We follow this strategy for selling in our DMs and it almost always converts
Tim Frey and Steph break down their four-step DM strategy for booking sales calls: start with personalized messages, build rapport, uncover pain points, then bridge to a call or video. They share dos and don'ts, how to manage a sales team using this approach, and track what converts.
Chapters
Where most business owners go wrong is that they either have a script to their following and they don't ad lib at all. So it might be like, that's a great goal. Tell me more about your problems. Like, it feels really robotic and you're going to lose people in that conversation.
A lot of the time. People, they never cut from rapport, asking questions to finding out their problems and then offering a solution. This is key. So if you have a script or you're ad libbing or however you're doing this, you need to have a process to take them from. Hey, I have this problem too. Obviously the next step is to book a call and scale session.
We know a lot of people making a lot of money in dms. We know a lot of people booking a lot of calls and those calls make a lot of money for people. So it definitely still works.
Welcome to episode 87 of the Success School podcast. Before we go any further, guys, if you are here for the first time, hit that subscribe button. Our podcast managers have been up our ass about this, so we need to get that subscriber number up. Otherwise I'm going to get fired and you're going to have a new co host on the show. Steph, how are you feeling?
Tim is our marketing manager and he is actually in trouble. So please, guys, if you, you know, have any shred of like, respect, like I know you guys adore Tim, please help him out and give us a subscribe.
They do.
I get lots of messages about how much they meaningful. So deep and meaningful.
Alrighty, so we're going to hit our personal updates. So we bought a ranch and we went there this weekend, which was super nice. We were driving our caravan around and testing different spots. The spots were 3 to 5 meters apart on different angles. And we're just testing out where we're going to put our house, which was super nice. Dogs were out. We were hunting for protein. Couldn't find any protein to hunt, but it was incredible. Look forward to sharing the updates of the ranch with you guys. But I feel very out of my depth as a man on a ranch. I have no idea what to do and how to do ranch stuff. So we go, did I do man stuff?
You shot some arrows as well?
Yeah, shot some arrows, shot some guns. That was pretty cool. I think, like once we've actually got to fix something like major or if something goes wrong, I'm going to be like, up shit creek.
Yeah. So Australian gets a ranch becomes the most. Becomes the most Australian person ever.
What's up with you.
What's up with me? I have recently assumed a new role in our company. Oh, so not just Head Chef.
Not Head Chef.
Not just.
You're like Apprentice Chef.
Apprentice Chef.
You're cook. Like, I think it's a cook. Yeah. Oh, you can't call yourself a chef.
Okay, so Head Chef, chief of coaching, and now head of sales. Sales manager.
I think we've taken coaching 50. 50 now. So you're not even achieving coaching.
I'm basically just Jack of all trades in our company, Head of sales. So I've taken on the role of sales manager and I think this is kind of interesting to talk about because I didn't want to. To think of the. Not something that neither of us really wanted to take the role on. And originally we kind of thought, well, we have actually previously advertised for the role.
Yeah.
But it doesn't feel like it would be that hard. And so we just thought, oh, look, let's just give it a try. Roll out the process. And what sales manager requires in our company is every day we do 15 minute daily huddles with our sales team. Keep everyone on track, get everyone super accountable. And immediately. I've been doing it for one week. Immediately better results. Immediately everybody's doing the work. The person who needed to do the work the most apparently was actually me. So it's been awesome to have the accountability with the team because it forces me to get the work done. And I have no doubt that by the time this podcast airs, our sales process, teams, management, social media followings, everything's going to be growing and I'm just super excited.
Let's get this a little bit actionable and take away for the crew.
Yes.
So what are some things you've implemented as sales manager? Captain Big Dick with the name over there. So like, what can someone listening take away from this that they can go and implement in their business right away?
Yeah. So I think like, if you're outsourcing, if you have, if you have a sales team, it's really important that you're regularly finding out what the objections are, that you're regularly touching base, that you're regularly optimizing the sales processes. So, for example, watching calls back, providing feedback on how to frame up a new way of saying something like sales is just language. So a lot of it is group refinement. Another whole part of it is KPIs. So what do we need to do to get that person across the line? Who do we need to follow up with this week? Who's in our pipeline Daily cleanup of CRM systems, new processes getting rolled out. So, you know, if something's not working, for example, let's say that we're reaching out to all new followers on our social media and all the new followers we've had lately have been unideal men from countries that we don't work with. Then it means that I can go to our head of marketing who is a very handsome man sitting across from me.
