Stop Selling In Your DMs

Most people treat their DMs like a closing room, and that instinct makes sense because that is where the conversation is happening and that is where the person is, so it feels like the natural place to make your case and present your offer and walk them toward a yes.

But that framing costs you the sale before it even starts.

Here is the actual dynamic at play. When someone reaches out in your DMs, they are not at the beginning of a buying decision. They are already somewhere in the middle of one. They have seen your content, they have formed an impression, they have questions. The conversation in your DMs is not where trust gets built. It is where trust gets confirmed or collapsed.

So when you show up in that conversation trying to sell, you are doing the exact opposite of what the moment requires.

Think about what selling in a DM actually signals to the person on the other end. It signals that you have something to protect, that the real value is behind a paywall, that the free version of you is just a preview designed to make them buy. And people feel that, even when they cannot name it, because they have been through that funnel before and they know how it ends.

The person who reaches out with a question is testing something more than whether you can solve their problem. They are testing whether you are the kind of person who helps first and lets the relationship determine what comes next.

Now here is where the mechanism gets interesting. There is a concept in psychology called the reciprocity principle, which is the observed tendency for people to feel a compulsion to return a favor when something of genuine value has been given to them without an obvious string attached. The key phrase there is without an obvious string attached. The moment the gift feels like a sales strategy, the reciprocity effect disappears. What replaces it is skepticism.

This is why the sequence matters so much. If you give the answer first, with no pitch attached, and then the conversation naturally moves toward your work, the person is drawing their own conclusion rather than being led to yours. That conclusion lands differently. It feels like their idea.

What Josh describes from that sales call is a real example of how this plays out at scale. The woman on the call had not just read a post or watched a video. She had gone into the community, watched the level of value being given without any gate on it, compared that against four other people who were all withholding information as a selling tactic, and made her decision based on that contrast. She said it directly: everybody else is trying to sell all this information and you just give it away.

That sentence is doing a lot of work. It is not just a compliment. It is a description of a competitive differentiator that costs nothing to create except the willingness to actually help.

The objection that comes up here is almost always some version of: if I give everything away, why would anyone hire me? And that concern is not wrong to have, because information itself has become nearly free. You can find an answer to almost anything with a search. So the fear is reasonable.

But it is built on a misdiagnosis of what people are actually buying when they hire someone.

Knowledge is rarely the bottleneck. Execution, accountability, judgment, context, and the experience of being guided by someone who has done it are what people pay for, and none of those things are threatened by giving away the answer to someone's question in a DM. What you are actually doing when you answer freely is demonstrating all of those things at once. You are showing that you have the knowledge, that you are generous with it, that you are confident enough in your own value that you do not need to hoard it.

That demonstration is worth more than any pitch.

The practical shift here is not complicated. When someone reaches out with a question, answer it. Give them the real answer, not a teaser, not a redirect to a sales page, not a "great question, that's exactly what we cover inside my program." The actual answer. If the answer requires more context than a DM allows, give them as much as you can and tell them honestly what additional context would change things.

Then let the conversation be what it is. Some of those conversations will never go further and that is fine, because each one still deposits something into how that person talks about you when they talk about you to other people. Some of them will turn into clients, and those clients will come in already trusting you in a way that no amount of sales copy could manufacture.

The woman Josh quoted was looking at four options. She chose based on observed behavior, not positioning, not promises, not a good offer. She watched what he did when he thought the only thing at stake was helping someone, and that is what she bought.

Most sales conversations try to convince someone you are worth working with. But behavior, especially generous behavior in low-stakes moments, does not convince. It demonstrates. And demonstration is the only form of persuasion that does not require the other person to lower their guard first.

The DMs are not a closing room. They are the place where you show people who you actually are when there is nothing obvious in it for you. And it turns out that is exactly what people are looking for before they decide to pay you.

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