#219 - Is closing in the DMs more work than sales calls (and how to fix it)

For those of you who are now trying to swap out their sales calls, trying to use the DMs as another way to talk to people, to engage with people and to make sales. How's it going for you? Does this feel lighter, easier, more manageable? Or do you feel like all of a sudden you are now chained to your phone way more than ever before?

Hey, everybody, is K here from. Hello, funnels, and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Today I want to sit down virtually with you and I want to talk about something that has been bugging me for years, and that is this sort of promise that has been made that it is actually easier and faster and way less hassle to be selling, closing, chatting in the DMs than it is to do it on sales calls. Now, as a hugely introverted person, I am definitely all for any time. We can swap out literally anything for speaking to people, particularly people I don't actually know yet. But there has to be the payoff, right? Like, it has to actually make sense. And I believe you're listening to this episode. You've probably started to notice there's been a bit of creep when it comes to doing things in the DMs, and while it might be great that you've been able to say goodbye to sales calls to sell your programs, because let's be fair, most people don't love them. Have you actually swapped them for something better? So today I want to talk about that. I want to talk about selling, closing, warming up, engaging in the DMs, the problems that it actually seems to cause, and a potential much better, much easier, much more introvert friendly solution. So if you're ready, let's dive right on in.

All right. All right. So welcome everybody. I kind of wish this was live because I would love to be able to ask the question that is one hands up, who likes sales calls? Feel free to DM me or if you're watching the video, to comment below. So, yeah, question number one. Who actually likes doing sales calls? There? I know there are some people who do love them, some people who love having those conversations who are great at them. You guys, I have so much respect for you, but that's not my reality and not the reality of most of my clients. That's why they come to us. Hello, Funnels. To learn about how to automate things. Okay, so question number two. For those of you who do sales calls to sell your programs and offers, who has tried to either reduce the number of sales calls or even swap them out completely for closing in the DMs. So again, obviously I can't see you, but let me know in the comments. You know, DM us over @ hello Finals. Let me know. I would love to know. And then the third question is for those of you who are now trying to swap out their sales calls, trying to use the DMs as another way to talk to people, to engage with people and to make sales, how's it going for you? How is that feeling? Does this feel like something that is lighter, easier, more manageable? Or do you feel like all of a sudden you are now chained to your phone way more than ever before, or you're like almost giving yourself rsi trying to respond to all of these comments, you're going crazy trying to remember who said what and where. And it's actually has become something that's way more hassle than it seems to be worth. So again, let me know below the video or DMS over at HelloFunnels. So I'm gonna make a bunch of assumptions here because obviously this isn't live and I can't actually hear your answers. But I would assume for most of you that, yes, that is the case because that is what I'm hearing from, from people within our programs, from people that I'm just trying to peers. Things like that, like closing in the dms, it appeared as this holy grail solution to not having to do sales calls, because, let's face it, nobody loves those. But however, that's actually for many people, has just created way more work. So rather than now having a calendar full of calls that you dread, you now have an inbox full of questions. And it's also, for a lot of people, not converting that well. And there's a few reasons for that, that. And one of them is just the lack of momentum, the lack of cadence. Because when someone feels like they can just respond to you whenever and when it's convenient for you, which is great, they do that. But then you have to respond back to them. And maybe like is quite often the case for us. Maybe you're on one side of the world and they're on another side of the world, so they respond to you when it's convenient. Sometime during their day, comes back to you, you're asleep, you respond to them when it's convenient for you, even if it's first thing in the morning, that's maybe like 12 hours later, then they're not going to see it for another 12 hours. And all of a sudden things slow down. And I think we all know if you've been in this world at all, that when you're having these conversations, when someone's reached out to you and said, you know, hey, I'm interested in working with you, or tell me more about your program, then you have to keep the cycle moving. You have to keep it going. If the speed drops and drops and drops, then so does momentum, so does the excitement. And all of a sudden they're like, maybe I won't get back to them. And you've missed that opportunity. So you've gone from someone who was really keen and excited, who was actually engaging with you, and because of the amount of time there was between the conversations back and forth, you've lost them. Or like, worst case, if you're like really onto it, you're now messaging people in the middle of the night or before you go to bed and first thing in the morning and multiple times throughout your day, which again is just a nightmare. So what do we do? Well, you've got a few options. Number one is just completely ignore them. Drop it as a strategy, go back to making sales calls. Number two is to change up your offer suite so that you don't have offers that are priced at a sort of level that requires a conversation or some kind of engagement one to one, before someone is feeling, you know, comfortable, safe, has enough commitment and engagement to be able to make that decision. That's another option, but again, not always a good one, depending on your business. Number three, hire someone to do it. I've done this before. We had a wonderful person managing our DMs, which was great, but it wasn't cheap. And also when we looked at the numbers, didn't necessarily increase the conversions from when we had no one managing our DMs. So when bringing on anyone to your team, obviously there's cost, there's a lot of time involved. You have to train them up, you have to be monitoring them. It has to be something that you are keeping an eye on, setting KPIs on. It has to be tracking all that stuff like it's a whole thing. It's not just a matter of going, hey, come in here, you look after this. I don't have to think about it anymore. You have to actually manage them, especially someone in a sales type role. So there's that, which again, some people works, some people not super appealing, might not be right for where you are in your business or the type of business that you want to run. So then we come up with option number four, and this is an option I always like to play with. And that is what if you could automate it? So think about it. In just the last six months alone, the rate that automation capability has increased thanks to things like AI is just insane. And if you also think about it, most of the conversations that you're having, like most of the questions that you're asking, responses you're getting, majority of it is