I'm looking around where, who's that? Someone in here.
I can go to head of marketing and I can say, hey, these follower ads are not working. Can you please optimize them?
They're actually not.
And they were, they weren't working. And so it's just been really. I think you need hands on deck when it comes to sales because sales teams notoriously as well are a little bit, I would say two things.
One, they need hand holding.
They're needy.
Yeah.
They love to talk and touch base. They can sometimes cut corners a lot.
Yeah.
And so it's been really nice just to have hands on deck. Everybody doing the work, everybody like optimizing every single day. I think, I genuinely think sales has been our constraint for a little while. I genuinely think that we're going to be able to double ourselves in the next 12 months.
I'm super excited for it. Let's double ourselves. So we're going to get into the topic today. So we're speaking about sales, speaking about sales. We're actually speaking about selling in the dm. So we're going to give you guys our cold hard secrets about selling in the dm. So you can sell on landing page, you can sell on the phone or you can sell in dm. They're the main ways you can sell on stage as well. But not many people do that and not many people do that very well. So we're going to give you guys the four on one on selling in dm. So essentially in terms of effectiveness, I believe zoom calls are the most effective way of selling. Second most effective way of selling is on the phone. Like actual, you call someone like old school, then text message DM and then on landing page. And that would be my order of preference from, you know, most effective to least effective. We're going to go through dm. So how we use DMS in successful is essentially to book a call. We don't do too much selling in the dm. So that's the, the variation that I want to give you here. Selling in the dm, like asking someone to make a payment without actually Ever speaking to you requires a lot of trust. If you don't have trust, you're going to not do very well. Selling in the DMs, asking people for money. We have found, just as a general like overview here, selling in the DM has gotten harder in the last couple of years because there is a lack of trust in the market and there's a lot of scammers and there's a lot of scammers in business coaching. So it doesn't work super well. Anything I missed there in the intro?
Hell of a lot of like people doing it. I think more and more people have learned that there is money to be made in DMs and so a couple of good people figure it out, then everyone tries to do it, then everyone does it really badly. And then Instagram has changed its rules on, you know, it's made it harder, Instagram's made it harder to have conversations in DMs. And so, yeah, definitely, it's definitely gotten harder, but it's not impossible. We know a lot of people making a lot of money in dms. We know a lot of people booking a lot of calls and those calls make a lot of money for people. So it definitely still works.
Speaking of getting calls booked, we're going to give you a step by step strategy. I'm going to go through steps one and three, Steph's going to go through two and four. So the first step by step strategy on how to make sales in the DMs is you actually need to start conversations. Shock horror. A lot of people are like, why am I not getting booked in the DMs? And they're not actually messaging anyone. You need to take the first step. So when you message someone in the DM and the first message, you want to make it as personal as possible within the limitations of your business. So we message people in the DMs and we, we literally put a ton of effort. Takes us about five to 10 minutes to do every first message in the DMS. So we look up the person, we find out some information about them, then we customize the first message to them. I want to give you guys a stat and a KPI. So let's say you are sending a hundred of these opening messages or intro messages. We want to have a reply rate of 40% or as close to, if it is not that either your profile sucks or the message is bad. And one of the two. And a funny story, I was watching a LinkedIn training last night and they were talking about DMing from LinkedIn, which can be the same process here. And they were like, if your process looks like a scammer, they're not going to reply to you. And I thought to myself, I'm going to go check my profile. And I looked at my profile and all the endorsements and recommendations I have was Tim was an amazing strength coach and not a business and now he's.
A seven figure business coach. And it's like that was the, that was the gap, that was the bridge.
So if your profile looks scammy, you're not going to get a reply. So go through Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever it is and then customize that intro message that miss anything. And what's step two?
