Stop Selling In Your DMs

Most people treat their DMs like a closing room. Someone shows interest, asks a question, or comments on a post, and the instinct is to move them toward a sale as fast as possible. The pitch goes out. The offer lands. And the conversation either converts or goes cold.

That instinct makes sense on the surface. Someone is already talking to you, they are already warm, so why not use that window to sell?

The problem is that selling in that moment is almost always the wrong move, and it backfires in a way that is hard to see because the damage is invisible. The person does not argue with you. They do not say the pitch felt pushy. They just quietly disappear, or they keep circling without ever committing, and you never know exactly why.

Here is what is actually happening.

When someone slides into your DMs, or comments on your content, or asks a question in your group, they are not signaling that they are ready to buy. They are signaling that they are curious. Those are two completely different states, and they require two completely different responses.

Curiosity wants to be fed. It wants information, context, relief from uncertainty. When you respond to curiosity with a sales pitch, you are answering the wrong question, and the person on the other end can feel that even if they cannot name it.

What they actually need in that moment is something called a give, which is an answer, a framework, a resource, a genuine piece of useful information delivered with no strings attached and no ask buried inside it.

This is where most people hesitate. There is a widespread belief in the coaching and consulting world that if you give away too much, people will not need to hire you. The logic feels reasonable. If the information is free, why pay?

That belief has the mechanism exactly backwards.

When you give someone a real, complete, useful answer to their question, something called perceived competence goes up, which is their internal read of how much you actually know and whether you are someone worth trusting. And perceived competence is one of the most powerful purchase drivers that exists, because people do not hire coaches and consultants for information alone. They hire them for proximity to someone who clearly knows what they are doing.

The information you give away is not the product. It is the proof that the product is real.

Think of it this way. If you walk into a restaurant and the chef sends out a free amuse-bouche, something tiny and extraordinary that makes you say "what was that," you do not think, well I already got a taste so I do not need to order a meal. You think, I need to see what else this person can do. The sample does not replace the meal. It makes you want the meal more.

That is the structural dynamic in play when you answer someone's question with genuine depth instead of a pitch.

What actually happens at scale is even more interesting. The person asking the question is almost never the only one watching. In a group, in a thread, across a DM that gets screenshotted and shared, dozens or hundreds of people are observing how you respond to questions. When you give a real answer, all of those people update their read of you at the same time.

This is why the behavior compounds in a way that a direct sales approach never can. A pitch converts one person or it does not. A genuine, generous answer to a question builds trust with everyone who sees it, and that trust creates inbound pull that the sender never had to manufacture.

The example from the video makes this concrete. A woman on a sales call said she had been evaluating four different people and chose the one who gave the most away for free, specifically because the others were protecting and selling their information while this person was just answering questions and pouring into the community. She said, if this is what he gives away for free, I can only imagine what it is like to work with him.

That is the mechanism out loud.

She is telling you exactly what happened inside her head. The free information did not satisfy her need to hire someone. It amplified it. It made the gap between "I can read his content" and "I can actually work with him" feel worth paying for, because the content itself proved the value was real.

The practical shift is simple. When someone asks you a question, answer it completely. Not a teaser. Not a "great question, book a call and we'll go deep on that." The actual answer. The framework. The thing that would genuinely help them if they walked away and never talked to you again.

That last part is worth sitting with, because it is where most people flinch. What if they do walk away? What if they get the answer and never come back?

Some will. And those are people who were never going to pay you anyway, because they were only looking for a single answer to a single question. The people who are looking for someone to work with long-term are not evaluating you based on whether you gave away too much. They are evaluating you based on whether you are the kind of person who gives without calculating.

The DMs are not a sales channel. They are an audition, and the performance that books the job is not the pitch. It is the proof that you actually know what you are talking about and that you will give it freely to someone who needs it.

The clients who are worth working with are specifically looking for that person. Most of your competitors are too busy selling to become them.

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