Sign Your First Client Using Cold DM's

Heyo,

I’m writing this to you on Friday, December 8th at 11:07 AM.

And it’s dark out. Like… really dark. Like the sun starting to set on a cloudy day type of dark.

Kinda puts a damper on the day and makes me want to do nothing but stay in and write (hey, there are worse things to do lol).

Annnyyyywaysssss… welcome back to another edition of the Digital Brand Builders newsletter, a newsletter teaching you one actionable lesson you can use each week to build and grow your own brand online.

I want to teach from my own experience, so I’ll be sharing everything I’ve learned about starting and growing my personal brand and online business over the past several months in the hopes that it helps you do the same.

And by the end of every edition, I’ll leave you with a few action steps you can take to get one step closer to building your own digital brand this upcoming week.

Sound like a plan?

Alrighty, let’s dive right into this one!

Here’s what we’ll be covering this week:

How to sign clients from cold DM’s.

This Week’s Blueprint 🗺

Now, you might think you need a massive audience and follower-base to start closing clients from social media.

You might even think you need to hit a specific follower milestone before you start sending DM’s to prospects.

But I’m here to tell you… that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Does it help to have a lot of followers and some social proof already? Heck yeah it does!

But is it a necessity? Heck no!

So today, I’m going to be breaking down how you can start signing clients by sending cold DM’s… even if you have a small audience.

Let’s jump right in ↓

1 | Optimize Your Profile for Visits 🏗

I’ve talked about this before in this newsletter, but it’s worth mentioning again:

If you’re creating content, engaging with other accounts, or sending DM’s… the first thing people will notice is your profile.

• What your profile pic looks like

• What you can do for others

• What your content is like

All of these things go into creating a well-optimized profile that’ll help you get more followers and replies to your DM’s.

Let’s look at my Twitter/X profile as an example:

Immediately after someone clicks on my profile, they’ll see that I’m an actual human being (with a beautiful smiling face ;)) and not just some bot.

They’ll see what I do and how I’ve helped others in the past. And they’ll be prompted to visit my landing page and learn a bit more about how I can help them.

So before you even start sending any DM’s or doing any sort of outreach, you need need need to optimize your profile to show that you’re an actual person who can help others.

Make sense?

Alright, now it’s time to actually start doing outreach…

2 | Find Your ICP 🕵🏼‍♂️

Assuming you already know what type of people you’re targeting and what you can offer them (if you don’t know yet, read this newsletter), it’s time to actually find them on social media.

There are a few tools you can use to help you automate the process. But for the sake of this newsletter, we’ll do it on our own.

Let’s say your ideal client is founders of e-commerce brands (which is what my ideal client profile is, aka my “ICP”).

Here’s what I’d do:

Find where my ICP is hanging out on social media or what type of accounts they’re following.

For example, if you’re targeting ecom brand owners, you might want to look at the followers of Shopify since a ton of ecom brands host their websites on Shopify.

Or maybe you’d look for ad or email marketing agencies that work with ecom brands.

Just look at the image above… there are 418,000 people who follow Shopify. 418 thousand!

Which means you just found 418,000 people who might be the perfect fit to work with.

Obviously not all of them are going to fit into your ICP. But with a bit of searching and “Command + F’ing” (that sounds wrong, but I hope you know what I mean lol), you should be able to find a lot of people you can reach out to and pitch your services.

3 | Sending Those Collllldddd DM’s 🥶

Okay, I want to get this out of the way before continuing…

If you have the time to engage, build a rapport, and “warm up” your prospects before reaching out to them, that’s usually the way to go.

Truthfully, it’ll lead to more responses and genuine conversations.

But it can be a bit of a time-consuming process. And it’s not as scalable as cold outreach.

So if you need clients fast and want to send a bunch of messages in bulk, all at the same time, cold DM’s are the way to go.

Alright, by this point you should have found a ton of people who fit your ICP that you can reach out to.

So now it’s time to start sending those DM’s!

There are three different approaches I would recommend you take:

If you already have previous client results, share what you achieved and ask if they’d be interested in getting similar results for themselves. Like this:

If you don’t have previous results, I’d recommend sharing value upfront or offering to work for free in exchange for a testimonial. Like this:

(P.S. this is the DM that helped me land my first client way back when)

The final approach you can test out is asking a qualifying question right off the bat and taking a more conversational approach. Like this:

This is such a simple message to qualify the person you’re reaching out to and gauge their interest in working with you.

Something to note is that I have a massively helpful resource in my pinned tweet that I offer here. If the person responds, I start a conversation and ask questions to see if they’d actually be a good fit.

(If you want to learn more about this approach, read my previous newsletter here)

4 | Testing and Following Up 🧪

You’ve probably heard it over and over again, but the money’s made in the follow ups.

This is true… but it’s also made in testing what works (and what doesn’t).

Here’s what I’ve been doing to see which messages work best:

I’ve created a simple table in my Notion workspace (if you’ve never heard of Notion… I’d highly recommend you check it out because it’s a lifesaver).

Every three days, I go through all the DM’s I sent and take note of how many replies I got.

If I didn’t get many replies, I know that I should either change the message itself or change the type of people I’m reaching out to.

Next, I change one variable every three days:

Either the message or type of people/lead list.

Test, iterate. Test, iterate. Test some more, iterate some more. That’s the name of the game.

Just don’t forget to follow up with everyone. People are busy and don’t always see your first message.

So if I don’t get a response from my initial message, I send a short follow up two days later. And if they still don’t reply after that, I send one more follow up message three days later.

I’ll repeat it once again because it’s important: The money’s made in following up and testing to see what works best.

Then when you find that thing that does work best and gets you replies, booked calls, and clients… double down on it.

This Week’s Action Steps 🐾

I’ll stop there because this one’s already getting pretty long.

But the four steps above are the process I’ve been following over the past month to start more conversations, book more sales calls, and land more clients.

So without further ado, here are your action steps for this week so you can start signing your own clients from cold DM’s:

1. Optimize your social media profile

2. Identify 5 - 7 different accounts where you can find your ideal client

3. Craft a simple outreach message (look back at step 3 above)

4. Send 5 - 10 DM’s a day

Remember, it’s all a numbers game.

The more DM’s you send, the more conversations you start. The more conversations you start, the more booked calls you’ll get. And the more booked calls you get, the more clients you’ll sign.

You got this, my friend :)

As always, let me know if you have any questions or need any help!

✌🏼

Connor “that’s cold” Flynn

This Week’s Top Quote 🗯

This Week’s Top Hits 🤙🏼

• Breakdown: How I designed a newsletter for a clothing brand

• Article: Why blogging is dead

• Song: Coachella – Sammy Rash

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