No, I didn't miss anything at all. Okay, so the second part is. And off the back of yours you kind of said this, guys, I love to treat Instagram DMS and honestly, any DM conversation I'm having, whether it's in Facebook, LinkedIn, it literally doesn't matter where it is. You have to remember that these are people, these are human beings. And so where most business owners go wrong is that they either have a script to their following and they don't ad lib at all. So it might be like, that's a great goal to tell me more about your problems. Like it feels really robotic and you're going to lose people in that conversation. I like to imagine that I've just walked up to somebody on the street that's. This is my favorite way of having a conversation. So someone just. If I've said hello and had a really beautiful intro message that has lots of personal touches and somebody comes back to me and they sometimes put a wall of text or maybe even three voice drops.
Oh, fuck.
I'm not your least favourite thing. Yeah. If someone comes back and they've given me three voice long voice drops, if I go back and I kind of go up with the thumbs up of that sounds like a great goal. And just move on to the next question. Yeah, I move on to the next question. They're not going to buy in at all. They just, that's a very warm lead. Somebody who's just come in and they've exposed their heart to you or they've given you a lot of information, that's an incredibly warm lead. You should treat that person just with a little bit more respect. So I like to imagine if you walked up to that person, you said, hey, I really love your outfit. And they were like, oh my God, you know, my boyfriend just dumped me in. That's a really nice compliment. Thank you so much. Blah, blah. You wouldn't go, cool, nice goals and then go into the next question like, you're like, I'm so sorry, you sound.
Like a serial killer.
Legit. You'd be like, I'm so sorry that you're experiencing that. You know, it's really, really tough. I think you're doing absolutely amazing. Look, I'd love to see if I can help you out. What are your goals? Just be a human being when you're having a conversation and compliments always work, so just stick with compliments. Number three.
So we've got the opening message. We're building some rapport. We're having a chit chat and some conversation with the person regarding what they said. We obviously want to find out what their pain points are and then offer a solution. Okay. If you never find the pain points, you're going to have nothing to offer a solution about. And if you never offer a solution, AKA jump on a scale session with our team and we can see how we can help you, you're never going to get the call booked. And I think this is a lot of the time, people, they never cut from rapport asking questions to finding out their problems and then offering a solution. This is key. So if you have a script or you're ad libbing or however you're doing this, you need to have a process to take them from, hey, I have this problem to obviously the next step is to book a call in the scale session. So it's the bridge between problem and solution.
Yeah, so I think, you know on that guys, when deep diving problems, it could just be like cool. Like the first thing you have to understand is where they're going. So the goal, the next thing is like the problem. So you know, why aren't you at the goal? What's stopping you from getting to the goal? What have you tried for getting to goal? These are really good questions to figure out where they're stuck, stagnant or it's not working and then going, hey, like I have this thing, I think I could probably help you out. Do you want to jump on a quick call or let me send you some more info. If you are selling in the DMs, here's a quick hack that we weren't going to talk about but I will definitely help you out with Today is any kind of video, we call it a bsl, but any kind of video that you can pop into the chat. So if you're directly selling in DMS, let's say you've got a $500 product and look guys, you can sell high ticket in dm. It would not be my recommendation. You were going to get. You are going to spend a lot, a lot, a lot of time pitching and not get many sales calls booked or any sales through. Sorry. But if you're selling something under $1,000, you can probably get away with selling in DM if you optimize this process. So once they give you the problems, then you would present your offer in a video that has a lot of touch points, a lot of sell points, a lot of proof, a lot of stuff like that. And then you'd have follow up sequences. Okay? So just make sure that when you're presenting the offer, the thing we see often go wrong is people just present walls and walls and walls of text about all the inclusions and stuff. No, no, no, you're not selling them in the dm. You're selling them with information that's elsewhere. So either a landing page or a sales video that they can come back and they can ask you questions about. Okay. And then last but not least, make sure you're offer that's right for them. Okay. The easiest thing if you do sales calls is to offer a sales call. Like that is the cause. It's just the easiest next steps, like let's just find out a little bit more about each other, see if I can offer you some advice or help and if I'm not the right person, I'll point you in the right direction. Easy. Next step solution is getting calls booked.
All right, so we're going to go through a couple of what not to do. So Steph and I are going to do two each on things we have seen go terribly in the dm. So the first one for me is acting like a robot and just replying like a robot off a script. So let's say you've got a script and you just copy and pasting and going bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And you're giving no acknowledgement to what they're saying. You're not going to get anything booked. They're going to be like this sounds fucking weird. And this person is a serial killer. So don't be a robot.
