THIS is How to Effectively Slide Into Somebody’s DMs
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 4th, 2023
Today, I’m excited to share with you a conversation I had with one of my coaching clients who’s been struggling with cold DMs, emails, and calls. He was having a tough time getting people to respond, let alone convert into paying customers.
But fear not, because in a previous newsletter, I laid out a playbook that shows how to go from a low-paying job to a million-dollar business in just three to five years.
One of the key strategies is to develop a high-value skill and find prospects to deliver that value to..and one way to do that is through cold outreach.
Now, we all know that cold outreach can work, but it’s not easy. Most people underestimate the number of people they need to reach out to before they start seeing results.
When I started my window washing business, I had to knock on hundreds of doors to get just two yeses. But those two yeses turned into referrals…and that’s how we grew the business.
So, the key is to get your foot in the door and deliver excellent value, which can lead to more referrals down the road.
Take the time to build relationships and understand your prospects’ needs before pitching your solution.
And always remember, it’s a numbers game, so keep at it and don’t give up!
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“When we show interest in somebody else, they feel compelled to show interest in us.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What is up everybody? Welcome back to the podcast as always. Super excited to see you, super excited to have you here. I want to share a conversation that I had with a coaching client just the other day. Actually it was yesterday. He is cold DMing or cold emailing or cold calling or cold knocking on doors. He’s doing some variation of that where he is DMing people on LinkedIn and he is really struggling to get people to respond to his DMs and then actually to convert into high paying customers or just even low paying customers or even just people who respond, right? And in the playbook that I laid out a couple of weeks back in one of the hyper focused entrepreneur newsletters, we, we laid out exactly how I would go from making like a low salary, minimum wage job up to a million dollars in about three to five years. And one of the strategies in there is to develop a high value skill and then you need to go and find prospects to deliver that value too. And one of the ways that you can do that is cold emails where you just email somebody out of the blue.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:04]:
You try to slide into somebody’s DMs. You cold call, right? We know that these things work, but when you are reaching out to somebody cold, it is very, very hard to get a response. It is very difficult to get them to the point where they’re going to convert into a customer. It’s just purely a numbers game and most people drastically underestimate how many people they need to reach out to before they start getting people to respond to them. For me, when we started our window washing company, I would go and just knock on doors cold and our hit rate was maybe like two houses out of 100. So it was abysmal, it was getting a lot of no’s. But then you turn those two yeses into two referrals and now those two referrals and that’s really how we grew. So you really just got to get your foot in the door and if you deliver excellent value, you can leverage that into the future through referrals.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:54]:
However, cold emailing, cold DMing, it can be effective. However, from what I’ve seen, most people are doing it completely wrong. So on this one, on one coaching call, we dove into this guy’s script that he was sending out to people and then we dove into his email automation and like the follow up sequences and everything that he was doing to try and figure out why it wasn’t converting. And it was pretty obvious honestly, as soon as we looked at it, it was very clear. See, the niche that this guy was in is in healthcare and he’s an investor. So he’s trying to talk to healthcare professionals, doctors and try to turn them on to real estate investing and say, hey, come invest with me through real estate. I’m also a doctor. This is a great avenue for us to explore because there’s so many great tax benefits.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:42]:
There’s cash flow appreciation. All doctors should be invested in this thing, right? So he’s got a great product. I believe strongly in the product that he is offering. However, the way that he’s going about reaching out to these people and it’s one that I see I get hundreds of DMs every day on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, from people with a very similar ask, not about investing per se, but a lot of people want to do copywriting for me. A lot of people want to create short videos for me. A lot of people want to do thumbnails for me over and over and over. And the message that they send almost immediately turns people off. They don’t even understand that they are dead in the water because their first interaction with the cold client is a negative one.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:25]:
So we’re looking at this guy’s DM that he would send out to people and a couple of things stood out. First, in the very first sentence or the very first couple of sentences, he says, hey, so and so, thanks so much for connecting. Now I know you’re busy, so I’m going to keep this short and to the point, okay? So first mistake, do not qualify this by saying, hey, I know you’re busy. I’m going to keep this short and to the point because what you are telling me is that you are in a rush to get into bed with me. This is not about respecting my time. This is about you being lazy and not wanting to invest time into building a relationship with me that’s going to take maybe days, weeks, months, years that you can then convert me into a customer. So you’re telling me that you are lazy and you’re trying to play it off as though you’re respecting my time. I don’t buy it, okay? You’re just trying to send out as many DMs as possible.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:20]:
So that’s the very first thing. Second thing about that message when you say, hey, I want to be respectful of your time, so I’ll just get right to it is I know that there’s a pitch coming. You have shown zero interest in me in understanding my problems and what I’m looking for. You are just trying to throw out what you do as a solution that you hope sticks. And because I don’t think you really understand or know me and what I do, I don’t have any faith that you have a solution that can actually help me. Because if you’re reaching out to me and you’re like the best thumbnail creator in the world, the best shorts editor in the world, if those are problems that I think I need to solve, I will go out searching for the best thumbnail editor or the best graphic designer. I will go looking for those things. So the very first thing when you’re reaching out is I don’t yet know that I have a problem.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:12]:
Okay? So that’s number one. You are coming in assuming that you have a problem to my or the solution to my problem. I don’t think I have a problem yet. And now you got to convince me in this cold DM that I do have a problem. But the problem is I’m not going to read that far because I don’t truly think I have a problem. So I’m like, oh, this guy just wants to pitch me something, some copywriting. Don’t need it. I’m out.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:31]:
