"Interview Method": Avenues to the interview

Hi Warriors,

I've been doing a lot of browsing regarding the "Interview Method", and many people seem to use an online directory/listing as a way to leverage potential customers into scheduling an interview. The problem I ran into is what if our company is not a directory service and we still want to use the interview method? What if we simply offer a consultation service?

One suggestion that was mentioned to me is to feature them on our company blog, which is a great idea. Another I have been thinking about is just saying we want to feature their company on our facebook page or other form of social media. But then I would be cluttering my social media with promotion for other businesses when I want to use the social media for promoting myself...

Because I don't have an established blog for my company, I was thinking about another possible approach. This would involve calling the potential customer and basically offering them a free consultation on their web strategy. This could even be phrased as, "We are trying to get our name around locally, so we are offering free consultations". Perhaps the notion that it is a free consultation rather than a sales pitch will help them bite. Then I just interview them about how they do business and what I think they need to do, and thats my in.My only hesitation is that "wanting to get our name out" makes us seem inexperienced (even though our company uses agents in different states). And if we phrase it as just "wanting to understand their web marketing strategy to better develop our service", well then they think we are going to apply their techniques to other companies. Any thoughts on this?

Really I would love to hear from people about what strategies they are using in order to utilize the "interview method". It seems to me that this method is one of the best for closing local clients, but I'm having trouble really dialing down how I want to try to get to the interview in the first place.