That's my number one you've got here. Don't send huge voice messages, which I love and I totally agree with, especially if you are selling. So look, if you're having a pow wow with your best mate, send three, four, five minute voice messages, whatever. The worst thing that Instagram did was to allow more than one minute voice messages. Dude, sometimes we get five or six minute voice messages. Stop that stuff, okay? Especially if you're trying to sell. All right? The people who win in any kind of sales and marketing are the people who can do it the simplest and the quickest ever. People don't want tons and tons and tons of information. They want the information that makes sense to them. So keep it short, keep it sweet, keep it punchy, and make sure that you use language that is assertive as. As in to say, assume the sale.
The third one is be methodical about the numbers and how many DMs you send. So if you send a hundred or you engage in a hundred conversations, track that. How many people reply, how far does it go? Do you book calls? Do you not book calls? Do you make a sale? Rather than being like, oh, DM sucks. It doesn't work for me. It doesn't work. It feels like shit. It's so hard. Yada, yada, insert feeling. Whatever it is. You've got to be very methodical about DMs, like, we are. We track everything. We track how many messages we send, we track the reply rate, we track how many calls we get booked, we track how far the conversation goes in dm. We track everything so we can optimize it week to week. I think a lot of people go out with that. This is hard work. Here's my feelings. This doesn't work. And then move on from there.
Any marketing tactic that you deploy to be able to get sales calls booked or make sales, regardless of if it's on Facebook ads, whether it's podcasting, Whether it's Insta DMs, you will have to track the data to this depth regardless. So whichever one you decide to use is the one and use the one that is most that makes the most sense for you. But you are going to have to track this depth at some point. So don't think, oh, it's just too hard to do that. At some point, you're going to not be able to avoid doing this, especially if you work with us as clients.
All right, guys, we're going to move on to a new topic on the podcast. We're going to be commenting on the news. Okay? And I'm going to give you guys some news that's going on in the world, and Steph and I are going to give our take on what's happening. So the first one is the Doge incident with asking American Federal employees to send an email to their manager of the five things they completed for the last week. And, Steph, let me tell you, there was lefty outrage galore about this. So I want to start off and ask you, can you see where the outrage comes from? Can you, like, understand the outrage?
Let's just take. Let's just wind it back a step for anyone who's not following American political news.
Yeah.
What happened?
So Elon Musk is in charge of Doge there. It's basically targeting government waste. And they did find that there were, I think, like, during COVID 96% of federal employees were working from home, and a good percentage of them were not actually working, not actually doing anything. And they were basically going into the office. So they would go on the last day of the month and then the first day of the new month. So there would be one day in each month, and then they wouldn't go to the office for two months. There was a lot of waste going on. So he's literally come out and said, hey, can you just send your boss 5 bullet points of what you accomplished last week? And if you don't do it, that's a sign that you don't want to be here and you're going to get fired?
Basically, yeah. And when you told me about this, I thought, but isn't that just the job?
Yeah.
Like, I. If I ask, like, isn't that just like any job ever? Like, if I went. If I work, look at, you know, even when I work back in corporate, and I went into the office and my. And they put, you know, broad news policy, and then we had to report to our manager every afternoon and let them know what we got done in the day. That just feels like a part of the job description. That's. That's not something to be outraged about. That's not something to micromanage. It's to make sure that the company is thriving. And the company being the government is to make sure the company is thriving, that we have no additional waste. Like, we would 100% run our business like that if we thought that there was waste going on in our company. And in fact, sometimes we do when we feel like maybe people aren't pulling their weight or we want to optimize to make sure that we're. Our teams are spending their time in the most vital places. I don't think there should be any outrage. I don't really understand the outrage from a business sense.
Yeah. I think from our perspective, we run a business based on outcomes. Yeah. So we're very big on outcomes. We're very big on KPIs, but it made me realize a lot of businesses, companies and jobs are not. It's just punch in, punch out, clock in, clock out. Who really cares what gets done? We encourage all of our clients to run their businesses on KPIs and numbers. And if team and staff are not hitting KPIs and numbers, we need to find people that do because that grows the business. I didn't think that was outrageous. Like, should people have a job and potentially not be doing the work? Like, is that accepted in today's.