Peace. Because you didn’t take the time to get to know me and build a relationship. So then what followed in this guy’s DM is five or six paragraphs, pretty beefy paragraphs about, hey, here’s who we are and what we do. Here’s why I think you would love it here. Let’s hop on a call to discuss right away. You’ve just given me homework. Effectively. You’ve given me a book to read, and then I have to learn about your company, which I didn’t care about in the first place because you’re reaching out to me.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:58]:
So now why should I care? I wasn’t looking for this. You’re just thrusting yourself on me. And it’s like the guy at the party who’s like, hey, here’s what I do. And it’s like, I don’t care. I don’t know who you are. That’s cool for you, but I don’t know why you’re going into such great detail about your job and everything when I’m just over here trying to eat chips and guacamole. Leave me alone. So what you can do differently when you’re going into these DMs is understand that you’re not going to convert them on the first message.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:27]:
And so stop trying to do that. Stop trying to get me into bed on the first DM. Instead, your only goal when you walk up to the girl at the bar or the guy at the bar isn’t to be like, you want to go to bed? Or do you want to get married? It’s not about that end state. It’s about just getting them to respond favorably to you. Right? Just get them to respond. So be funny, be charismatic, be entertaining, be interested, be intriguing, but get them to respond. Because until you can get them to respond, you’re never going to be able to sell them your product. And the way that you get people to respond is by being generally interested in them.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:03]:
Pay attention. If you’re on LinkedIn, instead of sending out 100 DMs every day, find five. Do some research on their profile, find some areas of commonality, and then reach out and share the insight that you had. But be brief about it. When you think about the text messages that you send to your friends and family, are you sending books? No. Whenever somebody I love sends me a book, I’m like, oh, shit, I’m in trouble. They’re mad at me. I did something bad.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:33]:
Right. That’s not how we communicate. Right. And so don’t set off those alarm bells in people’s minds by sending them books initially. Just reach out and say, hey, Jim, I was looking at your profile. I see that you volunteer with this program. I think that’s really cool. I did something similar with this program, love to connect and learn more about what got you interested in helping that particular thing, right? Like that’s just off the top of my head, a terrible example.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:56]:
But what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to point out that you have paid attention to what they do. You’re trying to draw a commonality to something that you’re interested in, and then you’re opening the door with a question, right? So you’re getting them to respond. And this all takes place in maybe one, maybe two sentences. It has to be quick. And so if you’re wasting space with things like, hey, thanks for connecting no, it’s wasted space. Again, get straight to the point. Joe psyched on what you’re building over here at this thing. I just checked out your blog.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:33]:
This article was amazing. What are your thoughts about X-Y-Z? Boom. Now we’re having a conversation, and now through that conversation, people reciprocate. This is one of the six weapons of influence that we know about from Robert Chaldini’s book, Influence the Science of Persuasion. One of them is reciprocity. So when we show interest in somebody else, they feel compelled to show interest in us. So now they’re going to go to our profile and they’re going to look at our website, and they’re going to look at what we do. And if it’s something that is mildly interesting to them, they’re going to ask questions about it, right? So our resources at our profile and our website, they need to be really good so that people are actually compelled to ask us more about it.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:13]:
And if you do this right, then you are going to forge a relationship with this Bill or this Ted or this Susan. And then over time, as you’re engaging with them and you’re seeing behind the scenes of the problems that they’re having in their business and their jobs now, as a friend, you can suggest, hey, I’m doing this thing, doing some thumbnail creations. And I see that you’re starting to build out your social media presence. It looks amazing. This is exactly what we do, is like helping design thumbnails that attract a ton of viewers and get incredibly high click through rates and all this stuff. And I would love just to throw it actually, don’t even say, I would love to throw some together for you. Just throw them together and say, hey, here are some examples. Check them out, use them.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:56]:
I’d love to see what you think about them and how they converted for you. Right. So just give them a test run. Let me know what you thought you do that, then you’re going to have a much higher conversion rate than just reaching out and dumping on people, because the reason you’re dumping on people is because you’re lazy, and you’re just trying to get me to bed as fast as possible. And people realize that, and they don’t want to go to bed right away. They’re just like, don’t do this to me. It’s super annoying. And we know this doesn’t work.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:23]:
We know this is annoying because as I was sitting down with my student, and I was like, why do you do this? Why do you think this works? Do you respond to messages like these? And he’s like, no, I get a bunch of these every day, and I hate them. I was like, you hate them, but you are sending them, so why is that? And until somebody points this out for us, it can be we are just oblivious to our behaviors. This happens all the time. We’re all guilty of this. It’s like we’re doing stuff that we ourselves hate. But for some reason, like, the gurus and marketing experts or whoever are telling us this works, and this is what we should be doing. But if it doesn’t pass the initial sniff test of like, does this piss you off? Then don’t do it. You are the best.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:08]:
What is it the best consumer that you personally know? So just go with your gut of like, does this work for you? No. And that’s not for everything. There are some exceptions, but generally speaking, I find that to be a very easy way just to know, are my marketing efforts on point or not? Do they feel sleazy? Is it the type of stuff that I hate when people do it? Don’t do it. If it is, don’t do it. So that’s going to do it for me. Guys, I’m a little bit up on a soapbox. I got a little ranty on this one. I hope it brought some value and not just, like, the ramblings of a disgruntled old man, like, get off my law and you damn DMRs.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:45]:
But I do hope this helps you as you’re reaching out to convert better as you’re building your businesses. If this is like a light bulb moment for you, then let me know. Shoot me a comment. Shoot me a review of the podcast. And in that, just say, hey, I’m guilty of this, but I’m going to change my ways. I’m going to repent. So I’d love to hear from you guys, truly. That’s really the goal here, is just to create a two way conversation.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:07]:
So reach out. Let me know what you thought of the episode, and until next time, stay happy, folks. My friend.
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