In regards to efficient marketing, no marketing is efficient. Your options aside from referrals and networking are pretty much: mailers, cold call, or seminars (putting on a presentation for a group). They all work, but none of them work "well". If you do mailers you'll get approximately one call back per 1000 mailers you send out, if you cold call you'll get approximately the numbers in my previous post (if you do it well), doing seminars is time consuming because you send a mailer, then call the people you mailed to, then get them to go to the seminar which costs money and more time. So for me and everyone I encountered, the fastest way to build a book (speed is important because during this time you're almost always working for a firm which has some sales targets you have to meet) is to cold call all day every day and from the clients you get from cold calls hit them up for referrals as much as possible. Keep cold calling and getting referrals, rinse and repeat. And it sounds funny but the initial call is as much for qualifying you to them as it is them to you, so yes there is some element of "hey just so you know I exist" but that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. You should have leads where you have a solid expectation that the people you're calling are all affluent, i.e. calling luxury neighborhoods or business owners or whatever, so that's not a variable. You're trying to find people who will buy from you, do they have money, do they invest in general, are they open to an idea/meeting, what's the fastest way to get the meeting to happen or get them to buy your idea. People hate being cold called. They hate it a little less when they feel compelled to listen to you. They hate it a little bit less than that when you don't try to sell them something immediately and humanize yourself to them. They hate you even less than that when you're in their area or somewhere they are familiar with, which makes it real and further humanizes you. They hate you less than that if you say things that make sense. Then they open an account with you and find reasons to hate you