There is a marketing strategy that costs almost nothing, converts unusually well, and almost nobody schedules. Kate Hendrickson of The Strategy Lane builds her whole practice on it.
The Line That Explains The Whole Model
“I’d rather sit down and have a conversation with you. Let’s go have some lunch and let’s talk about how we could potentially partner together and how I can really help accelerate some of the work that you’re doing.”
— Kate Hendrickson, The Strategy Lane
She lists the rest of her channel mix in the same breath, and it is all the same thing wearing different clothes: “hopping on a podcast, sharing some tips and tricks and my expertise… putting myself out there at conferences and doing speaking events locally in my own community.”
She is also disarmingly honest about the alternative: “I’m gonna share and be totally vulnerable and honest. Social media is not my strength.”
AI Cannot Replace That People Connection
“think AI can’t replace that people connection.”
— Kate Hendrickson
Her argument is not nostalgic. She makes the ROI case in the next breath — that the connection work reduces turnover, so “you’re not consistently having to onboard new people and spending your time hiring and interviewing and retraining and that’s going to save you on the bottom line.”
“So if you don’t necessarily see the benefit in that people connection,” she says, “you can see the benefit in the ROI.”
Scaling A Lunch Into An Event
The limitation of Hendrickson’s approach is arithmetic: there are only so many lunches in a quarter, and each one reaches one person.
A community cleanup is the same mechanism run in parallel. Twenty owners, two hours, a shared task that gives everyone something to talk about other than what they sell. The conversations are shorter than a lunch and there are twenty of them.
It is not a replacement for the lunch. It is how you decide which twenty lunches are worth booking.
What Sponsors Actually Remember Afterwards
Our observation. Sponsors do not remember the logo placement. They remember which of their staff turned up, whether anyone thanked them by name in front of other people, and whether they were sent a photograph of their own team afterwards.
The durable marketing asset is the recap page, but the durable relationship asset is the three minutes you spent talking to them in a car park. Hendrickson’s whole point is that those three minutes are the strategy, not the overhead.
More in relationship marketing and showing up in person and events that pay off: depth over business cards.
See upcoming events.