I think maybe in big corporate. And so I think that, you know, I think people hate change. And if they've been getting away with murder, they love it, they're enjoying it. You know, it's easy, easy. They hate change because it's going to actually make them more accountable. Of course it's going to be outrage. And that would have been in any company ever. They would have been outraged about it for sure. It's not wrong, though. I don't, I don't think it's wrong. I think it's right. And the reason that we get our clients to this is not because we're micromanagers. It's not because we want our clients to be micromanagers either. It's because profit is king. And there is nothing worse. And we've experienced this time and time and time again. There's nothing worse than knowing that you're paying someone a wage out of the money that you could be putting into your family, putting into charities that you love, putting back into your community to not do the job. There is literally nothing worse. And, and so many companies go under because of bloat, because of this sort of bloat that goes on within the corporate structures where middle management just aren't in control of the data or the numbers. And I think that as we move forward with today's economic climate, we're going to have no choice.
I go through our numbers and how much we're spending at Success School monthly almost like every fortnight, and I'm like, do we need this? Can we cut this? Are we using this technology? Are we using this subscription? Is this person getting the most out of the hours they're doing? We look at all the roles, we do all that type of stuff, but I realize that's not normal across the board.
Yeah, it's not normal. And it took us a long time to learn. But if you're listening to this podcast, I would highly recommend that you have just an Excel spreadsheet.
Of.
And when I say spreadsheet, it's just literally one, one page of all the subscriptions that you have and then just check in once a month ago. Am I still using those subscriptions? Subscriptions, because it is so easy to have all of a sudden thousands of dollars per month just flying out the door for stuff that you're not even using. And if you are under a million dollars a year right now and you're listening to this podcast, and honestly, probably if you're under $5 million a year, please do not buy annual subscriptions.
Yeah.
Oh, don't do it.
Kills me when I see it on our clients. P. Ls.
Yeah, same client's like, oh, no, but I just paid up front for the year. And I'm like, no, no, because I say 4%. Yeah, you say 4%, but you got locked into a contract that or you've paid for stuff that you may month's time because you don't know what the future is going to bring. Things change. AI is rapidly increasing its power. You know, you might not even need to use that service anymore. So please, guys, make sure that you're only buying the month by month subscriptions.
All right, guys, we're going to get into a listener question today, and I'm going to pull this paper up to my face so I can read this one word for word. So this is a question for Steph first, because this is an AI question, which is incredible. So Ben asks, should I empower my clients to use AI or will I make myself less valuable as a coach? Great question. Because we've had a lot of fear about AI and a couple of weeks ago, we launched our AI episode and we had a little bit of outrage about it. And we can talk about that later, Steph. But, Steph. Yeah? What's your answer here?
Yeah, look, I. I had this thought, it crossed my mind, I'll be honest. I was like, ah, you know, they won't need us as much. Like, you know, there's that fear that comes up and that scarcity that can pop into anyone's mind when thinking about AI. I don't think anyone's going to be free of, of scarcity when it comes to AI and having that thought. But we would be doing our clients a disservice if we didn't teach them how to use AI you know, and Ben is also a business coach, and so I think the best thing you can do is empower your clients with all of the tools. Our number one thing is how do we get our clients completely self sufficient without actually needing us so that they never at a point in time where they are waiting on somebody else to help them make a decision in their business. Like that's our number one goal is like we want you to be so sovereign that you know exactly what you need to do and that you are totally confident to be able to make all the decisions in your business. And part of that is learning how to use AI. And so does that maybe make us irrelevant in 10, 15 years time? Yeah, potentially. And we'll track that and measure that and monitor that. And if we have to make a new decision and a pivot, then we'll make that decision pivot. But I'm not going to hold back people's growth. I got into this to help people and so that's. That was my answer for this.
I love that answer. And if you guys got some value from this episode, please let us know if you have a question that you want us to go through on the podcast. Also, please let us know. And always, guys, subscribe to the show because that is our most important metric besides you amazing people watching the show. Thanks guys.
Thanks guys.