probably something that you've actually, you've sat down and you've mapped it out and it's probably scripted. Like you're probably using canned responses to respond to people anyway, right? Like, you'd be crazy not to. Otherwise you're typing them out on this tiny little bloody keyboard all the time. It's super time consuming. So if you're already at a point where you've actually got a bit of a process and you've systemized that process, then all you're doing is copying and pasting back to someone and guess what? AI can do that. And they can do it better because AI can also customize that copy and paste, which again is probably something you're doing, but they can do it like that. So this was something that really, really excited me and that I've been playing with and testing and, you know, tweaking, perfecting over the last 60ish days. And we're actually going to be running a bonus live training on this inside Ecourse empire. Depending on when this episode comes out, it may have just been. In which case that it will be uploaded as a replay or it might be just about to drop. But where I'm going to literally walk all our amazing Ecos Empire students through how they can actually just install this into their current tech stack and use it in multiple different ways to help support them, to improve that process and to help to again automate it, free up the repetitive tasks while still creating something that feels really great to both parties. So what do you need to do? Like, if you were thinking about this, thinking like actually, you know what, these conversations, these questions that people are asking me, like whether they're asking, you know, they want to know more about your program. Right. Chances are that most of those questions, it's the same maybe three to four questions people are asking. Bonus tip. Go and answer those questions on the sales page. That's going to free up some time. But we also know that people don't like to actually read those. Sometimes they want to actually ask. So what if you could have a little bot that was preloaded that knew the answers to all these questions and was able to chat with people and answer them for them right away when they ask the questions, rather than waiting for you to get back to them 12 hours later. Would that be something that saved you a bunch of time with your closing in the DMs? Or what if you could take it a next step further? And what if you could actually use a bot to triage or qualify people who have started chats with you and make sure that you are only actually speaking to the people who have the highest intent, who are the ones who are the ideal client, who are great fit for your program, who are showing engagement. What if you could set up something that was almost like a filtering process so that you only had to jump in and have manual conversations with like 1 in 10, 1 in 20 of the people who are diving into your inbox. You could save yourself a bunch of time, but you could also keep those people motivated, excited, engaged, you know, rather than have them shoot off a question and wait and wait and wait and wait till you come back to them, what if you could have a bot asking them some follow up questions, getting some more details and doing it in a friendly, personal, on brand way. So again, that is something that you can now do and you don't need any crazy tools to do this. It definitely takes a bit of practice and tweaking to get the prompts right. But as I said, anyone listening to this is an ecosystem. We got you, we have perfected them and we'll be sharing them with you very soon. But the only tool you need to be able to do this is one you probably already have, and that is manychat. So manychat now have two really cool AI add ons. Try saying that 10 times fast that you can use in your flows. And one is they've just called it the AI node, Not very catchy, but it's basically just like a little block, like just like you would do normally in your manychat, where it might be like send this message or add this tag or whatever other action. There's now like a little AI block and inside that can house an entire conversation. So when people move to a certain point in an automation, like maybe they've opted in for something, then maybe you ask them a follow up question. If they respond to that follow up question, then maybe this is when the AI steps in and has a little chat, a little pre chat to see whether or not they are an ideal client, whether or not they're actually interested, and then if they are, hands it over to you, you can do that. You can load up that little node with just a little sequence of the kinds of questions you want to ask. You can give upload all the back information that they need. So like all your frequently asked questions, the tone, you can even tell it you what do you want it to say if someone says like hey, is this a bot? Because we want to be upfront about this, you can put all of that in and it will just run as this little like triage person. So it's the same as hiring yourself and a AI setter or instead of paying someone a salary to be copying and pasting these things, you can have a bot do it and do it like that. So clever. Another place that I, yeah, I've been loving them is also that FAQs type of thing. And this is where you would use that second ManyChat little tool which is it's able to have a trigger that is checking for intent. So you can set up a ManyChat automation that says like if someone asks a question about my program, so they DM you to ask a question about the program and it can tell they've done that and then you can tell them, give them all the information that it needs and some follow up questions and even what you want them to do at the end. So if maybe after somebody has gone through the sequence they've asked all their answers that says you got everything you need, maybe it gives them a discount code, maybe it sends them to a webinar or prompts them with like, hey, did you know we've got this VIP offer? Like, you know, the opportunities are endless and so fun and we've been geeking out on this hard. So lots of really cool things you can now do inside ManyChat. We've got a link below if you want to jump in. Get a free trial of ManyChat. You can click through, use our link, get a free trial, have a play. If you want some help with this, you want to actually see this, you know, the scripts and prompts and everything that we're using that we've been like refining over the last roughly three months to really make sure that the questions and the answers, they feel great, they move people along and you know, ironing out any bugs that can happen with anything that's AI. If you'd love to grab our prompts then make sure you come check out ecourse Empire apply. Come and join us. It will either be being dropped in live very soon or the replay will be in there already depending on the date of this episode. So I hope this has sparked some ideas of where maybe you could add a little bit of extra automation to help make both your life easier and your customer journey more smooth, faster, with less friction. Because that's really what the idea of these things are. If you give it a go, make sure you let us know. Just leave comment below this video or DM us over @ hello Funnels. And if you found this valuable, it would mean the world to me if you could either give us a thumbs up, shoot us a review, or even share it with a friend. Because that is how we help get the word out. So thank you so much for spending this last 15 minutes nerding out with me. I hope it has been valuable. And yeah, we'll be back next time with even more nerdy tips and tricks. I'll see you then. Bye.