imbalance creates forces the word to spread. It means
that asking, “Have you seen . . . ?” raises the status of the asker, and the
champions multiply.
What matters is the connection you made. Everyone has ten friends, fifty
colleagues, a hundred acquaintances. And you can cajole them into seeing
your work . . . and then what happens?
If it’s electric, if it makes an impact, if the right sort of tension is created,
they’ll have to tell someone else.

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Because telling someone else is what humans do. It’s particularly what
we do if we work with ideas. Telling others about how we’ve changed is the
only way to relieve our tension.
This is the hard work we discovered many pages ago. The hard work of
deciding that this is your calling, of showing up for those you seek to
change.
Do that first.